Arcana Journal #2 by Robert Hemminger and published by the Avalon Game Company is a generic role playing game supplement and the second supplement to the Arcana Core Book. Arcana is a generic role playing game setting which is described in a regular series of supplements which provide details on places, people, countries, organisations and other things.
The supplement is available as a 57 page PDF from DriveThruRPG with a regular price of $2.99 but this was purchased at the discounted price of $1.57. The PDF is in full colour. One page is the front cover, one the front matter, one the Contents and there are six pages of adverts for other Avalon Games Company products. This journal, like the previous one, covers one hex of the continent map and provides some setting information too. It starts with a map of the main continent, divided into hexes, with the hex covered in this book highlighted.
Hex 2: Northwestern Coast of the Great Northern Woods opens with a one page description of the hex and labelled colour map. There are then several pages of Rumours, 18 in total, each of which has several of detail and a note as to whether these rumours are true or false. In this section there is also an adventure site. Next, there are three pieces of Hidden Lore. Each of these, like the rumours, has several degrees of detail, with the difficulty noted with them.
The locations that were listed on the first page of this section are then detailed in Locations and Sites of Note, often including floor plans for important buildings and city maps. These are covered in a reasonable level of detail, and there are some details on non player characters here as well.
People of Interest covers more non player characters, in a higher level of detail than in the previous section, but these are generally more important people. There are then a number of Adventure Seeds.
General Gaming Information (which is called Rules, not Information, in the section itself) covers how Adventure Difficulty Level, Schools of Magic and Character Stats should be converted from the generic information given to a specific game system.
Maps has many pages of maps. These are all duplicated, but unlabelled, copies of many of the maps that were seen throughout the supplement, starting with the hex map, in colour and in black and white. These would be suitable for player handouts.
Arcana Journal #2 in Review
The Contents does not cover every section, but the PDF’s bookmarks have a better level of detail. Navigation is therefore okay, but it could have been better. Unlike in the previous supplements, much of the art in this book looks to be stock art, rather than the reasonably decent amateur work used in the previous supplements, probably old public domain works, as they are primarily used to illustrate NPCs. The map of the hex looks to be either hand drawn or painted, and is decent enough, and the various maps look to have been created using a simple computer drawing program of some type. The supplement is reasonably well laid out but, except for the black and white maps, printing it out will probably not be easy, due to the extensive use of page backgrounds.
There is more detail on the hex and the people in it than there was in Journal #1, but then the first hex had only an uninhabited island, whereas this one has several countries and towns to cover. Probably as a consequence of this, there is less general background information on the setting.
Unfortunately, this book also suffers from the same problem that was noted in the core book and the first journal; namely, there are a very large number of grammatical errors. These are mainly those where the word is spelled correctly, but the wrong one is used, which are often not spotted by an automated spellchecker. “Manner” for “manor” is one of the most common of these. There are missing words, improper capitalisation and missing punctuation too. There are simple spelling errors in the PDF’s bookmarks too. There is also the occasional use of language that just doesn’t seem to fit, although these are not as bad as the instances in the Core Book.
This supplement will not work by itself for the Arcana setting, but it isn’t supposed to, as the Journals and other supplements build up a coherent world, with information being referenced across different works such as Gozer and Mana. It will require some work to convert this to any particular system, although Dungeons & Dragons based games will probably be the easiest. Some of the information provided to do this is in the Core Book, though.
The Arcana setting is definitely well detailed, with a lot of background information and details provided that would definitely make it stand out from the rest, after converting it to a specific system. The Arcana Journal #2 does a good job of expanding this, and it certainly isn’t very expensive; it’s just a shame that it is seriously damaged by the large number of errors.
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