City Slice: Strip Mall Paradise by Dave Woodrum and Cathy Woodrum is a generic role playing game supplement published by Fishwife Games. The supplement is a piece of a city intended for use in a modern setting.
This is a sixteen page PDF which is available from RPGNow at the regular price of $2.50 but which was purchased at the reduced price of $1.68. One page is the colour front cover and one the front matter. Two pages are also taken up by two black and white line drawing maps of the region, one labelled for GameMasters and one unlabelled for players.
The supplement starts with a brief couple of paragraphs explaining the purpose of the supplement, which is to provide a commercial area – containing a lot of strip malls – of a modern city. It does state that it could possibly be used for post-apocalypse settings, giving an idea of what the area used to be like. Using it for such would require a fair bit of work for the GM, as only the building’s former types would now be accurate.
The rest of the supplement is taken up by descriptions of the various map locations, 81 in total. Each location has the business’ name, some details on it and some primary NPCs described. There are a few potential adventure hooks given, some connections between various locations and some options for the GM to choose from.
City Slice: Strip Mall Paradise in Review
The PDF lacks bookmarks and it is not that surprising that this is the case. It could have been possible to have linked all 81 locations, which would have been good but unusual. Navigation is as expected.
The text maintains a single column format and a few minor errors were noticed. Apart from the fairly basic maps, there are a few pieces of clip-art that are used in appropriate places. There are also a few blank spaces marked as note areas for the GM. Presentation is okay at best.
As mentioned, this is primarily intended to be used in a modern setting. Translating it to a post-apocalyptic one could be done, but would take a bit of work; it is not ideally suited for such.
Each location has enough detail to flesh it out to a degree. Being system neutral will require any NPCs to have stats generated, if these are needed – in many cases they are not. Many of the locations are small businesses but some are chain stores of one type or another. In such cases, the specific store isn’t specified but the author suggests a chain in each case. Chains are often not international, so this does create a degree of universality to the supplement, although it is definitely best suited to use in the U.S. There are quite a few suggestions as to how the locations can be used, such as adventure hooks and sources of information. City Slice: Strip Mall Paradise is a decent supplement that covers a nice little chunk of a large city in a degree of detail and it can be found by clicking here.
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