City Slices I is just what it claims. It's lots of fun bits to drop in your game. There are some great urban scenarios that are fun in themselves but more importantly can serve as springboards for adventure. I consider this product a success on three levels. First, it's good content. I read it and I want to use it. I know immediately how easy it would be to slap it into city portions of my campaign. Second, it inspires me to come up with similarly interesting bits to use in my game. It's inspiring. Third, it just makes me want to play. I read these scenarios and I itch to get back to the table with friends and try them out to see what would happen, how they would play out with my group. Sadly, I doubt we'll see a City Slices II" unless it's out there and I'm missing something. The author/designer seems to have focused on 4E design and that system is pretty much toast. I'm one of the few happy to keep playing it and so it's nice to find little surprises like this years after a system is no longer supported. Long live 4E! Is anyone out there....there....there.....echo..... Huh. Oh well, I'm having fun. Thanks for a great product.

Some really good bits in this for when you are stuck and suffering writers block

City Slices is a collection of interesting characters, events, and encounters that the DM can use to help add color and life to fantasy cities.

The encounters and events draw the characters in to the environment around them - stopping a runaway cart, helping a child find his parents, getting hired to do some shopping for the Emperor, etc. - and some of them can even lead to other encounters in the book, or to future adventure seeds (one of the rewards for the shopping trip, for example, is an invitation to the next royal ball).

The second section of the book is a list of unique and unusual booths and shops in the marketplace, to give a bit of variety to an otherwise ordinary bazaar.

City Slices is a great sourcebook for bringing life to city-based RPG sessions - while the label says 4e, this material can be easily used with any RPG with very little to no conversion. I'm looking forward to seeing other offerings in this series.

City Slices Marketplace Fun is marvellously rich tome with well thought out encounters and situations which at first glance to PCs would appear mundane, but after the briefest chat with any innocuous NPC the players will soon realise that there’s many layers to these onions, with mini-games, adventure leads and skill challenges. This is a very accessible document. Most of the pages are self-contained encounters, allowing the DM to print off single pages to put amongst their own notes -without raising too much suspicion that this would be any more than a normal trip into town for the PCs.

It’s tailored for 4E gaming but I’m guessing that it could be adapted to be used as part of a Pathfinder campaign, different editions of D&D, and most fantasy games, perhaps with some skills tweaking. The traders mentioned don’t have stats, but have enough background for a DM to elaborate on the basics if needs be.

Not wishing to reveal too much about the product, there’s some very refreshing takes on familiar locations and activities. One game “Frog n Flies” involves physically throwing the dice around in some sort of surreal boules game. On the very next page is a superb sub-quest /encounter in which the players are sent to purchase exclusive items from a list for an emperor, which is also a great way to get the players familiar with the layout of a new city.

From rats on sticks snacks to poison in bottles, from the interesting to the practical (practical to dungeoneering warriors, that is) there really is something for any campaign or urban adventure, with many opportunities for role-playing and non-combat skills checks.

In my opinion this product may also be of some use in historical settings or even more contemporary, exotic settings – a Cairo bazaar perhaps (providing you alter references to elves and dwarves, and mammoth furs… of course).

I’m looking forward to more from this series. Ace.

The game elements described in "City Slices I" offer a good bit of fun, and most should be fairly easy to use in "plug and play" fashion in a typical D&D 4e setting. The five "interesting encounters" are indeed interesting, with a lot of good story potential. The skill challenges aren't quite as impressive, but they're good and useful. The twelve unusual market stalls are probably my favorite part of the product; they introduce interesting NPCs and do a lot of work for the DM. The author provides further adventure hooks for these, as well as for the seven food vendors. I could easily imagine myself using material from this product. I just with the production values (layout, grammar, and such) were as high as the obvious level of creativity that went into the product.