The basic concept of this book is to provide a generic but beautifully detailed village (or small town), which the DM can place in his campaign world - possibly as a base or as somewhere the characters will pass through. To this end, the history, economics, inhabitants and surrounding areas are all described, so that the entire village may be picked up and used with little need for preparation save deciding just where it is, and how it fits in to everything else that is going on.

Indeed, the introduction looks at various ways in which the village might feature. Perhaps it is the home of one or more young adventurer, starting out on his career. The group, as newcomers to the 'hero' business, might even have their first adventures here before moving on to bigger things. A village environ should provide an easy start, with challenges at the right level - how many big cities really have well-signposted novice-level dungeons to explore? Once characters have gained some experience, they might be ready to move on. Or, of course, this could be somewhere they find later... somewhere that on the surface looks like a good place for a rest, but where there is really plenty going on! Or it might be the nearest settlement to the traditional 'somewhere out in the wilds' dungeon complex, the logical place for the characters to rest and resupply.

Everything is a wonderful combination of great detail and total portability. Although there's a lord of the area, and some recent history as to how he was appointed, there's plenty of space to change it around to suit the history of the region (or to change the fellow in charge). Two deities are provided - and with considerable detail if you'd like to use them - but can be easily replaced by a 'good' and an 'evil' deity from your own pantheon. While about 50 inhabitants are given names, trades and other details; there are about 400 more whom are there for you to use as you see fit. Some of them might be your PCs, if you decide that this is where they come from!

Individual characters are given complete write-ups, including statistic blocks and sufficient characterisation and background to make them come alive; while little 'interaction seed' suggestions of ways of using them in anything from a brief interlude to a full-blown adventure are scattered throughout. Many adventurers regard any settlement as a place to stock up on supplies, so the number of shops and other businesses that are detailed and populated is very useful. The other major reason to visit a town - to visit an inn! - is also catered for, with a detailed establishment called the Greenbriar Inn. A nice touch is the pricelist, preventing that deathly silence when a character asks how much he will have to pay for the ale, food and accommodation he has ordered - there are even enough options available to allow for an impressive response if asked what's on the menu.

The 'good' deity, Erilys, is a particularly nice and 'homely' goddess; one well worth considering adding to your campaign's pantheon if there is no suitable figure already there. As well as Good, Healing and Protection, she controls a new domain called Hearth, which enables its practitioners to provide support and protection to a community.

Not all the people you'll meet there are permanent residents, some will be travellers also, and a selection of these are presented. The villiage, of course, does not exist in isolation; and so we are also introduced to the surrounding area - people like a wizard, the local ranger and a lady who runs a horse-farm just outside Briarton. People again who might be useful or interesting for the adventurers to talk to. There's also a ruined abbey, a tribe of orcs and the temple of the 'evil' deity - the new one offered here is Vextra, the Lord of Pestilence, but it would be relatively easy to substitute another evil god if preferred. A second new domain, that of Pestilence, is introduced so if you like your bad guys to be able to cause nasty diseases with a single touch, Vextra is worth considering. Naturally, the domain can be used without the god if you'd prefer to assign it to another member of your pantheon.

Presentation is by and large good, with an attractive page border that is neither obtrusive nor (if you have the PDF version) wasteful of printer resources. Artwork is patchy, varying from crude sketches that could probably be bettered by my 12-year old to some really nice ones; while the maps are of good quality if sometimes enlarged a little beyond the size that their resolution would allow, something that needs to be watched when using computer mapping programs. There is a comprehensive index, and PDF users reading onscreen have hyperlinked references to play with.

The book rounds off with Action!System statistics for all the characters and a series of full-page maps.

