Now that Stingbaats Vol. 0 is out & Things Possessed of Power is with a few readers for a clarity check, I looked around for something to review while I consider how I want to expand Crypt of the Child for the “Blood-Soaked” edition post-game jam.

Since I’m thinking of adding a starting town to Crypt of the Child a la Tomb Robbers of the Crystal Frontier, I thought I’d look at what others are doing. On the Arcane Library discord server, City of Hawkmoor was mentioned and I took a quick look. I was immediately struck by the 2 ratings: one for 5-stars with no review and one for 1-star calling out a lack of conceptual density. So I’m in, let’s look.

What is Conceptual Density?

Before jumping in, I should explain, conceptual density is the unique ideas that populate an TTRPG product that push beyond the cliches. They are the unique ideas that give you something new to work with as a GM packed into the number of pages available in the adventure/supplement/product what have you. No concepts means the product is basically cliches and provides no real value added. Too dense and the product is giving you your money’s worth, but you have to tease it apart to even understand or use it, which slows the game to a stop or makes the book an indecipherable block of words.

In short, you want a few unique ideas that fire the imagination factory for GMs, but not so many that it bogs down the players. It’s the provision of the unexpected, the trope subversion, the interesting & weird.

City of Hawkmoor

City of Hawkmoor presents itself as a 24-page supplement that is a broad outline of a city that should serve as a base of operation for players during a campaign. A base of operation just meaning a location that presents opportunities to restock resources between adventures and a source for discovering adventuring opportunities. There isn’t a particularly standard take on how a starting town or base of operation should be structured. You have classics like Hommlet, Orlane, Waterdeep, Baldur’s Gate, & Lankhmar, but they don’t have the same things in each. They do, however, have some overlaps in the form of conflicts, factions, adventure, points of interest, and encounters. Including all of this within 24 pages is a tall order. The writing needs to be tight.

It isn’t.

Overview

The overview explains the size of the city (~8000 people), the region around it (mountains, forests, roads), cultural reference points (romano-english & anglo-saxon italian), the governmental system, & how laws are passed. While the governmental system & how laws are passed is mildly unique, it’s not really gameable. For an overview, it wastes precious space to describe things that won’t likely become relevant until later in a campaign and things situated outside the walls of the city (which are 45′ crenulated monsters that require 4 paragraphs of explanation rather than a sentence). I know more about how far Mount Icingdoom is to Hawkmoor (an obscure reference to the distance between Puyallup & Mount Rainer when Tokyo to Mount Fiji serves as a more common reference point of roughly the same distance – 60 kms) than I do about the city itself.

Compare that to Cursed Scroll 6 – the City of Masks. In 2 pages, I’m given information about the biome, people, travel in the city, random encounter frequency, labyrinthine mazes of canals, & a quick overview of each of the districts (organized by wealth). Aside from people, most of this information is absent in the 3 pages of Hawkmoor overview. Plus, I can make a session out of the little these 2 pages provide. If you’re asking the GM to build the game, provide them the tools.

This is where a lot of my issues arise. The information I want isn’t conveyed and when it is, it’s not conveyed in a manner that is easily digestible. The writing is languid, depicting the unnecessary & mundane, providing little direction or visual context for Hawkmoor. It’s an example of Gygaxian prolixity versus modern conveyance.

If you want a more generic city so you don’t need to come up with the basic outline structure of a city & some names, this will work for what you want. But you could also just use Donjun or some other random generator.

Encounters

This is immediately where I lost hope. It’s an organizational issue for me. If I’m running a city, I want the encounters based on the district to be conveyed with the information about the district. I also want my tables conveyed as tables.

Sure it uses space, but it creates visible breaks so your eyes can rest. It provides opportunities to slow the reading so the reader can process the information. It also doesn’t waste space explaining that half the encounters aren’t even in the book. You could also just remove the unnecessary roll by adding all of these into the random encounter tables for each district.

This is also where I realized I may not be an old-school roleplayer in the same sense as others because I abhor the information design sense of the old modules, classics though they may be. Then, I remember that even old modules used tables. (From D3-Vault of the Drow.)

