Product Description: The beautiful hardback city sourcebook Freeport: The City of Adventure blew the lid off the most larcenous city in fantasy. In this book game industry veterans Matt Forbeck and Hal Mangold join Freeport creator Chris Pramas for an in-depth look at the people, places, and politics of the city of adventure. Jam packed with info on the city, the Serpent's Teeth, and the sea lanes, Freeport: The City of Adventure provides action-packed material for any campaign. The book also includes a full color poster map of the city, beautifully rendered with street-level detail. Freeport: The City of Adventure is a must-have city sourcebook!
Fun but Flawed Product I should start this review by saying that FREEPORT: CITY OF ADVENTURE is a great sourcebook and excellently serves its goal of being a location for playing the Freeport modules that came before it. It looks like a fun location to play in and I wish that I could, but I probably never will because of two major flaws.
1. (This is the big one) - there is practically no information on pirates. Now I'm no dummy - I can google just like anyone else - but I expected some rudimentary information on playing a pirate campaign. For instance: What does a typical pirate ship look like? What might be some sample floorplans? How are pirates paid? What do pirates do when they're not getting booty (sorry)? Considering the emphasis in FREEPORT on, oh, PIRACY (!), I feel that there ought to be more information on playing a pirate. There are two pages on the pirate prestige class, which includes a list of pirate weapons (but not stats). Maybe there was a memo that I didn't get, but FREEPORT would be of very limited use to me without notes on buccaneering and sailing. If you're a nautical nut who is on intimate terms with the sea then obviously this isn't a problem for you.
2. This is perhaps a minor gripe (in that it is easier to remove material you dislike than to add material you lack), but FREEPORT seems to have been written with progressive ideals and then shoehorned into a Rennaissance-level time period. Now don't get me wrong here; I'm not commenting on anyone's politics here. I just thing that some of the attitudes and concepts properly belong to post-1960s America than a 17th-18th century fantasy setting. I will try to list some examples below:
-p41. Longshoresman's union. Yes, there is a union. With modern labor-capital negotiations. This seriously cracked me up. -p51. Student's union at local university with coffee shop owned by hippie woman with dreadlocks. Naturally it is where all the students gather to be free of the lowbrows and to share their revolutionary ideas (and read beat poetry?) This must be parody... -p52. A halfling mafia boss that sells "insurance"
In addition, there are a lot of characters expressing socioeconomic opinions from a Marxist point of view, plenty of female shopowners and powerbrokers, and very little racial tension (let alone outright discrimination). Almost all of the middle class characters are villains of some sort and the rich are fools (except for their rebellious daughters). Look - it's 1970's America with pirates and orcs. At some point I said to myself "Why does Freeport have a modern view of socioeconomics but their technology is firmly 16th-17th century?" This is supposed to be a gritty, hardscrabble, spit-in-your-face town; it has unions and hippies for crying out loud! I half expected the book to recommend that when PCs face danger that they try writing letters to the ditor or forming a civic action committee! Again, I don't advocate sexism or racism, but given the apparent time period its absence is striking. The relative egalitarianism deserves at least an editiorial note lest history be whitewashed.
Okay, I think these are serious flaws. Most people don't understand that when your setting is full of weird magic and bizarre races that everything else has to pass a higher standard of consistency. I cannot reconcile labor unions and Blackbeard the Pirate without devolving into parody. Oh well.
Still, the city is well plotted out in terms of locations, people, and secrets. I think that Chaosium's Lovecrafy Country series (ARKHAM, DUNWICH, and KINGSPORT) are the gold standard in this area, but FREEPORT was still impressive. There are plenty of good adventure hooks, if you don't mind the milqetoast level of adversity (the MIDNIGHT campaign setting is a good example of what serious grit looks like).
To put my words where my mouth is, here are the changes I would make for FREEPORT to seem more self-consistent: -serious gender discrimination; females should have to have a front for power or ownership in a sexist society; female PCs would stand out all the more by refusing to conform -serious racial discrimination; orcs are dirty, smelly, crude, and dangerous. Many places should be segregated; considering that orcs are bigger and stronger, this should create real racial tensions in the city. Perhaps the PC's prejudices could work against them? -If you want to keep the Marxism, forget the armchair (class-)warrior stuff and foment some serious social unrest. You have a confined city of mostly poor people scrabbling to make a living who are just miles away from the nobility and ruling elite. Don't forget that because there is a strong tradition of piracy, there ought to be quite a few weapons floating around. Frankly, there ought to be periodic bouts of rioting and anarchy.
