A Review of the Role Playing Game Supplement Arcana Cities: Githmorgian by Robert Hemminger

Arcana Cities: Githmorgian by Robert Hemminger and published by the Avalon Game Company is a role playing game supplement set in Avalon’s generic Arcana setting. Avalon regularly releases new supplements covering different parts of the setting. This one covers the city-state of Githmorgian in the Western Reaches. The city-state has been briefly mentioned in Arcana Journal #25 and the Arcana Western Reaches Source Book, but is fully covered in this supplement.

The supplement is available as a 31 page PDF from DriveThruRPG. The regular price of the supplement is $2.99, but it was purchased at the reduced price of $1. The PDF has one page for the colour cover, one page for the Contents and there are seven pages of adverts (many of which look to be for products from other companies) at the end of the book. There are four full-colour full-page maps of the city. The first of these is an unlabelled isometric map; the other three are all variations of the same overhead map, with different labels.

History of the City is a single page overview of the city’s history, although not with a timeline, and a description of how the buildings are constructed.

Rumors is a substantial proportion of the book and covers 20 different rumours that can be heard in the city. Each of these rumours is then split into further related rumours, with notes on their veracity, as some game details as appropriate.

City Map is the first of the colour overhead maps of the city, which is labelled with various locations.

Descriptions details the various labelled locations on the city map, including some generic (rather than system-specific) details on some important non-player characters at the locations and details of military forces. This section concludes with two more maps of the city; the first shows the sewers and the second the locations of the tunnels and chambers of the Guild of Night, as well as the locations of the Maze of Gix Chambers and Complex. Neither of these areas is covered in any detail, beyond colouring in where they are located related to the rest of the city.

Arcana Cities: Githmorgian in Review

The PDF has no bookmarks and fairly limited Contents, only having four sections, and the headings in the Contents do not match up with those within the book; for example, Descriptions is actually Locations and Sites of Note in the relevant section. Navigation is, therefore, not the best.

The formatting swaps from a two column layout to a single column, sometimes with little apparent logic. Every page has a coloured background, and there are a variety of page filler illustrations with no real relevance to the text, and the whole supplement is not very printer-friendly. The appearance does match the other supplements in the Arcana range though.

Like so many of the supplements in this range, this has an abundance of spelling errors most of which are actually grammatical in nature, as the wrong word has been used, generally homophones which sound the same, but which have different spellings and meanings, simply the wrong word, such as “manner” instead of “manor”, or just incorrect use of plurals. These are abundant enough – there are usually several on every page, and often several in the same paragraph – to be extremely distracting.

Rather than covering a single hex of the world map, as many of the earlier supplements did, until every hex was covered, this instead fleshes out a single location. Rumors and Descriptions both have some minor details that could be used as adventure seeds, but this is not really an adventure supplement, but one for a city.

Githmorgian is a mercantile city-state, and is generic enough that it could be dropped into other worlds without too much difficulty, as there are few details that are setting specific.

Arcana Cities: Githmorgian is not a bad generic city supplement, and it does have some possibilities, but it is on the short side compared to many supplements in the Arcana range (which are generally available at the same price) and, like so many of them, badly let down by a whole host of errors that show the book really needed a proof-reader or an editor before being published.