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A Review of AGP's Wilderlands of High Adventure: 100 Street Vendors of the City State-
With Geoffrey McKinney's highly detailed review of the material specifics of the product in question, I shall endeavour to illustrate the vast utility of the 100 Street Vendors product, and state up front that this utility truly encompasses any and all genre of roleplaying game, so long as any sort of merchant is required.
As the author, James Mishler, notes, with but a moment's thought, any of these solitary individual merchants roaming the streets of the City State can be turned into a shop, with the merest inclusion of a few shop hands to fill out the 'hired help'. However, I would suggest that larger establishments, perhaps even modern malls, or post-apocalyptic flea-markets, could be formed by selecting a few related trades being clumped together into sectors of the physical location in which the item-questing, or time-killing player characters are roaming.
To reiterate McKinney's review, the depth of detail provided by Mishler in the 100 Street Vendors product is most authoritative, but this value-packed product is only increased in its usefulness by taking it out of the run of the mill fantasy settings that fill the gaming market, by using it for d20 Modern, Future, Post-Apocalypse, Supers, or even hard-Science-Fiction settings, after all these require merchants and places of business to equip PCs, as well as places where important gossip or hard-facts can be secured. AGP's Wilderlands of High Adventure: 100 Street Vendors of the City State fills that role exceptionally well for those Gamesmasters with the ability to think outside of the literal constraints of the presentation for the excellent and enjoyable Castles & Crusades gaming system.
Think of a Traveller game in which a TL7 or lower world is the current place of adventure, and the sorts of isolated encampments often encountered on the fringes of larger population centres. Any one of these merchants presented within 100 Street Vendors could be used 'on the fly' to detail everything the merchant or shop could offer, and with even the barest ability to translate a 3-18-scaled Strength score to Traveller's hexadecimal Stren range, the very scores themselves offered for each the merchants itself is immediately useful.
Likewise, The Morrow Project, any edition thus far of Gamma World, or even FGU's Aftermath!, with their scattered settlements and rarer enclaves of civilisation. All of these could profit from the inclusion of this product with exactly the same briefest moment of 'out of the box' thinking on the GM's/Referee's part.
With this degree of utility, is there any reason for me to go on urging you to purchase this product for use with ALL of your rpgs?
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