4 Reasons To Check Out The Streets Of Avalon Preview

 Welcome to Avalon, a city with secrets held tight to her vest, crime and corruption are openly practiced, and “strange” being the default state. While the general feel of Avalon is familiar, there are some distinguishing features that make it unique. Survival, hard choices, and player driven play are some things you will find on the Streets of Avalon. There are no real heroes here, just those trying to survive and those that do are counted among the lucky. As a kickstarter backer, I received an early release of the PDF to check out. Here's a few reasons to give it a try.

1) City Play
Streets of Avalon centers around a sprawling city, the last city after the final battle in the Soul War. Avalon is a gritty, steampunk (really steampunk, not steamfun or steam-is-cool), noir setting with aberrations, undead, and the mysterious Lamplighters: mystics from another realm with the urge to help the beings of this realm. The city is ruled by magistrates and their griffons, but money is the true despot here; seems everyone is open to a bribe. The history and current mood of Avalon is well explained, but still has plenty of mysteries left for the dungeon master to flesh out. This city setting isn’t a building by building account of the city, rather a background to set your games against. In a world with the highly detailed Forgotten Realms, one of the more exciting ideas in this book is “What does your Avalon look like?”
 
2) Unlimited, Changing Play
Avalon is a city campaign, there isn't really a reason to leave the city, and if one area gets boring or finished, you just move on to a new area of the city. Play centers around neighborhoods, small sections of the city that you build up with a three step process: 1 - who’s in charge, 2 - groups, people, places, 3 - adventure locations and ideas. This is explained in a succinct way with three sample neighborhoods provided to mine for ideas. With play focused on politics, heists, investigation, monster hunts, and dungeoneering, as opposed to the general theme more D&D products lean to, each neighborhood the players move to can be a different taste of what Avalon has to offer. The city has a really familiar feel which makes it easy to start playing in. The themes in this city can also be found in Marvel’s New York and DC’s Gotham, movies like Dark City and Brazil, or books such as Diamond Age, Boneshaker or The Difference Engine.
 
3) Unique Flavors Of Fantasy
Avalon has no gods. Priestly magic is granted through study just like arcane. This is a great choice by the author and has no real mechanical effect, and is just a small tweak on the game's rules as written (cleric's spellcasting functions like a wizard's spellcasting normally does). This book is full of flavorful delights that make Avalon strange and unique. Examples include Lamplighters, who are outsiders with knowledge and the compulsion to help citizens for a strange price, a different take on the investigation skill, focus on a living city that is not waiting for the characters to show up, and planar creatures trying to break through  and affect Avalon in some devious way. Within the 5th edition D&D universe these things are all possible in any setting, but when you put the focus on them it brings out a new flavor that really compels players to act instead of react.

4) Random Encounter Tables
If you know anything from the articles I’ve written here, it’s that I love tables. Clocking in at thirteen pages of random encounters, a lot of the feel of Avalon is communicated in these tables. They are not just full of entries like “2d4 gang toughs,” but a sentence or two with little nuggets of story baked in. Most of these are designed to lead the players (and the dungeon master) onto an unplanned, emerging adventure. As a dungeon master, I appreciate the work that went into these tables, with many ideas about the people and creatures of Avalon, as well as setting information you could do worse than to start every session here. They lend themselves to development at the table instead of before, a style that I really enjoy, giving the dungeon master some unknown fun as well as the players. The tables go over eleven different areas each with twelve encounters. That’s one hundred thirty-two story starters! They are even fairly system agnostic so you can use them in your own campaign.
 

All these things lend to Avalon's dark, gritty theme. Bringing the game to a street level with focus on who you live by and what they are doing is the best part of this setting. If nothing else, this makes a good read for doing some alleyway adventures or even a Defenders-like campaign. This all works well with the newest version of dungeons and dragons and it’s heroic play; letting the characters persevere and play a part (albeit small compared to the vastness of Avalon) in the stories that unfold. Brett Bloczynski has some great ideas in his head, hopefully we’ll get to see more soon. Streets of Avalon is not yet available but will be soon on DriveThruRPG.

Richard Fraser has been roleplaying since the early days of Dungeons and Dragons and started with the red box in the eighties. He currently prefers to DM fifth edition D&D, though reads a lot of OSR and PbtA. He currently has podcast, Cockatrice Nuggets and maintains a blog at www.slackernerds.com, and recently started a Patreon.

Picture Reference: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/encoded/the-streets-of-avalon