Woolcock makes some of the best third-party Savage Worlds stuff out there, always has. Sharp Knives & Dark Streets is a micro-setting and toolkit for running urban fantasy adventures, the kind that deals with thieves' guilds and nefarious back-alley plots in a dark fantasy milieu. It's like a cross between Lankhmar and the Blades in the Dark roleplaying game, and packs a lot of good stuff in a small package.
It starts with three new Setting Rules that help capture the flavor of the setting, including one for utilizing flashbacks during a heist and another for retroactively declaring one brought a needed tool along for the job — reminiscent of similar innovative mechanics from Blades in the Dark, and that really improve these kinds of stories.
There's a section that talks about simplified NPCs, which reduces the need for separate stat blocks for every random person the heroes might encounter. Nice.
Finally on this page is a "roll 3d6" mission generator that is similar to the kind used in Lasers & Feelings. It can generate tons of quick & dirty adventures in a pinch. The next page expands on the options from this table.
From here we get a condensed micro-setting: Stormgate, City of Serpents. This is an ancient, corrupt, walled port city, the kind you might find in a typical fantasy world. Twenty distinct locations are summarized in brief, and a full-color map follows.
The last section is a primer on doing some solo gaming in this setting (or any setting, really). Without rambling or overly-complicating things, it tells you how to frame adventures as a series of questions — yes/no, scaled, or complex, each with tips on how to use dice to derive an answer. It talks about scene progression, then ends with a full page of random tables for things like events, people, and places.
Sharp Knives and Dark Streets ends with six pregens, presented in both Novice and Seasoned form.
You'll need Savage Worlds to use this to full effect (especially when dealing with the pregens) but a lot of the stuff here isn't necessarily system-dependent and could be used with other roleplaying games.
Personally, I'd like to see Stormgate expanded into a larger setting at some point. Then again, I'm always a sucker for dark, urban fantasy settings. If you already have Pinnacle's Fantasy Companion this makes a nice supplement, as it doesn't attempt to cover any of the same ground. But the Fantasy Companion isn't required at all. Overall, a great product!
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