RPG Review: Cityworks 3.5

Today’s review is for Fantasy Flight Games’ Legends & Lairs supplement “Cityworks.”
While this is a D&D 3.5 supplement, there’s nothing keeping a 4e DM from using a lot of aspects of it for their own game, or hell, anyone running a fantasy RPG from any game system.
It’s your typical Legends & Lairs book, in that it’s cover matches the rest of the books, as well has being filled with some great black and white art throughout.
The first chapter deals with different characters in the city, explaining each character class and what they’d be doing in the city. It should be noted that because it doesn’t have any mechanical rules for this section, you can definitely use it in your 4e game. For example, they talk about how a Cleric within a city can serve as an emissary to temples, and high priests with political power in the town.
The introduce three more character classes, the Acrobat, the Assassin, and the Pit Fighter, as well as introducing some urban prestige classes: the Kingpin, Speaker of the City, and Street Stalker. All of these would be great introduction to your campaign, including the Speaker of the City, who are druids who have embraced the sprawl of the city as a necessary “node in the web of life.”
As with any 3e book, there’s a smattering of new feats and spells, before the book delves into City Basics.
In the City Basics chapter, it talks about how cities originate, how to develop your own city’s history, different city archetypes such as a religious city or a war-torn outpost, the government and how it could be organized, law enforcement, economics and religion. This chapter talks in great detail all about different aspects of city life, a lot more than I would have thought of on my own. Mixing and matching different parts of this chapter will help you in moving on to the next chapter: City Construction.
In this chapter, it breaks down in great detail how to build a city, with all kinds of districts detailed, giving you lots of tables to roll on to give more spice to your town. This is a great resource for any DM, as it doesn’t really talk too much about the rules system, but introduces one of its own for planning out a city.
The City Adventures section helps a DM put together a ton of different kinds of adventures, detailing different kinds of urban environments, including chases, crowds, fires, rooftops, sewers, tavern brawls and stunts. There’s also different types of urban events such as plagues and the like.
Overall, it’s a good, solid book, which I would recommend to anyone who would be running an urban campaign in any fantasy setting. It’s definitely worth picking up and checking out.