This is a really usefull and nicely done module which you can easily use anywhere in your RPG campaign.<br><br><b>QUALITY</b>: Very Good<br><br><b>VALUE</b>: Very Satisfied<br>

Great base of operations for a standard D&D game. The town will fit into just about any Greyhawk or Forgotten Realms type fantasy world. The characters are interesting, but now weird enough to frighten off the PCs. Most of the time, PCs need a peaceful place to go, so they can buy stuff, heal and such. This works, but also gives great ideas for thing to happen in the town, and even ways to let things develop over time.<br><br> <b>LIKED</b>: Characters were interesting, but did not distract from the idea of this as a base of operations for a party.<br><br><b>DISLIKED</b>: Needs to be updated to 3.5 and the maps are awful, but serviceable.<br><br><b>QUALITY</b>: Excellent<br><br><b>VALUE</b>: Very Satisfied<br>

Cool supplement. A complete village at the palm of your hand with adventure hooks and NPCs galore. We need more books like this one as GMs!<br><br> <b>LIKED</b>: The idea behind it and the presentation was tight!<br><br><b>DISLIKED</b>: It was all good!<br><br><b>QUALITY</b>: Excellent<br><br><b>VALUE</b>: Very Satisfied<br>

This is a very nice product. A place you could base you players in if you so desired or just have them pass through if that's what you want. There are lots of interesting plot hooks. The histories of the NPCs are detailed and well thought out. The artwork is not consistant and a bit uneven, but even so-so portraits help to imagine a character. I would have liked to have seen a few more floorplans and the artwork on the floorplans and maps is a bit sterile, but these are minor quibbles given the low sale price.<br><br><b>LIKED</b>: good descriptions of NPCs, good plothooks<br><br><b>DISLIKED</b>: could use more floorplans and drawings of the outside of buildings and a consistent style in the artwork<br><br><b>QUALITY</b>: Very Good<br><br><b>VALUE</b>: Very Satisfied<br>

If you're a lazy GM like me this is a godsend. A compleete town with places and NPC's galore. I would like to see more detail in the overland maps, but the location maps make up for it!

A well constructed, complete setting! I was annoyed with the crunchy bits- sometimes I just like a good read without the distraction of player tools.

Solid writing, good art, and well-realized characters and places. What's not to like? An great product for basing or starting a fantasy campaign.

I felt the overland maps could have been better, but everything else was top quality. Loads of detailed NPC's and plot hooks. This is, perhaps, at its most useful for DM's starting a new campaign as a starting village for the PC's. There is just too much good stuff for this to be a 'passing through' adventure. Overall this was definitely worth the money, just mildly disappointed with the overland maps. The floorplan maps were fine.

Excellent resource for those of us how either don't have the time or patience to create a whole village by ourselves. This PDF has some interesting plot hooks, a bunch of NPCs for the PCs to interact with, and two new deities (including a new clerical domain for each deity). Some people may think that the dual-stats (for both D&D 3rd Ed. and something called Action! System (?)) may be a waste, but that doesn't disturb me much.

Excellent Gaming Aid Wish there were more products like it. Highly recommend.

The Village of Briarton is a PDF supplement from Gold Rush Games. There is apparently a print version of this book, but the e-version is the one I bought. I was in a time crunch and needed a complete village fast, so I thought I'd give this product a chance.

Appearances - The zip file I downloaded from RPGNow.com only had one 62 page pdf file in it. It should be noted that only 45 of those pages are actual d20 product, as the rest of the pages are filled with Action! System crunch which I will not consider relevant to this review. The cover also acts as the credits page, which was moderately annoying since the large white letters that ruin the otherwise attractive black & white cover illustration. Color is used in moderation throughout the book, mostly for the test of section headings and as background for sidebars. What really makes this product hard on the printer, however, is the inch thick border art that runs along the top and outside edge of each page. The interior illustrations, of which there are many, are mostly mediocre. There are a few really nice pieces in the mix, however. The maps are truly hideous color ink eating abominations done with what looks to be Campaign Cartographer. Most of the maps have very blurry key text. The layout of the book is okay, but overall it isn't a very visually appealing product. I would have also appreciated the font size being knocked down a notch to help compensate for the fact that a lot of page space is wasted on those borders.

Content -

Introduction - Nothing exciting here. Just some words about how "a village doesn't have to be a backwater to be glossed over in the rush to get to somewhere more exciting." and some notes on how to use the book, how to tweak it for your own campaign, and a bit on religion. The couple of paragraphs on religion are really the only useful information on these two pages, but introductions are rarely worth anything so I won't hold that against the book.

Overview - This brief three page chapter gives us a short history of the thirty years young village, the settlements stat block, some words on economics and the daily routine. Nothing here really jumps out as terribly interesting, falling mostly into the realms of the generic and the obvious. At the end is the worst map in the book, which takes up a full page. It is of the general area surrounding Briarton and could have had 90% of it cropped down without losing more than a few areas of interest. It could have been cropped to half its size without losing any of the keyed locations at all. There is entirely too much dead space on this hideous thing. So not only is it ugly in the extreme, it is also mostly pointless.

