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Not exactly what I expected it to be, but useful to anyone who needs a text-centric overview of a hidden city concept for their fantasy campaign.
The Lost City of Jershon by R. Hyrum Savage has excellent production values -- good page design, readable text, and above-average artwork -- but it proves ultimately to be more descriptive than table-ready.
There are only two maps -- both of them general overhead views. One map shows the riverside town of Talara, and the other, The Lost City of Jershon itself. A couple of NPC characters are statted out for use with the new RuneQuest rules, but pretty much everything else is text-description only.
While this makes The Lost City of Jershon very adaptable to different fantasy rules sets and campaigns, it also means that any GM is going to have to have to fill in the table-ready details themselves if they want to use The Lost City of Jershon in practical play.
To author Savage's credit, he does describe everything quite well, and has the wisdom to keep his descriptions short, focussed, and useful for play, rather than burying the reader in unnecessary background detail.
The background material is described only in terms of how it may be relevant to actual play. Most NPC characters are summed up with a short paragraph only, again with the focus on what a GM or player would need to know.
As for the Lost City of Jershon itself, it's not an ancient ruin to explore -- which I thought it would be when I bought the product, for whatever reason -- but rather a living, functioning isolated community, hidden from the larger world. As such, the general tone of this module has far more in common with adventure-fantasy classics like "King Solomon's Mines" or "She" by H. Rider Haggard, than any ruin crawl I was anticipating.
Without spoilering, I can say that the denizens of Jershon are devoutly dedicated to their pro-active gods, and this defines their society.
Their magically-infused city features a tower dedicated to their pantheon, and when this crystal changes color, they behave in ways consistent with the god represented by that color.
For example, when the death god's color is displayed monthly, the death priests somberly and efficiently go about killing any non-death-priest they encounter until the crystal color changes.
Ultimately, The Lost City of Jershon is a handsome product with good ideas well-presented. Unfortunately, it is also a completely general product. GMs who want to use this material in their fantasy campaigns will have to do almost all the table-ready preparation themselves, from the ground up.
Not only are there only two general-overview maps of Talara and Jershon included, but there are very few explicit adventure hooks included. Yes, the river pirates of Talara are described, with the expectation that players will battle them at some point(s), but the GM with have to design those battles him- or herself.
Likewise, Jershon is an interesting location, but any specific adventuring or confict which takes place there will be up to the GM to design. A cursed tomb in Jershon is given a general description, but making that tomb into an adventure site falls entirely to the GM.
Scoring this product is a tough call. It doesn't really do anything wrong, per se -- it's adaptable across fantasy rules sets; it's nice-looking; it's easy to read; it's relatively inexpensive, and it handles its central concepts well.
The problem, as above, is that it's almost entirely conceptual. Almost all the heavy-lifting required to make this setting table-ready for Game Night will fall to the GM who buys it.
Split it down the middle, and call it a 2.5 out of 5 then, rounded up to 3 for the RPGNow score system. The Lost City of Jershon is not bad in any way, but it could have been so very much more.
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<b>LIKED</b>: * Nice artwork and an eye-friendly layout.
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