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Modern Backdrops is a unique and exciting resource for the Modern d20 System gamemaster This collection offers you a series of well-developed cities, each with its own unique history, information on the important people and places, maps of specific locations, and plot hooks to help jump-start your campaign and get your players involved. These cities were created with the FX game in mind, but the information provided for each city should be sufficient for any style of game to be set, successfully, inside the city limits..
Price: $19.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

With the Beatles, Bob Dylan is one of the most talented performers to emerge from the sixties For more than twenty years Dylan has been a spokesman for the young--a representative of a generation and a way of life. While Dylan's originality is his strength, his art has roots in Amercan
folk, country and pop music.
In this exciting new book, Wilfrid Mellers, author of the acclaimed study of the Beatles, Twilight of the Gods, examines Dylan's musical heritage, from the British folk ballads that influenced his lyrics to the American folk-singers who influence his music. Mellers looks at how Dylan's vocal and
instrumental style was affected by such greats as the Carter family, Hank Williams, Jimmie Rodgers, Elvis Presley and Woody Guthrie. He goes on to consider what Dylan did with this musical legacy, and how he made these musical forms his own.
Mellers offers illuminating commentary on virtually every song recorded by Dylan, and shows why his individual contribution has spoken so powerfully to millions of people..
Price: $19.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Backdrops presents a collection of ready-to-use locations for your D20 System fantasy campaign. Each location is detailed in a two-page spread, including a scale map, descriptive text, and related new D20 material from traps to special combat rules. All maps are gridded with 1 square equals 5 feet, and include an enlargement legend so you can use a photocopier to scale them up for miniatures use. Backdrops features fourteen locations, including:
* The bath house is a place of whispers, threats, lies, and scheming. Beneath its tranquility it is a tense scene, where enemies face each other without swords or shields.
* An urban stable breeds noble horses in which the wisdom of ancient tribal kings is scattered as a blessed reincarnation.
* In the secret smithy, three burning golden dwarves arrive from within the forge at the stroke of midnight to craft wondrous items.
* Small, fortified caravanserai offers protection and company to travelers and traders ... though bandits know that the most valuable thing in any caravanserai is the caravan visiting it.
* Narrow alleyways wind like veins through the city ... but only three sorts of souls walk these streets at night: lantern-bearing guards, cutthroats, and the undead.
* Plus a bazaar, athenaeum, ship, wharf, toll bridge, temple, tavern, merchants' district and city dungeon.

Link the sets to detail a single city, or scatter them across your campaign world. Use them as a foundation for more exotic travails for your PCs, or to fill in the dark corners of your characters' hometown. It's your game, after all. Backdrops just gives you more time to play it!.
Price: $6.08 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The work that first brought the contemporary Chinese photographer Xu Yong to the attention of the international art world was 101 Hutong Portraits, a book-length collection of traditional Beijing street scenes. In Backdrop, Xu Yong collects two bodies of "souvenir" photographs--one taken in Tiananmen Square and the other in front of Shanghai's super-modern Oriental Pearl Tower. Because of the way that Xu Yong lights and frames his photographs, at first glance one can hardly tell if the cultural landmark in the background of each picture is an actual architectural monument or a backdrop screen from a commercial photography studio. Indeed the settings are real. And the people that this rising star captures--including children, teenagers, young sweethearts, married couples, mothers and sons, middle-aged tourists, multi-generational families and groups--offer riveting psychological and sociological studies of modern Chinese culture. Often enigmatic, they have a rare, magnetic pull that keeps you looking..
Price: $20.52 [Notify me when price goes down.]