Arundel Manor - Here we get an overview of the residence of the local lord, starting with another ugly map that is at least useful, if hard to read. Fortunately, there is a full page version of this map at the end of the PDF which is much more legible. After a few paragraphs about the house itself (including a helpful set of stats for the walls, doors, locks, windows, and wooden shutters), we get to the meat of the chapter which are the NPCs. Here we get Lord Roderick Arundel himself, his daughter Lady Alianora Fitzhugh, her son Robin Fitzhugh, and Gellir, the only dwarven inhabitant of Briarton who just kind of lives with his old adventuring buddy Arundel. Two other residents of the house, the married servants Dunstan and Rosalind Giles, don't get stats and only get three sentences of attention. Also in this chapter are a couple of magic items and a spell (Allure), and the first of the books "Interaction seeds" which are basically ideas for possible adventures or plots related to the npcs. Not all NPCs get interaction seeds, but they do help bring a little life to otherwise terribly generic NPCs.

The Village - Here we are treated to a fuzzy, hard to read map of the village itself which sinfully doesn't get the better, full page map treatment that Arundel Manor, Greenbriar Inn, and the Shrine of Erilys get at the end of the PDF. Maybe it is just me, but it just seems obvious that if you're going to include full page maps in a product about a village that one of those maps should be of the village itself. And the map of the village, whatever size it is, should be legible.

As for the text of the chapter, we get brief summaries of most of the important shops in the village and descriptions of the locals. As far as crunch goes, this chapter gives us 16 statted NPCs (several more are described without stats), a goddess (Erilys, The Protector...goddess of the hearth), a domain (Hearth), two spells, and a monster (the grass cloaker). There are also nine interaction seeds. Combined with all the descriptions of places and people without stats it doesn't seem like this should be a bad use of 22 pages. Unfortunately, I found it all so terribly dull and uninspiring. I could almost swear I've seen most of these characters in fantasy movies ridiculed on Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Outlying Regions - More people and places, this time of the folk who don't dwell in Briarton itself, but nearby enough to interact with the village from time to time. For some reason the fact that chapter starts off with a wizard named Angwyn ap-Llewellyn made me cringe. On the other hand, the rest of the NPCs described here seem a little less cardboard than those in the previous chapter. They didn't excite me but they weren't so dull that I could only finish reading their backgrounds by force of will. The locations weren't any improvement, though at least the shrine of Vextra gives us a new deity (Vextra, Lord of Pestilence), a new domain (Pestilence), and three new spells (Malaise, Plant Blight, and Plague).

In Conclusion - I was very disappointed with this product. It has severe blemishes in both appearance and content without really having any significantly redeeming virtues to save it from being a mediocre product. It doesn't completely fail to be useful, but the true test is whether I would rather have the money I spent on it back rather than have the product. In this case, I can honestly say that I'd rather have the cash. Overall this book is truly boring, which is sad because I would really like to see a good, well detailed village product. This book falls well short of the mark of good. It doesn't even quite make average. Decent maps could have made this book a 3. That and more originality could have made it a 4. With all those and better layout and art it might have even made 5. As it is, this book marks a solid rating of 2.

This is a decent book. It provides a lot of detail on the village of Briarton, some of its populace, and the surrounding area, in 45 pages. It also gives a few hints for adventure ideas. Another 10 pages converts all the character stats from the d20 System to the Action! System.

I am disappointed with the maps provided in the book, however. They were at such a low resolution that it is extremely difficult to make out the names and locations provided. A higher resolution or an extra file of just hi-resolution maps would have been nice. There are a few maps in the back of the book that have been enlarged, which make them easier to see, but the earlier maps (one of which is the surrounding area around the town) are not clear.

I was also disappointed in the cover. I was expecting to get the full color cover, as is depicted in the description of this book, but it has apparently not been included.

Excellent place to begin a new low level campaign. Lots of interesting personalities, locales, and adventure opportunities. Planning on using it as the base town (modified to fit my world of course) for my new 3.5 campaign. Loved the hearth goddess domain...