By Alan D. Kohler (repost from ENWorld), April 24, 2004.
"New Glory Naval Base is a book in Darkfuries' new Masterwork Maps line of print products,
presenting a modern naval base for use in a d20 Modern™ campaign.
Darkfuries is responsible for a number of electronic map products, such as Castles & Keeps, Mansions
& Manors, and Inns & Taverns. These products are of such universal use that I use at least one of
them in 90% of my d20 fantasy sessions. It should be interesting to see both how their products fare in print and
how well they support d20 Modern™.
Further, as I have worked on Naval bases all of my gainfully employed life, it should be interesting to see how Darkfuries fares.
The writing in the book is attributed to M.K. McArtor, Robert Nolan, and Dave Woodrum. The maps are by Brian Moseley.
A First Look
New Glory Naval Base is a 96 page perfect bound softcover book available for $19.95.
The cover has a grey concrete like texture to it. The front is adorned with a color version of one of the interior maps.
The interior is black and white with art by Shafali Anand, David Cummings, Steven Grover, Kevin Sandborn, and Chuck Whelon.
The art is mostly low detail ink drawings of individuals, but the majority of the graphical adornment is the maps themselves.
A Deeper Look
The vast majority of the book is concerned with the various buildings of a fictional US Naval base called the New Glory Naval
Base. This base is about on the order of a small naval base like the Everett naval station.
The first chapter is a brief introduction, including the history of the base and the landowner who originally owned the land, told
from the vantage point of a newspaper article. The introduction also lays down a few basic concepts used in the book, like naval
ranks and watch rotations. The only map in this chapter is an overview of the base, showing all building locations and numbers.
One thing I noticed right off the bat was that the street names and building numbers have a very realistic veneer to them.
Chapters 2 through 6 describe the various sorts of buildings on the base: Security & Munitions, Command & Operations, Facilities
Ashore, Logistics & Support, and Services & Recreation.
Each of these chapter features multiple buildings. There are multiple building maps in each chapter, but in some cases, the same
building is used several times. This is fairly realistic, especially when you are talking about general purpose buildings like barracks.
That said, the barracks depicted herein range from much more posh that I am used to (with 60 man open bays, which I have only
ever seen in boot camp) to a little posh by naval standards (with long interior hallways like a nice hotel; in reality most barracks I
have seen only have small hallways linking groups of 5 rooms and have bays leading to outdoor walkways and stairwells like a
cheap motel.)
The maps are set up a bit like the ESD map products by darkfuries: each map has detailed descriptions of facilities and features.
The details listed for each of these include a watch rotation and details of which and how many personnel are in the building at various
hours, locations of telephone and power boxes, construction, ventilation, security features (including statistics for locks), and room
descriptions and contents.
The maps themselves are very nice, using a standard d20 system™ style 5-foot grid. The maps are adorned with notations that
make it appear like a realistic draftsman's blueprint of the building. This is nice if you want to copy the map and use it as a prop to hand
to the players. Unfortunately, the book provides no permission to copy for personal use for those with a deep conscience for copyright
issue or that must deal with paranoid copy shop clerks. In addition, the title of the building is not on the sheet, just a building number;
as some descriptions are displaced from the same page as the map, it may take a little hunting to get the map that you want. It seems
as if it would have been prudent to put a label outside of the frame so you could nkow what you are looking at at a glance, and still retain
the "prop-utility."
The assortment of buildings described here can be described in one of two ways - "realistic" or "mundane." There are no psychic research
centers or nuclear weapon storage facilities. This makes things a bit more difficult if that's what you want out of a book about naval
installations. But if you are comfortable setting your scenario amongst barracks, administrative buildings, naval exchanges, pierside
maintenance shops, and armories that are more the realistic norm for such an installation, then you should find the buildings useful. Further,
the selection means that you can take some of them and present them as civilian buildings such as a police department armory or a civilian
department store.
The seventh chapter, Roll Call, is where (aside from various security details) most of the d20 Modern™ material in this
book lies. There are about 6 pages of supporting characters on the base, including Naval personnel and civilians in the surrounding community.
All of the NPCs are ordinaries using the d20 Modern™ rules. There is also a exotic dancer nightclub in this chapter, the sort where
you might find young naval personnel.
Conclusions
As mentioned, I though there were a few ways that the book could have been made more readable and improved the utility of the book,
such as making building labels clearer.
That said, the maps themselves are certainly high quality and potentially useful, and most details strike me as reasonable and realistic
for a base of this sort. The only thing I might have added is a few more adventure ideas or a campaign setups to help the GM make use
of the base."
Overall Grade: B-
-Alan D. Kohler
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