So What’s It Called, Anyway?

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97638[1]By Thilo Graf

This pdf from Raging Swan Press is 15 pages long, 1 page front cover, 1 page blank inside the front cover, 3 pages of editorial/ToC, 1 page back cover, 1 page SRD, 1 page advertisement, leaving 7 pages for the content, so what is this about?

Every DM knows the drill: How is the tavern called? The baker’s daughter? The tavern wench? The cobbler’s son? Players ask these questions and while they forget essential names, they are sure to remember these names. If you’re trying to run an adventure, having a plethora of names ready can help keep the players from guessing who is relevant and who isn’t. The same, of course, goes for everything – if you don’t want to make hot-spot searching too easy, this pdf will come handy indeed, or at least that’s its premise:

The first two pages are devoted to explaining how to use this pdf – that is, how to create Inn, shop, ship, place and organization names. After that, we get tables – 100 descriptive words, 100 creature-names, 100 titles/occupations for people, 100 objects and finally a table called other, which includes additional words. We also get 20 organizations, place names, ships, shops and finally 20 inns & taverns.

Conclusion:

Editing and formatting are just as good as we’ve come to expect from Raging Swan Press, I.e. I noticed no glitches. Layout adheres to the classic, printer-friendly b/w-2-column standard for text and 3 columns for the tables. The pdf is extensively bookmarked. This is a very useful pdf, helping you come up with names. It’s no more and no less. It’s easy to use, makes no pretenses and, all in all, is a great resource for just about any DM – being system-neutral, it could be used for just about every medieval setting. However, I do have one minor gripe – The amount of content provided. I know, for the very fair price, is more than adequate. Nevertheless, I would have loved to see more tables – for shops, temples etc. What about titles in a church hierarchy or in a town? Don’t get me wrong, this pdf is an extremely useful purchase for the low price, but seeing that some more combinations of the words to roll up, some more detail could have been added, I can’t bring myself to rate it the full 5 stars. Thus, my final verdict will be 4 stars – a nice and useful work by author Marc Radle. Now, what about library tomes?

Endzeitgeist out.

So What’s It Called, Anyway? is available from:

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