Denizens of Freeport
D20 Accessory (96 pages)
Product Code: GRR1017, ISBN 1-9723599-5-8
Publisher: Green Ronin Publishing, $18.95
Denizens of Freeport contains a rogue’s gallery of characters that live in the City of Freeport. There are over 60 characters described in this book, along with backgrounds, stats and other important information about them. These NPCs can be used in Freeport, or can be adapted to fit any campaign system.
While many DMs like making up their own NPCs for their game, sometimes we just don’t have the time to do so. Also, during a game session, a DM may be required to come up with a character at a moment’s notice. Either way, that’s where this book comes in handy. The over 60 characters described in this book each have from 1 to 3 pages dedicated to them. Each characters has its own drawing, statistics, background, personality, physical description, and some adventure hooks. The information here gives enough detail to breath life into any of these characters.
Characters range from a CR of 1 all the way to 16, and have a wide diversity of classes and races. Along with the interesting characters, there are plenty of sidebars describing new magic items, skills, cults, diseases and much more. One thing I liked was that some areas of the descriptions for each character have multiple listings of items and such, so you can customize the NPC for the moment in your game. Characters are also not just your simple NPCs, many of them utilize multiclassing and many other rules to produce unique and varied people. This is the one reason I really enjoyed reading through this book. The only complaint I have about it is that there is no index or listing of characters within the book, making it a bit difficult to find something. The characters are listed alphabetically, but unless you know what you are looking for, you have to page through the book to find it. If they had included some type of listing, this book would have been perfect.
In all, this is a very good rogue's gallery of NPC characters. It could prove to be a useful tool in any DMs arsenal. As for players, it could help out in developing you own character, as it gives many ideas on backgrounds, ability grouping, and such. A good purchase overall.
(review (c) July 2003 / David Flemming)