Bolsa’s Blood Circus by Cliff Dunn is a role playing game supplement published by ZealZaddy for use with Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition. As such, it is covered by the Open Game License and some parts are considered to be Open Game Content as a result.
The supplement is available as a 25-page PDF from DriveThruRPG for $1.99 but was got at a reduced price thanks to a special offer. One page is the front cover, one the front matter, one the Contents and one the Open Game License. There is also a zip file.
The first two pages of content are taken up by some links to Free City of Vadashar material, a sidebar, Welcome to the Free City of Vadashar, that is duplicated from other supplements and gives background and history of the city, and some details on using Bolsa’s Blood Circus in a non-Vadashar or a Vadashar campaign.
Bolsa’s Blood Circus gives details on the Blood Circus, a violent travelling gladiatorial circus, and a history of Bolsa, the unscrupulous individual who founded it. The circus travels from place to place, first building up interest in the show, and getting locals to be interested in participating, and then describing how the show goes; some gladiatorial bouts are to the death. Given that the circus often skirts, and sometimes dashes completely over, the line between legal and illegal, it has had to make rapid departures from some places.
Dramatis Personae: The Players gives details and stats – a sidebar notes these, and those in other supplements in the range, are not monster stat blocks but character ones, as these are fully realised characters (a nice change to the current standard approach to NPCs) – the founder and owner, Bolsa, Karvos, the business manager and bookie, Lagurtha, the healer and cook, and Lonan, who drums up new business. None of these are particularly nice people.
Following this are pages on different participants in the shows. The first is pit fighters, the majority of the combatants who are best described as short-lived crowd fodder. The next four are individually described and statted NPCs. In each case, there’s a poster and for the main NPCs a page of stats.
Adventure Hooks has three short adventure hooks to get the characters involved with the Blood Circus.
The zip file contains six posters, in PDF and jpg format, based on those of the four NPC combatants and pit fighters. Four promote specific fighters; the other two are “Fighters Wanted” posters, both generic and Zul-specific, for the pit fighters.
Bolsa’s Blood Circus in Review
The PDF is bookmarked with major and minor sections linked. The Contents is to a similar level of depth and is hyperlinked. Navigation is good. There are a variety of stock colour illustrations, up to full page in size. Presentation is good.
This supplement has an organisation that is more than likely going to be a villain. The owner and main people running it are unpleasant and self-centred at best, sociopathic and murderous at worst, and they have no qualms about luring others in to fight and die in the ring. The addition of the posters is a nice extra, as players can then see promotional material for the Blood Circus. With this being a travelling organisation, it’s easy enough to drop into other settings, though some settings may not allow any such organisation to stage fights to the death; that is easy enough to fix, though, and the people running it can still do plenty of harm. Bolsa’s Blood Circus is a nice supplement about a nasty group and it can be found by clicking here.
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