The City of Archendurn details a Celtic city of about 6500 people and is designed to be able to be used in most fantasy settings. Statistics are given for both the D20 System and the Rolemaster system.
The Introduction includes some notes on Pronunciations that I personally would have put a few pages further in. They get rather technical and could put a reader off by having them as one of the first items in the book. However, things quickly get to normal and the rest of the book is fairly easy reading.
There are a couple of pages devoted to the Peoples and Cultures of the area. This is done in enough detail to give a Gamemaster a fairly good feel for the culture, describing a little of the history, what type of people inhabit the kingdom, what they look like, how they dress and some of the festivals that they celebrate. This still leaves room to fill in additional material but it gives a good start.
There’s a short description of the lands surrounding the city and a one page color map showing the Southwest corner of the Archendurn Kingdom where the city is located. There’s a discussion of some of the more interesting Flora and Fauna, then a review of the Political Structure of the Archendurn Kingdom, and some suggestions for dealing with the Economics and Trade.
The city itself is broken into four parts, each part having a color map to go with it. Different types of buildings are coded by different colors and buildings of particular interest are coded with a letter and a number. The letter corresponds to the quadrant of the city. Slightly more than half of the book is taken up describing the various buildings. 52 buildings are described, with 8 floor plans included. The descriptions are quite good, and include basic personalities for the people living in the buildings. Actual game statistics are done as two Appendices, one for Rolemaster and one for D20 system.
There’s also a couple of pages of Adventure and Story Ideas just before the Appendices.
Overall, it’s a well done book, especially considering the price. I would have liked to have seen a little more detail given in the Rolemaster statistics section, there seemed to be very few skills listed for each NPC when compared to the D20 information for the same NPC. The characters presented seem reasonably well rounded, some of them are fairly stereotypical, but there are a few surprises tucked away with some of them as well. The maps are quite well done, it might be nice to have a little more color coding, there are an awful lot of uncoded buildings which are just described as being commercial buildings with the business on the ground floor and living quarters or apartments/tenements on the upper floors. Other than one picture by the authors daughter, there's no artwork other than the maps.
If you’re looking for a medieval city with a Celtic feel and a mostly human population to drop somewhere into your campaign, the City of Archendurn will do nicely.
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