I liked this book enough to get it in hardback when I already had it in PDF to make sure I got all the glory of it.

It's a solid, well-built, incredibly detailed build of a single area within Glamour, the sort of place that adventurers might stay. If you've got call to be in Glamour, you're going to want it a LOT. If you don't, a lot of the work is easily convertible to other larger cities, and the plot hooks and connections between people are an education for a GM. You should still get it if you want to look at how to put together a community, or want to see a good bit of world-building. Chris Gidlow has pulled off a fabulous piece of work.

Lovely work! Excellently illustrated and written, with lots of great ideas for games. The only downside is that not many people are likely to be running campaigns set in Glamour, so finding ways to use this suppliment will be tricky, although certainly characters can be transposed to other settings.

Hot on the heels of A Rough Guide to Glamour, this arrived and I have to say that the two books together make a great expansion. If you feel that Dragon Pass has been well explored by your adventurers and are looking for some new flavours to add into the mix then The Lunar Empire is a great place to turn. If Glamour got behind the machinations of the Empire then Citizens fleshes out some of the day to day feel of the place. The book is well laid out, easy to use and even if you wish to keep the Empire as a sort of mystical place away from your regular campaign the book is perfect for detailing the places and people found in Lunar enclaves and provincial towns too. A great addition to any RQ world.

Citizens of the Lunar Empire is a sourcebook and setting for a gamemaster to capitalise on and, after reading it, I now have a strong desire to run an urban detective story. But it is more than that – it is also a great source of information about the cities and citizens within the empire (I loved reading the character vignettes to see what cults these citizens worshipped).

The book is well written. A great attention has been paid to getting the mood right e.g. The beautiful sound of a close harmony duet wafts out into the street. Alongside the main text there is a lot of boxed text with examples, extra detail and quirky information. There are also plenty of character hooks for the gamemaster to exploit.

Great character pen-pictures are beautifully augmented by the many images. The art is excellent and brings the people of Glamour (the city within which the sourcebook is based) to life. These images are counterposed by a series of geometric drawings of the insula (the city block) which gives the reader very clear instructions on the block’s layout and feel. These two contrasting styles (the curves of the character images and the straight lines of the buildings) are woven together throughout the book and it is very effective.

The book is clear and crisp to read and lovingly laid out. Oh, and the front cover is a delight.

There is so much to commend about this book.

This is an outstanding product, not just visually stimulating but full of character, plot and intrigue. Not only that but it would be easily adapted to any genre or setting, as it stands up on writing alone. I can't recommend this highly enough.

Citizens of the Lunar Empire is a terrific study of the everyday life of everyday citizens in the heart of the Empire. It is professionally written, the lay out is good, and the artwork fits perfectly for the style of the book.

It is evocative of the city and makes it easy to believe that you are walking the streets, catching the public transport dino, buying lunch on the go, or dropping into the bar. While set in Glamour it can easily be adapted to Furthest or any other city in Lunar Tarsh, or even Pavis during the lunar occupation.

Excellent portrayals of the residents of the area with sufficient stats for the GM to run them with ease without wasting space on excessive detail. Lots of adventure hooks to keep a party going for many sessions, or just providing a base that the party feel is really home rather than just some faceless room at an inn, it’s well worth buying.

There are more pop culture and literary allusions than you can shake a stick at; the jaded private investigator, the lovesick teenagers on balconies, the bar where everyone knows your name, the lovable dodgy dealers who will be millionaires this time next year and many more that bring the place to life and be a fun place to live.

Even if you never adventure in a Lunar city this is well worth buying for the background and the insight it gives into citizens of the Lunar Empire, your NPCs will be the richer for it!

If I had to find a quibble, and this is a very minor one, it’s that the rental value of each unit in the block and the purchase cost of the block aren’t provided. Chris does provide a perfectly workable economics section based on the Call of Cthulhu 7e credit rating system, which is fine. As I said, this is a very minor point and only really of interest to members of the Imperial Scriptoria!

Overall, this is well worth the cost for the pdf, and deserves to become available as POD. I’ll be getting the POD as well.

I had a one-thousand word review that discussed this book in detail, with lots of jokes, and then DriveThruRPG ate it.

A condensed version:

This sourcebook educates the reader on what a city of antiquity would have been like to live in, oozes Gloranthan flavor, uses pop-culture references and the broad tropes of social realist fiction to make it easier to enter the interiority of the culture in question (the Lunar Empire), delivers strongly on expanding the scope of Glorantha in concrete ways to match Greg Stafford's offhand comments, has some very good jokes, takes a unique tack in analyzing the characters through the lens of labor and work, and has honest-to-god themes going on in it, which actively comment on the source material.

It also communicates important truths about the setting, but to quote Leonard Cohen, "You don't really care about that, do you?"

Nearly universally useful for Gloranthan gaming, useful outside of Glorantha as well.

Do you want Le Mis in Glorantha? Rent or La Boheme? Or perhaps Sam Spade or Thraxas? If so this version of Glamor's less glamorous is for you. Enough advertising copy. The authors have very cleverly combined a multitude of "small lives" tropes into a single block of urban adventure hooks. They've created space to place most of our urban fairy tales into Glorantha. With very little work the insula could equally be placed in Nochet. The stories remain very much the same. Remarkably this is done with a great deal of empathy for what are sketches of sterotypes. This empathy for the characters makes you want to play in the rough side of Glamor. You will have to bring your own Benny Coffin.

This is full of roleplaying goodness. Each dwelling is detailed enough to be useful but not over-detailed to the point of knowing what it in all the cupboards. The NPCs are given a reasonably long character sketch and reasonably short set of stats, probably a good balance. Each dwelling has a number of Scenario Hooks that can be used to include the dwelling/NPC in Adventurers' schemes and a secret that probably comes from its earlier incarnation as a freeform game.

There is far too much detail to go through on a single reading and this is the kind of book that a GM could dip into for weeks. It really suits a band of Adventurers who get the chance to live here or to live nearby and investigate the comings and goings.

The sketch rules on money and income are useful and provide a guide on how to live.

The interior artwork is excellent, as always by the ever-reliable Dario Corralo, the cover art is very evocative, even without the Bernie meme. The supplement is easy on the eye and very clear, detailed without being cluttered.

So, overall an excellent supplement, well worth 5 stars. It could have done with a few scenarios to link the various NPCs together and provide a structure, but any GM with a few hours to kill can come up with many different scenarios.

An excellent supplement. Pretty soon we won't need to go much beyond Glamour to get our adventuring in. Which is good, because it's the best city in the best empire in the Lozenge.

Of course, this is a belated product of the good old Reaching Moon school of satirical and gonzo Glorantha, so this has as much as to do with our world and all its pop culture and legendary as anything else. The Lunar Empire is Us, We are all Us, as they say.