City Guard Chronicles is an interesting kind of "meta-setting" that doesn’t have to be a setting on its own – although it can be –, but rather provides some essential setting information and makes it possible to integrate the adventures into other settings. We were able to put the adventure into another setting (which wasn’t mentioned as an example in the product) without problems and just needed to look up some names from the setting in question.
The micro-settings comes with a few new interesting Edges, a collection of Setting Rules (both from the core rulebook as well as new ones) and eight archetypes, which are well-made both mechanically as well as regarding their personality. I especially appreciate that it clearly says what their strengths are as well in case you’re new to the system and can’t tell by the first glance.
The product has a great-looking layout and illustrations that fit together well and support the content.
The adventure is on the whole an investigation, but has a fair mix between action-filled parts and time for searching clues and puzzling together information. It does not rely on the players to solve any riddles, but keeps the tension even when the player characters do very well in their rolls. I feel that this is where other published investigation adventures fail, so I’d like to emphasize how well this works out here.
There are a lot of information, hints and clues which make the investigation feel very convincing. Also, the adventure is not linear and can go in different directions – dependent on both the players’ decisions and rolls – which add to this impression. For the GM, it’s clearly labeled which clue is essential and which is just for the scenery, and it also includes an overview of possible scenes and their connections. Both are a huge help to running the adventure. The overview is even hyperlinked in the PDF.
Although the setting is presented as more gritty and noir-like, it does not try to express that in making the case unreasonably hard to solve. We intentionally played it with a player character group that did not contain only the pre-generated characters from the product and was (again, intentionally) rather bad at actual investigation, and we still managed to solve the case – but the adventure includes different ways of solving it and possible complications, so it did not feel like the success was given away for free.
I’m looking forward to seeing more of this line and can recommend the micro-setting and adventure to everyone looking for a fantasy investigation adventure.
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