Pyramid Review
Urban Arcana (for d20 Modern)
Published by Wizards of the Coast
Designed by Eric Cagle, Jeff Grubb, David Noonan, & Stan!
Cover by Dave Johnson
Interior art by Jason Alexander, Kalman Andrasofszky, Lee Ballard, Justin Hampton, Kagan McLeod, Ken Meyer, Jr., Dean Ormston, Jake Parker, Puddnhead, Christopher Shy, Chad Michael Ward, Jonathan Wayshak, & Sam Wood
Cartography by Robert Lazzaretti
320-page color hardcover; $39.95
What goes well with a fantasy-meets-modernity RPG like d20 Modern? A setting, of course. But then, that's just what you were expecting Wizards of the Coast to do. Using some of the fantastic elements found in the d20 Modern book, Urban Arcana presents a somewhat more fully realized world setting.
Between the world of the mundane and the fantasy world next door lies a gulf called the Shadow. For reasons not fully explained or understood, the tides of Shadow periodically reach a critical mass and begin dropping the hapless fantastic creatures and races of some unknown world of magic into our considerably more ordinary cities. Those who make the trip find that not only can they not get back, they cannot remember much of what the previous world was like. They may retain certain skills -- magic included -- but they must now make their way in a modern setting.
Ordinarily an orc pumping gas at the local filling station would draw a good deal of attention, but the Shadow (or one of its aftereffects) keeps most people in . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: July 4, 2003
Copyright © 2003 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.