So what do you actually get for your $5?
Like it says on the tin, you get 100 plothooks and story seeds. You also get 20 quick random encounters, and some notes on running city adventures.
This product is 49 pages, including the front cover, and the usual product/credits page. We start getting into the meat with the introduction, which is brief. It's clear the author doesn't want to waste your time or bulk out the product with excess text.
We get an overview of how to use the book on page 4.
Each adventure is categorized by "challenge level" (low, medium, high, epic), expected length (short, medium, long), and a "focus" on the kind of adventure to expect (exploration, diplomacy, investigation, combat) to help the GM figure out how appropriate a given adventure would be to a group. As a result, you would get a "medium level average length adventure with a focus on investigation".
Many of the adventures can have the challenge scaled up or down, and many adventures have more than one focus as well (e.g. diplomacy and combat).
Following the overview, we have a two page random encounter table with 20 entries, and a page titled "Investigative adventures - A few thoughts", which contains some very good advice on running an investigation.
Starting on page 7, the next 40 or so pages contain the plothooks and story seeds. Scattered here and there are some GM notes that pertain to a few adventures. These notes are brief, but informative. The occasional small piece of color art breaks up the text now and then. The art is decent, but you're not really here for a picture book, and I really like that the author went for substance over style in this regard.
There is no index. I'm not sure an index would actually be useful in a product of this size anyway.
The layout is strictly functional; no frilly image borders on the edges of the page or distracting sidebars to be found here. I have no technical issues or "page lag" when reading the product on my 8 year old iPad 1 in Goodreader. Everything about this product shows that the author intends it to be used as a tool for the working GM.
How good are the adventure seeds?
Most of the plothook entries are a half a page long, and some are a third of a page long, and each of these entries falls between 200 to 400 words each in length. The entries themselves are purely descriptive, and include details such as NPC names and motivations, and how the adventure can be expected to play out. The author hits the sweet spot in terms of getting the guts of the story across without meandering off into pointless detail. The font size is fairly small (i'd say around Times New Roman size 8 to 9), so you're getting a lot of beef without any kind of filler in each one of these. By way of comparison, this review is the length of two average entries.
There are demons, serial killers, hidden monsters, crime lords, grave robberies, fueding nobles, street kids, and much, much more going on in these pages. Quality wise, the adventures themselves range from good to excellent. All of them are very usable, depending on the game you're running, of course. Some are good for a one and done scenario, and others would make for a good short or medium length multi-session story arc.
These adventures are geared primarily towards fantasy gaming. They range in tone and feel from gritty low fantasy to epic high fantasy. With varying amounts of work, quite a large number of them could be reskinned for modern or sci-fi settings. I've personally adapted one for Blades in the Dark (seed number 49) simply by changing the NPCs slightly, and several others are quite promising to use for BiTD.
Is this worth $5?
Without a doubt, yes. If you're like me, where you can build and run dungeons in your sleep, but are at a loss when it comes to creating city-based adventure, this is a tight, heavy hitter packed with usable high quality content, and the value in this product is extremely difficult to beat. An easy five stars.
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