Free Role Playing Game Supplement Review: FT – Bixatel

FT – Bixatel is a free role playing game supplement published by Adventures in Filbar. The supplement is in the FT series which primarily describe urban locations; in this case, a village founded primarily for mercantile reasons in a plains area dominated by a loose confederacy of tribes. The supplement is stated as being aimed at the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and AD&D 2nd Edition games.

This is a sixteen page PDF which lacks bookmarks. One page is the front cover featuring the Adventures in Filbar logo and one page has a map of the settlement, which would appear to have been created in RPG Citymap Generator, and a photo intended to represent the main gates and stockade surrounding the village.

The rest of the supplement describes the village itself. There is a one page description of the town and why it exists, followed by descriptions of 38 different locations, which would appear to be every building on the map.

Each location starts with what the location is, whether business, shop, residence or other building, followed by the name of an important NPC who can be found there. In some cases this is then followed by something else; although this isn’t stated anywhere, it would look like, where the NPC is from the tribes rather than being non-human or a human from elsewhere, this is what their name means. There is then a description of the business, activities or goods available and more details on the NPC.

The PDF lacks bookmarks but they aren’t really needed for one of this length. The text maintains the publisher’s standard single column with border format and quite a few errors, including sentences that appeared to have missing words, were noted. The map is functional and the photo illustrates what it is supposed to do, perhaps better than these stock images usually do.

Although this is stated as being for the AD&D system there are no game stats so using it with other systems is not a problem. Using the town outside of the Filbar setting will be a bit harder than usual, but is still definitely possible. The reason for it being harder is that this is one of the most important places for the caravan masters, an important organisation for the Filbar setting, and the settlement really needs to be in an area dominated by multiple nomadic tribes. This makes Bixatel rather less flexible than usual.

Having said that, this is still a well described small settlement and, despite the errors, is useful. FT – Bixatel can be found for free by clicking here.