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Thieves' World: Shadowspawn's Guide To Sanctuary
fantasy's grimiest, nastiest, ugliest city. fantasy's most notorious thief. Shadowspawn's Guide to the indispensable Thieves' World handbook. In this weighty tome, you'll find an overview of the city's neighborhoods and surrounding areas, descriptions of important locations and key sites, advice for aspiring Thieves' World Game Masters, and full details on the principle characters of both eras, including such favorites as Lythande, Tempus, Ischade, and of course Shadowspawn himself. The book also expands the rules options for the Thieves' World Player's Manual with new backgrounds, cultures, prestige classes, and the mysterious and powerful Ur-words. Shadowspawn's Guide to Sanctuary gives you everything you need to run roleplaying games in this classic fantasy city.
256 pages, Hardcover
First published December 15, 2005
22 people want to read
About the author
Aaron Rosenberg
234 books118 followersAaron Rosenberg is an award-winning, bestselling novelist, children’s book author, and game designer. He's written original fiction (including the NOOK-bestselling humorous science fiction novel No Small Bills, the Dread Remora space-opera series, and the O.C.L.T. supernatural thriller series), tie-in novels (including the PsiPhi winner Collective Hindsight for Star Trek: SCE, the Daemon Gates trilogy for Warhammer, Tides of Darkness and the Scribe-nominated Beyond the Dark Portal for WarCraft, Hunt and Run for Stargate: Atlantis, and Substitution Method and Road Less Traveled for Eureka), young adult novels (including the Scribe-winning Bandslam: The Novel and books for iCarly and Ben10), children's books (including an original Scholastic Bestseller series, Pete and Penny's Pizza Puzzles, and work for PowerPuff Girls and Transformers Animated), roleplaying games (including original games like Asylum and Spookshow, the Origins Award-winning Gamemastering Secrets, and sections of The Supernatural Roleplaying Game, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, and The Deryni Roleplaying Game), short stories, webcomics, essays, and educational books. He has ranged from mystery to speculative fiction to drama to comedy, always with the same intent—to tell a good story. You can visit him online at gryphonrose.com or follow him on Twitter @gryphonrose.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 21, 2017
The city of Sanctuary went through changes in the books about it and the people who lived there. From the first book, through the break, and then with them coming back there were lots of details about two different times.
With the number of authors involved with the anthologies and novels there were many interesting characters. And, with the two different time frames, two very different cities developed out of the one location. Combining all of this into a single source could be very confusing for a person wanting to game in the city of Thieves' World if it was done wrong.
Shadowspawn's Guide to Sanctuary by Aaron Rosenberg and Robert J Schwalb from Green Ronin Publishing provides a very good structure for describing Sanctuary and its denizens. The city's history from its earliest known times as a fishing village through to the current era are presented in an easy to follow manner. The districts are described for both of the major time frames and how they changed. The politics and beliefs are all part of this history along with the description of the notable characters from the stories of before.
The presentation comes from one of the more famous characters of the series of books, Shadowspawn. If you haven't read the books, Shadowspawn become one of the most notorious rogues of the city and rubbed elbows with some very powerful figures on both sides of the law. He started in the original anthology and remained a constant. Later Shadowspawn became the bridge to the new era of the city, though he goes by a different name as he takes up training a protégé.
Sanctuary is Shadowspawn's home and his guide to Sanctuary gives a good feel of a place being presented by someone who knows it. Besides the description of the city and the characters there is plenty of other useful content in this roughly 250 page supplement to Thieves' World Player's Guide.
For both game masters (GMs) and players there is information about each district so they can be used as players being residents or as someone new to the streets. This allows you to introduce the city without having to have all of the information first. So, you don't have to read the stories—but I recommend you do if you haven't. These descriptions tell what businesses are located where, the type of people and how well the areas are patrolled, or who really is in control.
There are adventure hooks throughout the book tied to the locations and people, then an entire section devoted to adventures in and around the area. The book has a section of ready to use common characters along with the well-known ones to flesh out the streets with major and fill-in non-player characters (NPCs). These work well for off-the-cuff encounters.
The final chapter of the book is a player's section to help build the characters to take on the streets of Thieves' World. The specialties of the characters we read about are presented so we can create our own. The different cultures of the world are described along with new backgrounds, feats, and prestige classes.
In going through Shadowspawn's Guide to Sanctuary I found it both a fun and useful supplement. GMs can introduce a number of significant NPCs to their players and create new ones. Encounters can be generated from walking down a street, an adventure can be created from the rumors heard, and an entire campaign world can come to life from the pages of the original stories.
They have done a good job of bringing Sanctuary back, again.
Originally published on guildmastergaming@blogspot.com.
With the number of authors involved with the anthologies and novels there were many interesting characters. And, with the two different time frames, two very different cities developed out of the one location. Combining all of this into a single source could be very confusing for a person wanting to game in the city of Thieves' World if it was done wrong.
Shadowspawn's Guide to Sanctuary by Aaron Rosenberg and Robert J Schwalb from Green Ronin Publishing provides a very good structure for describing Sanctuary and its denizens. The city's history from its earliest known times as a fishing village through to the current era are presented in an easy to follow manner. The districts are described for both of the major time frames and how they changed. The politics and beliefs are all part of this history along with the description of the notable characters from the stories of before.
The presentation comes from one of the more famous characters of the series of books, Shadowspawn. If you haven't read the books, Shadowspawn become one of the most notorious rogues of the city and rubbed elbows with some very powerful figures on both sides of the law. He started in the original anthology and remained a constant. Later Shadowspawn became the bridge to the new era of the city, though he goes by a different name as he takes up training a protégé.
Sanctuary is Shadowspawn's home and his guide to Sanctuary gives a good feel of a place being presented by someone who knows it. Besides the description of the city and the characters there is plenty of other useful content in this roughly 250 page supplement to Thieves' World Player's Guide.
For both game masters (GMs) and players there is information about each district so they can be used as players being residents or as someone new to the streets. This allows you to introduce the city without having to have all of the information first. So, you don't have to read the stories—but I recommend you do if you haven't. These descriptions tell what businesses are located where, the type of people and how well the areas are patrolled, or who really is in control.
There are adventure hooks throughout the book tied to the locations and people, then an entire section devoted to adventures in and around the area. The book has a section of ready to use common characters along with the well-known ones to flesh out the streets with major and fill-in non-player characters (NPCs). These work well for off-the-cuff encounters.
The final chapter of the book is a player's section to help build the characters to take on the streets of Thieves' World. The specialties of the characters we read about are presented so we can create our own. The different cultures of the world are described along with new backgrounds, feats, and prestige classes.
In going through Shadowspawn's Guide to Sanctuary I found it both a fun and useful supplement. GMs can introduce a number of significant NPCs to their players and create new ones. Encounters can be generated from walking down a street, an adventure can be created from the rumors heard, and an entire campaign world can come to life from the pages of the original stories.
They have done a good job of bringing Sanctuary back, again.
Originally published on guildmastergaming@blogspot.com.
Displaying 1 of 1 review