Charlie Ferguson-Avery is back, joined by Alex Coggon, to do for urban environments what Into the Wyrd & Wild did for the wilderness.  With Into the Cess & Citadel, they’ve created a fantastic tool kit to make your urban games all the more freaky and dangerous.  I find urban environments to be a great place for tabletop games to go in some wild directions, and I will definitely be using this book the next time I take my players there.

The book is set up a bit differently than Into the Wyrd & Wild.  Where the previous book took on the titular Wild as one big environment, breaking down its factions, dangers, creatures, etc., this book looks at each district of the city and does the same in a truncated way.  So the section on the Foundary district has its general set-up, factions, creatures, and artifacts.  The same is true for the Archivist district, the Undercity, and more. Each district is like its own mini-setting.

Though each district is its own thing, they all form a greater whole.  While Into the Wyrd & Wild had some hallmarks of an overall setting, it felt much more setting agnostic than Into the Cess & Citadel.  That said, there’s a lot in this book that you can use in whatever Fantasy city you choose, even if you don’t choose to use things like the Spires, the Cultivists, or the semi-divine monstrosities called The Nobles.

There are plenty of more general charts and tool kits within that will help you build your city out, give it flavor, and make it a more interesting place for you players to explore.

This is a really excellent book.  I’m sort of torn on some organizational aspects.  On the one hand, I like that the appropriate creatures are attached to the environment in which they would most likely appear.  Yet, I might have preferred all the critters be lumped together in one section.  Again, I’m not even sure which way is better, and I may very well come to appreciate this as I use it.  But in my first read-through of the book, I wasn’t a big fan.  Quibbles like that aside, I can’t recommend this book highly enough.  It’s evocative, inspirational, and practical.  What more could you want? 

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