12 Quarters

There are 12 quarters (so 3?, jokes aside, it should probably be called a district to avoid confusion) that are described briefly, with a lot of the description wasted on explaining encounters that are bland. This should be where most of the Points of Interest in the city are described and they aren’t. (The organizational issue again.) Just as a quick comparison to Cursed Scroll 6 (CS6), the Castle Quarter is 1/2 a page, tells me nobles & government live there, how it sits atop a hill, has 3 gates, the city has a militia, encounters are with nobles, & there’s a “5 in 6 chance of the City Guard responding to the hue and cry within 1d3 + 3 combat rounds.” Whereas, in CS6, Montmar Castle spreads across 2 pages with 6 POI keys and the following simplification of everything in Hawkmoor’s 1/2 page into 3 lines: “Class: Wealthy. Category: Castle district. City Guard Arrives: 1d4 rounds.” Oh and a map of the district.

Because fewer words are used to convey givens about the city, more can be spent giving the city life. Such as, “…are a team of barristers who advise on the city’s most intricate and challenging legal cases. They secretly possess the Doom Book…. Now, the reader has an adventure hook. Hawkmoor never gives the reader this, because that’s not its priority. For better or worse.

Personages & Establishments

“But Cri, Hawkmoor does have Points of Interests in the Personages & Establishments section!”

So? The establishments are listed in the order of the type of establishment they are, a name for that establishment, then the district it is in, & one unique (used loosely) thing about them. It’s a list that isn’t organized for the convenience of the individual running the Copper Quarter. If I want a smithy in the Copper Quarter, I don’t look in the section on the Copper Quarter to see if there is a smithy, I have to go to the personages section, look up all the different types of smithies (armor, blacksmith, weapon, farrier, etc.) and see if one is listed for the Copper Quarter and all I get is a name & 1 thing they are decent at. No real description of the individuals who work there, no interesting tidbits that might be adventure hooks or conflicts with other NPCs that could be one, not even a description of the establishment.

For Copper Quarter, we get a farrier called Nalbant’s Smithy who is known for best quality. It’s not really gameable content. It’s not really unique. It’s not really interesting. The reader has to work to find everything when it should be organized into the Copper Quarter so it’s there for when they run & need to quick reference. And if it’s not there, then I know I need to make it.

Social Class

A table!? I don’t otherwise understand the point of this section and I think this is just a difference of expectations. It explains how much people carry on them in terms of coin and I’m reminded of how older modules would explain where everyone kept their wealth expecting thieves to pickpocket everyone. It’s a different cultural mindset to gaming that others will appreciate. I don’t see how I can’t make a ruling and say it’s 1d10 copper and keep the game moving without looking up a chart.

Magical Mists and City-Wide Encounters

These are probably the most interesting sections to me. This is where all the conceptual density comes to play and it’s not really much. Given that you only roll for a City-Wide encounter 1:12 times, the fact that there are 100 City-Wide Encounters and essentially minimal district encounters, I would have eliminated the street encounters (replace it with “nothing happens”), expand the district encounters, and then split the 100 city-wide encounters into the 12 districts. A 1d8 encounter table would give more life to the districts than they currently have. As it is currently structured, you’ll never get through these 100 encounters in 10 years playing once a week for a few hours each week simply because you won’t roll that many city-wide encounters. It’s a waste of good content.

Conclusion

City of Hawkmoor is a supplement converted to Shadowdark (kind of) and harkens back to an older style of play for better and worse. As a broad outline goes, it is very broad, it is very outline. You will need to prep. I understand why the review said it lacked conceptual density, but I think that’s because the organization hides any that does exist into the city-wide encounter table that you will never get through. That same organization hinders how effective this supplement could be by making it more opaque than it needs to be. Simplifying the writing & a better organizational system would make Hawkmoor more compelling. It would let the vision for what this city could be sing.

It would at least provide space to explain why the city is called Hawkmoor. If you prefer that older style and want to prep while having some of the names for things already planned for you, this is great. If you want something you can run, this is not.