Urban Designs: New Glory Naval Base

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

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