Freeholds of Nar by Steve Dee is a role playing game supplement published by Schwalb Entertainment for use with Shadow of the Demon Lord. This is an entry in the Lands in Shadow series which detail parts of the official Urth setting.
This is a six page PDF that is available from RPGNow for $1.49 but was purchased at the reduced price of $1.03 during a sale. Around a quarter of the first page is the Credits and, weirdly, one page is completely blank.
The first couple of paragraphs are a standard overview of the Freeholds.
Next, History explains how a water genie was buried under the region by a band of earth genies after they became annoyed by the tumult he was causing in his pursuit of an elven princess. The area was then developed into five fortresses by a dwarven kingdom which controlled trade between the Empire and the Kingdom of Sails, whose paranoia and desire for power eventually shattered the unity of the dwarves. These dwarves were then drowned when the water genie woke up and flooded their homes.
Following the death of the dwarves, the genie fell asleep once again and refugees, bandits and pirates from the Kingdom of God, Tear, the Kingdom of Sails and the Nine Cities arrived in the area. Now, the water genie is awake again and in under a year the Freeholds will be flooded once more.
Geography has a simple map and briefly describes the five dwarven citadels, one of which is unoccupied, due to it having a portal to the Underworld, and all of them are prey to monsters, and the town erected by the sea. There are sidebars on nar-necked, a term for someone who is stooped, and superstitions.
Politics explains that the Freeholds are essentially divided in Picks and Axes; Picks excavate the treasure and Axes guard them. There is no overall ruler and decisions are hard to make.
Culture essentially explains that the Freeholds run on drinking and gambling; many of the games bet on are dangerous and at least one is automatically fatal to at least one person, for it only ends when someone dies.
There is a single new monster, Memory Mist, which is based on the Killing Mist from the core rulebook and is emitted from the Underworld.
Finally, there are details on having characters originate from the Freeholds and a new background table.
Freeholds of Nar in Review
The PDF lacks bookmarks and is short enough that they are not needed. The text maintains a two column full colour format and appeared to be almost free of errors. There are a couple of colour illustrations, as well as the map, all of which are custom. Presentation is very good.
The Freeholds are only described very briefly; this may be because they are also very small. With a combined population of only 5,000, they have less people than many towns in other nations described in the Lands in Shadow series. All of the locations would need describing in a lot more details; the five dwarven fortresses, especially the empty one, could easily be designed as dungeon, possibly a megadungeon as they are all connected and the new inhabitants of the Freeholds prefer to live near the surface. This would require a lot of development though. There are some potential adventure hooks, although none are listed, especially as the Freeholds only have a limited amount of time to live. A GM would be advised not to start counting down this time until it achieves some actual game relevance though. Freeholds of Nar isn’t really much better than okay, but it is cheap and it can be found by clicking here.
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