This is Rainy City, home to Achterfusses, the orating cephalopods who reside in the city’s pools and canals and come out in rainiest of seasons when they can breathe the ‘air’ to work, trade, sputter and cough, and give their opinions. To the diminutive Boggies of Bog End in the Sump where they enjoy water rugby and smoking reeds when they are dry enough or working as bottlers in the city’s few remaining wizard towers due to their immunities to enchantment. To Gargoyles and Ghouls, the latter enlightened flesh-eaters of Respectability Row and County Gaunt, perpetually well mannered about their old money and constant hunger, and delighted to have you to tea. To the chirping, wailing, and opportunistic Gulls—the only sea bird found in Rainy City—with wings that can grasp or fly, but not simultaneously. To the Deepsies, sufferers of ‘the Depsis’, who grow fishier and fishier every day, unhappily amphibious who mediate trade with the Underharbour or serve board salvage, sailing, and fishing boats. To the Mermaids who can slip out of their tails to walk as humans, most visiting during the wettest months of the year lest someone steal their shawls and gain power over them. To the Mine Goblins—or bearded cave elves—who hold a market in the Silver Falls Mines, but do not let just anyone attend, and dig endlessly into the Tower Cliffs for reasons they care not to divulge.
This is the setting of Rainy City as described in A Visitor’s Guide to the Rainy City. Ostensibly an actual guidebook to the city—written by no less a personage than Beauregard Hardebard, The Master and Four Wardens of the Fellowship of the Art or Mystery of Haberdashery and Millinery—it is actually a fanzine published in 2020 following a successful Kickstarter campaign by Superhero Necromancer Press (though not, it would appear, as part of ZineQuest #2). It is a systems agnostic supplement that would work with all manner of different systems and settings. Into the Odd and Troika! immediately spring to mind since both are simple to handle the baroque fripperies and arch arcanity of the setting’s strangeness. As a setting it cannot be pinned down to any one time period, the book’s line art suggesting the late medieval or early modern periods, but it could also be Georgian or Victorian as well. Its self-contained nature means it could easily be dropped into a campaign or simply exist in a water bubble all of its very own.
From the personal welcome of Beauregard Hardebard to every new visitor, A Visitor’s Guide to the Rainy City dives into describing the various peoples and places of the Rainy City. This includes its unsurprisingly wet seasons and the highly entertaining festivals that take place over the course of the year, such as The Gentle Exchange of the Fish in which every fisher and fishmonger proudly displays recently caught fish with the Peers of Fishmarket Way lording it over everyone for the duration, with public hangings, bracing auctions, cattlefish shows, crab fights, seaweed spas, flying fish races, a lanternfish brightness show, and the annual fisherfolk games. The latter consist of competitions in knot tying, sail raising, net throwing, bailing out a sinking boat, and anchor raising! There are details of what is commonly eaten and drunk, preferred pets and working beasts, and more. Then it explores the various regions of the city, from Rickety and the Swells, Vagabond Bay, and Old Town to Embassy Row, The Headlands, and Tower Cliffs. These are all given four pages of detail each, which always include the weather particular to the district, who they might interact with whilst there, how law is handled in the district, the degree of disorder and disarray, and more. The more includes the buildings of note, organisations to be found, and lastly things to do, hooks that the Game Master can develop. And every district is different and distinct, and though they are interconnected, a Game Master could, if she so wanted, take one of them and use it on its own. That though, would be to pull apart the richness of the setting as a whole.
In addition to the ‘Things to Do’ for every district, A Visitor’s Guide to the Rainy City gives eight scenario hooks in ‘The Patrons’. These include Madam Lydia, aged diviner of Old Town, noted for her dark prophecies, who now wants them to come true. Which means that the city will fall with the help of the Player Characters and her demons! Or Pizarro, the entrepreneur whose ‘Pizarro’s Dry Baths’ are a grand success and wants to expand his operations with steam baths. Except that requires that somebody capture a salamander. Lastly, there has always been The Sandestin in the Rainy City, a title and office with unclear meaning or purpose, but nevertheless, historically important. So important is the office though, that eras are identified by the holders. The holder could be an actual wizard or a charlatan or even a devil reborn each time some takes the office anew, but now? There are three pretenders to the office. Oh, the calamity.
Physically, A Visitor’s Guide to the Rainy City is charming. The artwork is subtly unnerving if you look close enough, whilst the writing is thoroughly engaging. The cartography is not bad, but it imparts a feel for the city rather than a detailed representation. If there is an issue, it is that the density of information is such that the book needs an index!
A Visitor’s Guide to the Rainy City is engaging from start to finish and you want to read stories set in the city let alone actually run a game set there. It is full of such wonderful little details that are going to astound and confound the players each time their characters visit, that they are going to want to come back again and again. A Visitor’s Guide to the Rainy City is simply delightful.
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