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From the back cover:
New in town?
No more generic innkeepers! Out with the bland blacksmith! Now Seven Cities brings you a wealth of vibrantly populated places to use in your D20 System fantasy campaign. Whether you're looking for a convenient refueling station after a hard day of plundering the local dungeon, a circumspect place to pawn hard-fought-for riches, or a quiet little town to call home, Seven Cities provides communities chock full of politics and intrigue, love and hate, life and death.
Seven Cities features:
- An introduction offering rules and insights for generating fantasy cities of your own, delving into the politics, commerce, geography, history, power centers, and population that make a city come to life.
- Seven discrete chapters each detail a specific size of city; a thorp, hamlet, village, small town, small city, and even a large city are all described not only with dozens of maps, but also with unique personalities that guarantee PC interaction.
- Later chapters refer to earlier ones, so that some of the inhabitants of the thorp show up in each of the larger communities, playing similar roles in every instance. This makes it easy to pick the size of city you want and make use of as much of Seven Cities as possible.
- Seven Cities is also designed to help tailor any city to work better in your campaign; add new life to it, and let it throb with the pulse of the people who make it their home.
Like all Penumbra products, Seven Cities is written to provide you with material adaptable to any fantasy campaign, whether it be a published setting or a world of your own creation!
- accessible entry point after simplification of survival aspects
- strong campaign integration
- replayability through campaign progression
- survival/survivor portion can still be challenging
- rule density can be intimidating for new players
- campaign-driven survival in a modular world
- collapsing lands with continent-scale development
- campaign-driven, story-led progression
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- Campaign progression — a linked series of scenarios or missions with evolving rules
- modular/environmental storytelling — the board and setup evolve with campaigns
- Survival mechanics — players manage resources and threats to endure an ongoing campaign
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- it's basically for us board gamers it's going to be even more fun to play it than just for people who play Escape rooms
- I am a sore loser
- it's going to be a go-to filler for me because it is so quick to teach