Voell's Garden is a complete stand-alone adventure locale for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game fit for any urban setting in your campaign. The 7th product in the Evocative City Sites series, it is an excellent example of the creative deviousness and deceptive danger you've come to expect from Rite Publishing. Voell's Garden provides the information you need to put intrigue, danger, poison and nature's deadly secrets right in the middle of your favorite fantasy city.
Use Voell's Garden as the center of a new cult, the secret behind a new poison or simply a terrifying locale for your PCs to brave. But whatever you do, bring pruning shears. You'll need them.
Author: Benjamin Bruck
Cartographer: Richard Biggs jr
Cover by Richard Knight
17 pages
Product Availability
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This pdf is 27 pages long, 1 page front cover, 1 page editorial, 2 pages advertisements, 1 page SRD, leaving 22 pages of content.
The pdf starts with 1 page containing the whole map of Voell's Graden and then dives into the in-character introduction to Voell's Garden, interspread with 5 detailed maps of the respective parts of Voell's Graden. The chapter also details secrests, a table for strange flora, notes on how to use the garden as a maze and secrets for the characters and garden. We also get a new poison and 5 adventure hooks. This passage is 8 pages long.
The next chapter details 6 pages of statblocks of the inhabitants, once again at the top-level of complexity, one of which is a potentially legendary and extremely cool and disturbing...thing that clocks in at a whopping CR 24.
The pdf closes with 7 pages of reprints of the maps as well as 7 separate maps of the garden in A4 format for Europeans like yours truly.
Conclusion:
Editing and formatting are top-notch, I didn't notice any mistakes/glitches.
I don't know why, but sometimes, if presented right, plants can creep the hell out of me, and I consider myself to be quite a jaded guy. Voell's Garden features some of the most enticing writing I've read in an rpg-book, especially in such a small one and really had me on the edge of my seat. For fans of the series it also features a slight nod towards Bedlam Asylum.
The statblocks rock, as almost always in the ECS-series and the final critter presented is cool as hell. However, as much as I want to, I can't bring myself to rate this 5 stars. This is due to two facts: The file does not have the usual blown-up versions for use with miniatures the other ECS-files always featured and, once again, the bane of my existence is back - the maps feature letters and a legend, detracting for me from the player's suspension of disbelief and preventing me from printing it out for my players. I don't get why the combined map e.g. has to feature the letters.
That being said, the writing somewhat made up for this and my final verdict will be 4 stars - if you don't mind letters in your maps or need the miniature-friendly huge maps, add a star.
Evocative City Sites: Voell's Garden by Rite Publishing
This product is 27 pages long. It starts with a cover, and credits. (2 pages)
The Garden (7 pages)
It starts with a single combined map, then following maps are larger maps of the varies sections of the combined map. Then a IC introduction is spread threw out the rest of the pages of the section with more maps. There is about 4 pages worth of text and the rest taken up by maps. Part of the garden is a maze and it has a sidebar on how to use the maze. Another side bar has a random chart of odd flora that can be encountered in the maze. The garden is controlled by a cult of sorts. The section ends with information about the leader of the cult, bit of a history of the garden, some secrets about whats going on and finally five plot hooks.
NPCs (8 pages)
There is three NPC's in this section with full stat blocks. But there is no real history and advice on how to play them, nor any stated goals etc. One of them is called a Fortune Blessed, I am guessing this a template. All the information you need to run the NPC is in the stat block but I am unsure what that came from. My guess is from one of the books listed in the OGL but that’s just a guess.
It finishes with a OGL and blown up maps to be printed out to be used with mini's. One page ad and back cover. (10 pages, 7 pages of maps)
Closing thoughts. I have mixed feelings about this one. On one hand I really liked the garden and thought it was pretty cool. I would have liked some more random tables with the garden though on plants that could be found or maybe even plant monster types. The editing was good, layout was pretty good. Art work was fair to good and the maps where well done. My only real problem was the NPC's. I would have liked more information about them. A short history, advice to RP them. Maybe some motives or goals.
It makes for a interesting location to drop into your campaign but to truly use it, the GM would need to do some prep work on the NPC's. In closing I am giving this one a 3.5 star review. Lots of potential but needs a little work.
Hopefully have this reviewed by the weekend. Got a couple of other things I need to finish first. Margreve got it done and that was the big one I needed to finish.
I gave it a once over so far. Will turn my notes into a review this weekend some time. It's interesting and something I would enjoy using. I like odd little things like this. Currently i am just not sure how i would use it yet. :)
Just let it be said that it's 04:06 am here and that one of the files made me wish I could grant negative stars. And you haven't reviewed the files yet. That limits the possible files seriously. ;)
Just let it be said that it's 04:06 am here and that one of the files made me wish I could grant negative stars. And you haven't reviewed the files yet. That limits the possible files seriously. ;)
@Wicht & D_M: Believe me - these three files made me appreciate ANY
forté(e) of ANY competent designer/author even more than I did before. Your curiosity will be sated tomorrow, right now, I'm too tired and/or intoxicated to post these reviews.
I saw the one's you were talking about. I know many reviewers who got tired of reviewing due to having to come through all the roughs to get to the diamonds so don't get discouraged.
