Denizens of Freeport

Denizens of Freeport is a 96 page softcover sourcebook from Green Ronin, priced at $18.95 (I got mine on ebay for the remarkably low price of $5 + $3.50 S & H). It's an NPC book, that is a book full of characters, complete with stats and background. Generally speaking, I like books like this, because they are very useful when you need to come up with an NPC to populate someplace. And not being a very creative person, most of the NPCs I come up with are either based on people I know or characters from movies or books.There are a lot of NPCs in this book. More than 60s, the back cover claims, and as there is no easy way to count them, I'll take their word for it. Each entry is generally the same. The name at the top, followed by the stats, then entries on "Background", "Personality", "Physical Description", and "Hooks", the latter being what sort of hook they like to wear (Sorry, pirate humor. It's actually more like adventure seeds or ideas)I thought the best NPCs in this book are the more mundane ones. For instance, a locksmith. A street vendor, a brewer, a lawyer, a tailor. Unfortunately, there are only a few of these.This book gets a bit silly (like I thought the Freeport: City of Adventure book did) when it comes to anachoristic NPCs. For instance, drug dealing/growing Hippies named "The Blooms". Get it? Yuk yuk. Or a police detective and a forensic scientist. (CSI: Freeport anyone? Bah). Still, these sort of NPCs aren't too common. Some of the names are again similar to real world people. An actor named "Rikard Burbage" (Richard Burton), a disease carrier is named "Mary" (like "Typhoid Mary"). Things like that ratchet up the dorkiness factor and ratchet down the suspension of belief and believability of the character and setting, at least for me. But again, it only happens in a few cases. Some of the NPC groups from Freeport: City of Adventure are fleshed out. For instance, in that book there was a group of rich women who were bored and so became thieves and would bully inn owners (picture a bunch of Jennifer Lopezs, I guess). A couple of them are detailed here. One of the closest things to a Thieves' Guild in Freeport is "Finn's Syndicate", which is a halfling protection racket - an assassin from it is detailed here. And that annoying tabloid newspaperman is detailed, too.As you might guess from the nature of Freeport, there are a number of Pirate characters. One is a mind flayer (whose inclusion has probably doomed this book to never being reprinted, as mind flayers are not in the officially released System Reference Document), one a viking lady, one a halfing, another a lady half-elf, and one just a human woman. Not quite the usual pirate demographics. There's a lot of interesting other NPCs. A womanizing Paladin, a goblin fireman (with a protection racket), a couple really nice examples of how half-orcs can be productive members of society, a halfling version of Sally Struthers (as Jabba the Hutt). There are some misses: Mungo & his am