Game: Beyond the Walls
Publisher: Mystic Eye Games
Series: d20
Reviewer: Wyrdmaster
Review Dated: 24th, February 2003
Reviewer’s Rating: 6/10 [ On the ball ]
Total Score: 6
Average Score: 6.00
Beyond the Walls is the next in Mystic Eye’s Foul Locales series. The title of the book says it all; in this issue we’re looking at foul places outside of the city. Actually, if we want to nitpick (and I often do) then we’re looking at interesting places outside of walls. The absence of walls is often the tricky bit in a wilderness encounter; players and NPCs can go anywhere, combat can spiral out in all directions and chance encounters are all the more unlikely. One of the first things I looked for in Beyond the Walls was to see whether the book had genuinely managed to step outside and stay outside. No. Quite a few of Beyond the Wall’s locales are set in or based around buildings. That’s not too bad, that means a fair number of them are honestly and actually beyond the walls. Those interesting places that do feature walls are countryside buildings; out of the way towers, isolated trading posts, farms, etc. These are all entirely acceptable locations for a book with a countryside bias.
I tend to think of the Foul Locales as an “oh crap! I need a location,” aid. They’re the sort of book that saves GMs when the players do something unexpected or when the flow of the game has been focusing on only one player and the GM needs a handy spanner to throw in the works to shake things up and share the attention around. Previous Foul Locale books have made use of a quick key to describe how suited the location is for different parties and places; in Beyond the Walls the key covers the Encounter Level for the locale, the climate and the terrain. This is a step in the right direction but fairly useless unless there is a handy table somewhere to summarise this and let a busy GM find what he’s looking for quickly. Beyond the Walls has such a table. The summary finds space for more than just the location codes, it describes the matching conditions in full and even includes a reminder of all the sidebar entries. A nearby table gives you the page number for each sidebar. If you want to dig up that encounter with spellnotes in it, or that marsh encounter or grab the page number for the standing stones then its easy to do quickly in this book. Not to put too fine a point on it; this indexing is a great success. It makes the book worthwhile. Oh, you’ll not find the page numbers for these locales in the summary. No table is that wonderful. However it is all too simple to find the contents page at the very start.
Spellnotes? If they sound familiar then that’s because you’re well read. Spellnotes are a creation of Monte Cook and can be found the Eldritch Might series. They’re not Open Content, they’re still not Open Content and their presence here must be testament to Mystic Eye’s growing reputation and “finger in many pies status”. This particular encounter sees a strategic pass that’s protected by sentient weapons, powered the souls of slain bards and which use the magic singing techniques that are spellnotes and spellsongs to help hack down any unlucky traveller. You don’t need to have the appropriate Book of Eldritch Might to use Beyond the Walls, what needs to be explained, is. One of the unexpected plus points to the book is this usable snippet of spell magic rules.
On the other hand, I think it might be a bit strange to have animated weapons (without real vocal chords, right?) introduce sound magic to your game. I think many GMs will want to introduce the likes of Bloodiron and Draconic Horses, foreshadow them at least, before their players stumble into the Bloodiron forge or the Draconic Horse ranch. This doesn’t adversely effect the locations as such but does lessen Beyond the Walls’ strength as an emergency location provider. It’s hard to foreshadow locations that have been pulled out of a book when the GM was in a squeeze. Other locations enjoy their best plot hooks and adventure seeds if they enjoy a bit of a run-up. If the players enter the location with a specific goal, for example, then they will be able to use more of the book’s text.
Beyond the Walls does well in finding the right mix of encounter levels. The average EL is 7 and the range covers EL 2 to EL 14. The very first locale as an encounter level of “Any” and so even if you treat the EL as canon you’ll find something that you can use in the book. There are enough low level encounters, these seem to be the ones that are most often over looked but that’s not the case in Beyond the Walls. There are two 2 EL locales. Beyond the Walls doesn’t do so well in mixing around the terrain types; the vast majority of the locations work best in a forested area. Although there are some locales that will do in any sort of terrain, the Stones of Legend for example, none of them really strike me as particularly good for desert, artic or even river encounters. I know, these terrain types are more rare than forests in most scenarios but they’re rarer because they are harder to manage, harder to come up with encounters for. On that note I would have especially liked to see Beyond the Walls take a bite at the more exotic. Viperwood, one of my favourite locations, might just edge up ahead of other locations because it can be used as a marsh locale.
The Stones of Legend deserve a special look at. These standing stones offer up another possible set of game mechanics for standing stones and arcane magic. Different patterns of standing stones favour different schools of magic and also drain the opposing school. These stones have an EL of 8 because things can get nasty if the characters end up suffering badly from the ill effects of the opposing school. The EL 8 is a bit of a shame really; it seems to take what could well have been an excellent campaign world idea and shoehorns it into a narrow character level band. The Stones of Legend really could give a weaker character party the chance to punch above their weight as the peak of plot piece but not with these rules. The backlash could undo the whole game. Higher level character parties can still benefit from the spell enhancement and they’re in a position to laugh off any come back. Still, this doesn’t so much reflect badly on the Stones of Legend as a Foul Locale in Beyond the Walls, it only represents a missed chance at coming up with something more substantial.
The cartography in Beyond the Walls is at the same superb quality which saw the previous Foul Locales, Urban Blight, nominated for an Ennie award in 2002. The maps have a clean, crisp style and manage to convey the wilderness and the countryside when they need to. Unfortunately the maps are only really for the GMs benefit since they’re always share the page with spoiler text and are likely to be too small for standard miniature use too. As a GM aid the cartography is a strong success and one of the reasons to buy the book.
In some ways Beyond the Walls is better than the previous successes in the Foul Locales series. It has a solid professional feel to it and is a satisfying book to flick through. This is the same strong direction that all the major players in the d20 publishing business are going, Mystic Eye has done well to establish itself as such but a good looking book is no longer much of a trump card. All new d20 books are expected to look good. Beyond the Walls has plenty of locales that greet me as entirely suitable for inclusion in any game I might run but there’s no single entry that grabs me as a “must have”. Beyond the Walls isn’t quite the essential purchase that Urban Blight is. Beyond the Walls is a buy it if you think you’ll need it and you won’t regret doing so.
