A Review of the Role Playing Game Supplement Village Shops

Village Shops by Andrew Hand and Michael Johnson is a role playing game supplement published by Limitless Adventures. The supplement is a collection of five shops aimed at the Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition game. As a result, it is covered by the Open Game License with some parts being considered Open Game Content.

Limitless Adventures

This is a 9 page PDF which is available from RPGNow at the regular price of $1 but which was purchased at the reduced price of $0.70. One page of the supplement is the cover, one page is the Open Game License and one page is essentially the introduction. This latter item discusses the purpose of the supplement, states that every supplement published by Limitless Adventures contains something new and mentions Further Adventure^TM – basically, adventure hooks.

There are five shops in all; a herbalist, a stable, a general store, a smithy and a public house. Each shop has its name – for the herbalist this is simply ‘Herbalist’ – and a brief description. The stats are given for the primary non player character who runs the store, the products that are available (the herbalist sells a new potion and two other new items that have useful effects) and three one sentence adventure hooks.

Village Shops in Review

The PDF lacks bookmarks which would have been useful but which are not essential, given its brevity. The text maintains a one column format and no errors were noticed. There was one problem with the text, fortunately on the introductory page, where the text overran onto the page border on three lines without any backing (as is the case everywhere else) making the end of those lines essentially unreadable. There are no illustrations.

The shops can easily be dropped into any setting and could be used in most settlements; hamlets, villages, towns and perhaps even cities. The stats decrease their use for other game systems than 5E; they could be converted but it may not be worthwhile spending the time doing so, given how short the supplement is. This is a useful collection of shops for a 5E game and each shop costs very little. The supplement could have been fleshed out more – images, maps etc. – but that would boost the cost and at $1 standard price this is decent value for money. Village Shops can be found by clicking here.