A Review of the Role Playing Game Supplement The Game Master’s Notebook: The City of Ravenclaw: The Sewers of Ravenclaw

The Game Master’s Notebook: The City of Ravenclaw: The Sewers of Ravenclaw is a role playing game supplement published by Art of War Games. The supplement is listed as being D&D 5E compatible, although there is no reference to the Open Game License.

This is a six page PDF which lacks bookmarks. It is available from RPGNow at the regular price of $2 but was purchased at the reduced price of $1.40. One page of the supplement is the colour front cover.

This is one in a series of supplements set in the City of Ravenclaw. This supplement isn’t describing the sewers; instead it’s detailing an adventure set in them. Various undead have been seen in the sewer, and the players are hired to investigate the problem and deal with it. One page gives an introduction to the adventure and how the players are hired, together with a wandering monster table.

This is followed by a full page labelled map of the sewer system. Next, around a third of a page details complications that may arise, such as competing agents in the sewers and incorporeal undead escaping from them to attack citizens.

Around two pages detail the various locations in the sewers and the remainder of the supplement is the stats for the primary foe encountered, who is responsible for the undead.

The lack of bookmarks is not a concern for a supplement of this length. A larger concern is that the text cannot be copied or searched; something which is common with supplements from this publisher. The text maintains a two column format and a lot of spelling and grammatical errors were noted. The spelling errors were genuine errors that would have been picked up by a spellchecker, rather than being the use of correctly spelled incorrect words. The grammatical errors tend to be odd capitalisations of words.

Apart from the black and white map, there are a few pieces of black and white stock art included, although some of these seem to be used as filler art rather than to illustrate anything in the text.

The adventure is aimed at D&D 5E but stats are only provided for the non-player character; everything else just has the monster name, which admittedly makes converting the adventure for other systems easier. Quite what level it is aimed for is unclear; although the foes are primarily skeletons and zombies, which are common for lower level parties, there are some higher undead and 6d6 zombies who may join other undead if they hear battle could prove a problem for a low level party.

This may be linked to the City of Ravenclaw, but it could certainly be dropped into another location as well. The sewer network isn’t that large for a city, but with only two proper connections to the surface, it could be dropped into another town.

The Game Master’s Notebook: The City of Ravenclaw: The Sewers of Ravenclaw is not bad value for its price, despite its flaws, and it can be found by clicking here.