Great resource from a great publisher. You can't roll a miss with DWD. anyway it's not 5 stars until the many typos won't be fixed. They don't really hinder the usefulness of the book but... It's just proofreading and it can be done =)

I hope DWD will publish more and more of those master tools. Keep up the good work!

I bought this a few weeks ago (I've made a commitment to buying all the Barebones Fantasy stuff I can afford) but didn't get around to reading it until this weekend. It an amazing resource for GMs looking for easy to use inspirations for town encounters. What I love is the art work showing villiage plans scattered throughout. Even those alone give me ideas for adventures. More supplements please!!!!

How useful this book is depends on what your games focus is. As the title suggests this is only useful if your fantasy campaign features cities or towns. I have not read all of it yet, I believe it would be counterproductive to do so. There are 100 entries which color a city or town. They range from NPC encounters to catastrophic events. Some are roleplaying encounters, other very much a war in the making, others funny. There are a ton of great ideas in there. There was nothing on my first skim through that stood out as bad. I think they under market it a bit. Because essentially these are 100 quests that can happen in a town. There are no stats of course but just enough information to get the ball rolling quickly and they are generic enough to not interfere with the established world order of your campaign. I highly recommend it! But if you are a person that is very well prepped and does not need random interference in the story line this will be pretty useless to you except may be the 10 city maps. Others charge this kind of money for the maps alone, so it could be bargain for you if you need some neat maps for small towns.

Of Towns and Heroes is a collection of 100 different in-town plot hooks to help Game Masters throw together adventures on the fly. Each entry has a lot of detail, and new hooks and ideas can easily be extracted from the summaries provided. Of particular usefulness are the town maps interspersed throughout the document. Not only do they look nice, but they are also not labeled so they can be dropped into nearly any fantasy campaign. And while this is originally intended for the BareBones Fantasy RPG rules, it can be applied to nearly any fantasy game system without trouble.

"Of Towns and Heroes" has a plethora of great ideas to get your player characters invested. As a "book of ideas" it excels. However, the downside is that the editing is quite poor. There are grammatical errors unchecked on almost every page, and the syntax is scrambled and unclear in many of the excerpts. I really encourage the author/s of this book to go back and get someone with editorial expertise to do another pass. It's worth it, because the ideas are so good!

Has your normal GM suddenly cancelled out for the night's game? Are you a GM that has a few of your players missing for the night and want to do a side trek for this weeks game? Perhaps you were extra busy this week and didn't get much prep time and need an quick idea for tonight's game? How about an introductory adventure to get the campaign going?

How many of you GM's out there have asked "Another town, how can I make this one exciting?" or "I need something to bring all the PC's together, to start my new campaign"

DwD's "Of Towns and Heroes" is your answer!

In this handy little supplement for BareBones Fantasy or any fantasy game is 100 ideas and plot hooks for a nights adventure or could be the start of something bigger. You can roll a d100 or simply choose something you like. There are 10 detailed maps to go along these adventure hooks that you can plop anywhere in your campaign world.

Here is just a partial example to give you an idea of the goodies in this book. "As the heroes walk through town, a silhouette blots out the sun. Everyone looks up to see a wyvern carrying a maiden in its claws fly by, heading towards a nearby mountain. A large key drops from the maiden and lands imbedded in the cobblestones by a hero. Dare they head into the mountains to face a wyvern and its foul master to save the maiden?......."

The book is designed to help out a GM with their adventures. You might get a one night sidetrek, a mini campaign, a new home town for your PC's or a full blown campaign out of this book. You certainly will get a fun adventure!

I highly recommend this gaming aid to all GM's out there!

Now if you will excuse me, I have a wyvern to kill and a beautiful maiden to rescue.....

Are you running out of ideas for how to make the townships the party visits in the course of their adventures interesting?

This may provide the answer, being an hundred little ideas for events and side-adventures that can happen within whatever settlement the characters are in at the time. Each situation is applicable to any fantasy game, not just BareBones Fantasy - the upside of this is you can make use of this supplement whatever game you run, the downside is that you will have to develop any necessary NPC/monster stats or other game mechanics required (indeed, you will even if you are playing BareBones Fantasy....).

Some of the adventures suggested will occupy mere moments, others have the potential to develop into full-blown adventures in their own right, if not into whole campaigns... or at least, events whose ramifications haunt the party for years to come, at least whenever they visit that particular settlement again.

Interspersed with the adventure ideas are some charming 'hand-drawn' sketches of town layouts. You could make use of these for the various settlements visited, if you like.

Overall, if urban adventuring is not the main thrust of your game, this could prove very useful in ensuring that visits to towns are never boring. On the other hand, if you want to develop city-based adventuring more, this should kick-start your ideas and help you develop this aspect of your plotting.