Beauregard Hardebard (Rich Forest, et al) take us on a tour of a fascinating and miserable city at the end of the world.  I’m reminded a bit of Doskvol from Blades in the Dark, except that instead of being surrounded by ghosts and darkness, it’s surrounded by ocean and storms.  I was also reminded of elements of The Eternal Champion series, The Dying Earth, and some others.  This is a city at the end of all things.  People and objects from other worlds that have been consumed by some great flood keep washing up.  That flood may just finally sink the Rainy City, too. There’s a grim humor to the place, a sort of sad, surreal silliness.  

The book is system agnostic, so whatever tabletop RPG is your drug of choice should work.  While I definitely plan to have it in my back pocket for a game of Dungeon Crawl Classics, as a place characters might get tossed if they’re traveling between worlds, I think I’d lean more toward something like Basic Role-Playing if I were to use this as the focal point setting of a game.  Something skill based and a bit lower powered seems more appropriate.  More story/character focused stuff like Powered by the Apocalypse games would almost certainly work well.

Not only is the book system agnostic, but it can also serve as a player handout.  It is written as though it is an in-world artifact.  The supposed author Beauregard Hardebard is a character who lives and works within the Rainy City.  And there are indications that he is, perhaps, not a completely reliable narrator.  So, after reading through the book and deciding what things are true and what are false, and what people, places, and things you’ll be using, you could have the book be something they find and just hand it to them so they can read it at will, or use it as a guide.  I was also thinking, if you were going to have the Rainy City be somewhere your characters might end up, that you could copy parts of pages, weather them, and make them into props and handouts that might be discovered.  Perhaps in a library somewhere.  Perhaps as a message in a bottle, or a scrap of paper in a dead goblin’s pocket.

The neighborhoods and personalities of the Rainy City are rich with ideas that will provide hours of story.  The art by Bill Spytma, which has a woodcut & etching kind of look, complements the thing wonderfully.  While I read through the book, I was constantly inspired by an idea here or a turn of phrase there.  At only 60 pages, it’s a wealth of worldbuilding and creativity.  I strongly recommend getting a copy, even if only to read it.  

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