A Review of the Role Playing Game Supplement CASTLE OLDSKULL – City State Encounters

CASTLE OLDSKULL – City State Encounters is a role playing game supplement written and published by Kent David Kelly. Although the supplement is perhaps aimed at Dungeons & Dragons based systems, especially the Old School Revival, it is generic and can be used with any system.

The supplement is available from RPGNow at the regular price of $2.99 but was purchased at the reduced price of $0.99. This is a 276 page PDF with two pages being the front and rear covers, five pages being the front matter and credits, three pages describing what the book is, three pages being the Contents and eight pages being About the Author and ads. A Kindle version is also available from Amazon.

Chapter 1: Introduction explains that the book is not intended to help the reader design a fantasy city in detail. It also covers the author’s philosophy related to city design, which is for them to essentially be dangerous above-ground dungeons rather than realistic cities. A number of books are cited as possible sources of inspiration.

Chapter 2: Urban Encounters starts with two d100 (although with a lot less than 100 results) encounter tables, one for Dawn to Dusk and the second for Dusk to Dawn. The results from these tables are described in the next sections.

Chapter 3: Events is a d1000 table, although not with 1,000 results, which has been divided into alphabetical sections, some letters having far more entries than others. Each entry has the name of the event type, starting with the letter of the relevant section, followed by a description of what the event could be. These are not specific entries, but instead a list of possibilities. There are quite a few similarities between some entries, where they all fall within a certain category.

Chapter 4: Unexpected Creatures has more d100 tables, again with less than 100 results. There is a table of justifications for urban monster encounters followed by a table for common beasts and monsters, followed by uncommon, rare and very rare.

Chapter 5: The Denizens is for people who may be encountered. It starts with some suggestions for numbers before moving onto the standard d100 tables. These are for common, uncommon, rare and very rare people and are then followed by subtables for drink merchants, food merchants, guardsmen, tradesmen and service providers. The sub-table for nobles begins with one for determining alignment and class then rank. The final sub-table is for officials.

Chapter 6: Twists for Events and Person Encounters is a d1000 table (again with less than 1,000 results) of twists for these encounters.

Chapter 7: Exploring the City State is for determining random encounter locations. The first d100 table in this has location types. Next there is a d100 table for streets and then a d1000 table for unusual and specific locations.

Chapter 8: Preparing Your Own Encounter Tables is on actually using all the previous tables. The tables are not intended to be used on the fly to generate encounters; instead, it should be used beforehand to generate encounter lists, rolling the results and then fleshing them out into actual encounters.

Chapter 9: A City of Wonders: Seven Sample Encounters does what is suggested in Chapter 8. It has seven different examples, each starting with the random rolls and then fleshed out into actual encounters.

CASTLE OLDSKULL – City State Encounters in Review

The PDF lacks bookmarks and, given its length, these would have been greatly appreciated. The Contents cover the major and minor sections and are hyperlinked but, given the length of the book, navigation is quite poor. The poor navigation does not help when it comes to using the book; to use the tables will require a lot of shuffling through the book, there are no bookmarks to make this process easier and there are too few results on the pages to print it out cost effectively.

The text maintains a single column format with the majority of it being tables and no errors were noticed. Although this is a long book, the amount of content, although significant, is less than might be expected from the page count. Illustrations in the book are the standard public domain works seen in others in the series, although placement is often very odd. Artwork often seems to be placed to simply break up tables rather things serving an actual purpose of filling up blank space. Presentation is okay at best.

As with other entries in the Castle Oldskull series, this supplement consists of tables –  a lot of sometimes very big tables. It is an idea generator and this is not the sort of supplement that will appeal to everyone. Certainly, any GM who wants stuff that’s ready to use rather than having to spend time creating it (GMs often lack the time to create everything they might like) will likely not benefit. It is also more than likely not suited to a GM who doesn’t want their city to become a giant, dangerous, aboveground dungeon, but prefers something more realistic (something that is acknowledged in the Introduction, and City State Encounters is not intended for that market).

Each result in the Events table is not a fully detailed encounter. Instead, it is a type of encounter followed by suggestions as to what it could be. It will require work to flesh these out, but Chapter 9 does have some interesting results from doing such. There are more than a few Lovecraftian references as well; the author would appear to be a fan of such, as are many GMs.

The tables from Chapter 5 onwards lack explanations as to what the results are. The vast majority are easy to understand, but some results such as “Famulus” could perhaps have done with an explanation rather than making the reader look them up themselves.

This supplement is an idea generator. It is intended to help GameMasters come up with encounter ideas in advance and then create their own encounter tables using these. What it isn’t is a set of encounters in and of itself. Anyone buying it expecting the latter is going to be disappointed. What it is is a resource useful for GMs with enough time available – and the ability to flesh out brief random dice roll results – to create their own resources, and that’s how it should be considered. CASTLE OLDSKULL – City State Encounters, in that sense, does fulfil this, and it can be found by clicking here.