"I am an explorer, a man of action, and foiler of nefarious plots. Come read my book, Evocative City Sites, and I, Owain Northway, will guide you to a safe haven for adventurers. I will tell you of The Next Inn."
Evocative City Sites: a modular systemless supplement detailing small locations that you could find in any urban campaign setting. Each site is detailed with its own cartography, a 1"=1 square scale map pack, two unique npcs, 5 adventure seeds, all presented in the unique, useful, and entertaining form of Owain Northway's first person point-of-view guidebook.
The Next Inn is a place where wounds are healed during a nights rest, heroes are revered like holy figures, with security protecting them through soundless nights against ninja clans, their archnemisis, or the city guard whom they worked over outside of the Rogue's Gallery.
Product Availability
Fulfilled immediately.
Are there errors or omissions in this product information? Got corrections? Let us know at
store@paizo.com.
The 18 page pdf comes with 2 jpgs of the maps for the inn, one of the interior and one of the exterior.
It features 1 page for the front cover and 1 page credits, including 5 adventure hooks.
The first real page consists of a beautiful 1 page map of "The Nexus Inn" (also called "The Next Inn"), featuring a clear key and no annoying letters or numbers, which is a definite plus for me.
After that, we get 3 pages of IC prose introducing the Inn and two characters, Sister Socorro and Knight-Captain Lansil, including secrets. There is also a nice, albeit a bit scifi-like picture of the main hall of the bottom floor and a nice and unique picture of the keys they use at the inn.
Sister Socorro is a Cassandra-like figure that can be utilized to give the players indirect hints and the Knight-Captain may make an interesting NPC to help out the players.
The inn specifically and exclusively caters to adventurers and tries to help them fulfill their destinies, which is a nice touch and a good reason for adventurers to be pointed towards the inn.
The rest of the 12 pages of the product consists of an inflated map, complete with battlegrid, of the inn, for everyone interested in using miniatures.
That's it. In contrast to the other pdfs of the "Evocative City Sites"-series, this one is systemless, something one might not notice at first (although it's clearly written in the product description!). Also, there is no extra DM-map with secret-doors, compartments and the like, although a secret passage is mentioned in the description of Lansil.
This has some unfortunate drawbacks, i.e. the fact that you get no awesome, complex and imaginative statblocks as in the other ECS-pdfs, nor will you find new feats, magic items or the like within these pages. None are advertised, but I just wanted to make this difference clear.
Conclusion:
The prose of "The Next Inn" is a nice read and the characters are also neat.
The letter- and number-less, player friendly map is another pro.
However, the lack of a DM-map with the secret passage is something that galls me a bit.
Also, due to the systemless nature of this pdf, you won't get any crunch. If you want stats for the two NPCs, you'll have to come up with them yourself.
While I like the prose, I couldn't keep myself from thinking how such an inn would be abused: You don't have to pay the order that operates the inn (you can donate, though) and you get healed of all of your afflictions, energy drain, diseases and so on. My players (and just about any group that qualifies as adventurers in the vicinity) would exploit the hell out of this inn and I can't see the concept really working.
Thus, while the prose is good and gripping as always in the ECS-series, this particular one is, at least for me, marred by this logical error. Ok, you could easily change all that, have adventurers pay and eliminate the extreme healing properties, but as it is written, I could see the churches trying to get the inn out of business very fast, if only to keep the donations coming.
If you're not playing PFRPG or 3.5. and don't need the crunch and if you can see the inn as a kind of haven working for you, add 1 star to the score.
If you don't care about the lack of a map with the secret passage, add another.
If you look for a semi-mysterious safe haven for adventurers as a home base, go ahead and check it out, it's only 2 bucks and has a high production value.
For me personally, it didn't really work. Go ahead and check the other ECS-titles out, though. They tend to be awesome!
That said, "The Next Inn" is close to 3 stars for me, but not quite.
I wanted to thank Endzeitgeist for taking the time to do a review of this product.
Quote:
The prose of "The Next Inn" is a nice read and the characters are also neat.
Thank you, one of the things I wanted to address with the next inn was that sometimes it was safer to sleep in the woods, and this place developed out of that.
Quote:
However, the lack of a DM-map with the secret passage is something that galls me a bit.
I apologize. I don't dictate how ECS are situated in a GMs streets. I believe in Flexible Feography and felt that the GM could add in the secret passage when and where they needed it.
Quote:
In contrast to the other pdfs of the "Evocative City Sites"-series, this one is systemless, something one might not notice at first (although it's clearly written in the product description!).
Again I apologize; The Rogue's Gallery Tavern and The Next were written and released before there ever was a Pathfinder Rpg, now we have updated The Rogue's Gallery to the Pathfinder RPG, and we did assign an update for The Next Inn but what came in were two core character classes (they were not our usual complex statblocks with combinations of templates, prestige classes, new feats, spells and/or magic items) I found these to be unacceptable so I rejected that update and its been on the back burner due to existing products taking precedence. The Next Inn will be updated, once I get some free time,
Oh and when we do the updates, they are free for our existing customers.
Quote:
I couldn't keep myself from thinking how such an inn would be abused: ..... My players (and just about any group that qualifies as adventurers in the vicinity) would exploit the hell out of this inn and I can't see the concept really working.
This is acually based on a trope (Trauma Inn) that works in a huge number of games., I will admit that this trope works best when you are working with a Points of Light style campaign: dungeon exploration, wilderness exploration, the town is a safe haven for you to rest and recover in.
If I did not feel like letting the party use the Inn, there were two things that kept the PCs from using it, the first one was simple and you allude to it above
This is an extremely popular Inn, when the PCs show up they don't have any rooms available (because all the adventures in town want to use it), and the security staff is going to run you off since its zealously serious.
The second was the PCs hated rivals The Company of the Coin were staying here, and the PCs were afraid to go to sleep there (they also were afraid they would get in a fight and the inn would be destroyed)
Quote:
If you look for a semi-mysterious safe haven for adventurers as a home base, go ahead and check it out, it's only 2 bucks and has a high production value.
Thank you again.
Steve Russell
Developer and Designer of the Next Inn
Again I apologize; The Rogue's Gallery Tavern and The Next were written and released before there ever was a Pathfinder Rpg, now we have updated The Rogue's Gallery to the Pathfinder RPG, and we did assign an update for The Next Inn but what came in were two core character classes (they were not our usual complex statblocks with combinations of templates, prestige classes, new feats, spells and/or magic items) I found these to be unacceptable so I rejected that update and its been on the back burner due to existing products taking precedence. The Next Inn will be updated, once I get some free time,
Oh and when we do the updates, they are free for our existing customers.
Now that is good news, Steve! I'll be sure to update my review once the new and revised "Next Inn" comes out.
I also think it's great customer service to provide the updates for free!
And if Rogue's Gallery was systemless, I have high hopes for the Next Inn, as the Rogue's Gallery got 5 stars from me. ^^
