Village Backdrop: Arcmoor (5e)

This installment of RSP’s Village Backdrop-series is 13 pages long, 1 page front cover, 2 pages of advertisement, 1 page editorial/ToC, 1 page SRD and 1 page back cover, leaving us with 7 pages of content, so let’s take a look at the settlement!

The village of Arcmoor in its 5e iteration is included in its entirety in the Dwellers Amid Bones-adventure, word for word – so if you want this plus the adventure, get that version instead.

Arcmoor as a settlement has its origins steeped in conflict – it is the place where the hero Therald Arcmoor fell, commemorating the final battle between the civilized races and the orcs of the severed ear – 300 ft. away from the feared Tuskwood. With a majority population of halflings, the settlement obviously comes with a massive array of supplemental information: We receive information on the village’s demographics, whispers and rumors, nomenclature and clothing habits as well as local lore and marketplace-information. The marketplace information has been properly adjusted to represent the realities of 5e as a system, and the checks noted have similarly been adjusted.

That being said, as always, the map provided is glorious and represents the privacy the local populace cherishes with the village being relatively dispersed – one can even see where halflings and humans live. The village also provides 4 NPC write-ups one can encounter here, and these are depicted in Raging Swan Press’ usual, fluff-centric presentation, sporting no stats, and instead focusing on mannerisms, etc. Beyond that, the village, being close to the ancient battlefield, has drawn a less than nice person living in the village, one with a strange agenda.

The 5e-iteration features the new and expanded content created for the stand-alone supplement version of Arcmoor: This content elaborates on the life in Arcmoor, provides more detailed notes on local trade and industry, and we now get a full 20-entry table of dressing and events that allows us to bring the village closer to life. Similarly, the aforementioned Tuskwood is not only fully mapped, it does also include a variety of different pieces of information regarding the surrounding locality.

As for the keyed locations of the village itself, the presentation has improved over the original PFRPG-presentation: The respective write-ups now feature easy to paraphrase read-aloud texts, suggested random encounters for the nearby battlefield, and lists of strange and unique goods that may be scavenged or unearthed from the chaotic general goods store.

Conclusion:

Editing and formatting are top-notch, I didn’t notice any glitches. Layout adheres to RSP’s smooth, printer-friendly two-column standard and the pdf comes with full bookmarks as well as a gorgeous map, of which you can, as always, download high-res jpegs if you join RSP’s patreon. We get pretty neat b/w-artwork. The pdf comes in two versions, with one being optimized for screen-use and one to be printed out.

Fabian Fehrs’ Arcmoor (additional design by Creighton Broadhurst) is a cool, solid village for 5e – the expanded materials are available for the first time for 5e here, and unlike the PFRPG-version, nothing was cut here. This is the supplement to get if you’re not interested in the Dwellers Amid Bones-adventure; if the module sounds like fun, get that instead. As a whole, this is a nice village, and hence, my final verdict will be 4 stars.

You can get this village here on OBS!

Want the entire module? You can find it here!

You can directly support Raging Swan Press here on patreon!

If you’re enjoying my reviews, please consider leaving a donation, or joining my patreon here! Thank you.

Endzeitgeist out.

Comments