Freeport: A Schizophrenic Pirate Setting "Freeport: City of Adventure" is a sourcebook for setting Dungeons and Dragons games in Freeport, a former pirate city now turned a rough-and-tumble port city trying (most of the time) to go legit.
Published in a hardcover format by Green Ronin, "Freeport: City of Adventure" is an attractive and well-designed book. While not as content-dense as, say, Wizard of the Coast's various Forgotten Realms sourcebooks - the difference in type size and white space is striking - the overall high quality and narrow focus of "Freeport" still makes this an excellent value for those interested in pirate and nautical adventures.
The book features a good timeline for Freeport and the region - in theory, it can be dropped into any large maritime trade lane in any setting, and it works best when placed in such a context - that is carefully generic enough to be able to fit into most settings with a minimum of fuss. (There need to be multiple competing political powers and shipping routes, which most settings have. The only setting I can think of off the top of my head that would have difficulty fitting in Freeport would be a Dragonlance campaign, although I suspect it could be done. Setting Freeport in the Iron Kingdoms - which works well in a number of ways - would require tweaking the religions found in the city as well as some of the races, but neither would be an insurmountable obstacle.)
This is followed by extensive information about the city, quarter by quarter. For the most part, the book focuses on highlights from each area, but sufficient information is given for each quarter that most Dungeon Masters will feel very comfortable setting action there, while still leaving enough room for their own creations, or additions from other books. (There are subsequent books in the Freeport line that do just this, and the setting also works extremely well with Citybook II: Port of Call from Flying Buffalo.)
Finally, there are new rules, including prestige classes, a new NPC class, a host of pirate-flavored spells (one tattooing a treasure map on the back of the subject, and then wiping their memory of where the map actually depicts is a particular winner) and some modest gunpowder rules. Some adventure seeds are also provided.
One thing potential buyers should be aware of is the somewhat schizophrenic tone of the book. For one thing, Chris Pramas and the other contributors are squarely in the camp of putting in overtly humorous characters and situations in the book, as well as some slightly anachronistic material. Elements like a daily newspaper (well, news sheet) feature strongly in the setting. While not a big deal taken individually, it creates a rather different tone than in most D&D settings, something some DMs might find jarring. The humor in the setting (including character names that are obvious allusions to popular media characters) is something many DMs will also want to scan for ahead of time and change as needed.
The issues of tone also apply to how "bad" Freeport really is. The hype on the back of the book, and in marketing hype in general, talks about how dangerous and deadly the city is. In reality, Freeport doesn't come off particularly more dangerous than any fantasy city - how criminal and corrupt is a town where drugs are outlawed? Compared to the TSR-licensed setting of Lankhmar, or Judges Guild's various city states, Freeport is Disneyland. Criminal activity in town is surprisingly mild and gang activity is more interesting than threatening. Still, it won't be too much work for a DM to crank the level of illegality up a few notches, but it's puzzling that it was set so low to begin with.
Finally, the book tries to have it both ways vis-à-vis gunpowder. While gunpowder is anathema to many D&D games, it's also hard to picture pirates without flintlock pistols and cannons blazing. Modest gunpowder rules are supported in the back, as an option, but the rest of the setting bends over backwards to create magical alternatives to gunpowder, and mostly it's just awkward - the city is defended by enormous cannon-style wands that use unique rules, don't resemble any other magic in the D&D game, and neither scratch the itch gunpowder-use pirate groups will want, nor fits seamlessly into standard gunpowder-free D&D. Probably the best bet would be to use gunpowder but say that the materials used to create it only come from secret locations far at sea, and the cost of creating it is prohibitive on the mainland, even if someone knew how to do it.
Having said all that, Freeport has a charm and a freewheeling style that's hard to match and is a great contrast to the more generic D&D published settings that groups were stuck with prior to the advent of the Open Game License. Where once groups had their choice of nearly identical-in-tone Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance settings, today players can find such wildly diverse top-drawer settings as Hollowfaust, Redhurst and Freeport. Freeport especially is supported with a line of supplements that expand and build off the setting, including the mega-module "Black Sails over Freeport" (which fleshes out the Pirate God, the one generic element in this work that should never have been left generic). It's a pirate's booty of riches, and Freeport is one of the brightest treasures.
Recommended for D&D groups looking for a swashbuckling setting. Groups using the duelist prestige class or swashbuckler core class from "The Complete Warrior" will particularly find Freeport to be a good home base for their adventures.
Anything Goes Trivia
Megaton Man
Trevor
