Publisher Blurb:
You weave your way through the heavy crowd of mid day as your traveling companions await your arrival at the gem cutter’s shop. Tucked away in a small sack are a dozen raw blue gemstones that you found jutting out of a cave wall. Suddenly, just as you narrowly dodge a carter’s donkey you feel a tug at your side. Someone is trying to steal your stones!
You quickly swivel to face the scoundrel as you unsheath your trusty dagger. A filthy young ruffian’s eyes widen at the sight of your blade as their hand quickly releases its grip on your sack. Your eyes narrow in anger. Suddenly you feel a heavy gloved hand on your shoulder. You quickly turn to meet the grim face of one of the local watchmen.
“At ease, traveler..”, the watchmen says as one of his companions stop the would be thief from fleeing, “Put away your blade. We’ll take over from here.”
Just another day in the city.
Welcome to Artisan’s Square, the first installment of the Fantasy City Block series by authors Dan “Smif” Smith and Dave Woodrum. This drop in urban fantasy location can be used in any of your current campaign world cities or connected to future series releases to make a whole new city for your player characters to explore.
Each Fantasy City Block release details a small block sized chunk of a bustling high fantasy metropolis. The various occupants, merchants, and landmarks of the city block locations are given flavorful descriptions, allowing the Game Master (GM) to add a great deal of color to the world that they are immersing the players in.
The first edition of this series focuses on a small chunk of the city that is home to craftsmen and supporting vendors. This installment, like others in the series, provide the following components.
Player and Master Maps: There are two maps presented in this book. One is for the players and lacks details regarding what is in each building. The master map provides a basic one to three word designation for each important locality, such as “arrows”, “healer”, “tavern”, etc.
Map Locations: A large portion of this product is devoted to providing detailed textural descriptions of the marked locations on the master map. Here you’ll find information about the non-player characters (NPCs) who live and/or work at these locations as well as a few notes about prices, inventory, etc.
Random Street Encounter Charts: Some of the most interesting things in Artisan’s Square occurs on the streets! List making veteran Dave Woodrum has provided three different twenty sider driven charts for random street encounters. The first chart deals with day encounters (early dawn to around 5pm equivalent), the second evening encounters (after 5pmish until midnight), and the third night encounters (after midnight to early dawn).
Random Rumors and Gossip Chart: Don’t put away that twenty sider just yet… there’s an additional chart for rumors and gossip. While most things that an eavesdropper might hear in Artisan’s Square are true there’s a few things that are half truths or flat out lies. This chart provides twenty different things that a character might hear along with information about their truthfulness (or not).
Battle Map: Each installment contains an 11” x17” scaled battle map that the GM can print off and use with miniatures or tokens on the gaming table. This map is provided as a separate pdf file from this core supplement book.
Tokens: An exquisite value for the common gaming table! Smif has so kindly provided complimentary tokens for you to cut out and use with the battle map if you don’t have miniatures. These are in a separate pdf and it is recommended that heavier card stock paper is used for these if you have such.