A guide to the city of Arkand in the Dragonbane tabletop roleplaying game, a place of myth and legend above the Sea of Dreams
The Free League Publishing motto should be: never do things by halves. This is the guide to the city of Arkand in the Dragonbane tabletop roleplaying game, a place of myth and legend above the Sea of Dreams. It contains many locations with evocative names ranging from the Witless Unicorn to the Temple of Broken Wings. Each has maps and a guide as to what you’ll find within the location, including characters that might be encountered there and hints about what might go on in that region and how that might affect the players.
Nothing special there, I hear you say – just another city guide with a few adventure hooks and fancy titles. But it’s not. Every single place has multiple locations, every location has multiple items and points of interest, and every point of interest has something that links it to other parts. The affect is something like a Matryoshka Doll, in that you take away the top layer to find another layer, then another and another, each one of which links to others, deepening the connection to that location, while also pointing to other places of interest.
The maps included in Dragonbane: Arkand – City of Waves and Flames are of superior quality, and every location has several, including buildings, caves, ships or even entire regions of land. Each map is laid out in a way that makes it easy to translate to a dry wipe sheet when your characters enter that location. Ranging in size from a single building to entire regions of the city, with equal space given to all, it does mean that the regions have less intricate detail to work with, but wider variety to play in. Being more generalised doesn’t provide as much in the way of points to investigate, but investigating a tent in a shanty town will not yield the bounty of an ancient temple and as such doesn’t require a map of the tent in question. Where a building has a map in this book, it needs one.
The characters in each location have enough spark of personality to be interesting to use, while not taking up huge swathes of pages. Many named characters have a position to fulfil in a specific place, and there are then those with artwork and backstory, each one having stats and other details, making them easily reusable outside of this city.
There is a sense of grandeur to the descriptions – nothing is described as just another building, everything has importance, no matter how down at heel it may seem to be in the hierarchy of the city. Full-colour illustrations throughout give the feel of the place, and descriptions walk a fine line of being both concise and detailed at the same time.
The random encounters within each location are nothing so simple as wandering monsters, but rather things that lend to the feel of that location. You aren’t left with the suspicion that one wandering beggar or thief has been repeated throughout the book, as tailored encounters are employed to match to the location.
The material included here could allow you to run months of campaign work without ever needing another resource, with enough clearly linked plots that run from one to the next seamlessly. It’s all tied together in an interesting place with enough backstory that you feel this isn’t just a world guide or adventure hooks, this is a living, breathing place that hungers for players. Try not to feed them to it…
Review by John Dodd
Beautiful and imaginative, all other city creators should take note.
LEGEND OF THE FIVE RINGS: CITY OF LIES
Both provide an incredibly detailed look at an in-game city.
Category: Tabletop Roleplaying Game
Designer: Johan Sjoberg
Publisher: Free League Publishing
Pages: 172
Age: 12+
RRP: £39
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