Frugal GM Review: Arkadon Castle

Well, the week-long GM's Day sale is over at DriveThruRPG, but I'll be using the "loot" I acquired for some time.

One item I'd been eye-balling for some time is Arkadon Castle, from Draken Games. I'm not really familiar with the publisher and to be honest I'm really not sure what drew me to this particular product in the first place. In any regard, I'm glad I tossed it into my shopping cart.

Arkadon Castle is a smaller fortification that is presented multiple times in the span of 32 pages. Aside from a couple of artist renderings, you get a small-scale map of the entire structure, a medium scale map of each level, and then several large-scale maps of the castle. One of the large scale maps is "plain" and the other shows a fully-furnished color floorplan. Accompanying each of these maps is an appropriate set of room descriptions.

A nice touch is a page of full-color page of additional furnishings that can be printed, cut-out, and used as-needed.

One of the coolest things about this castle is that the structure is far from ideal, and is duly noted in the PDF's text. The structure seems to have been organically built, starting from a smaller building and added on to as needed. I think this bit of imperfection adds a high level of realism to the building.

I kind of wished that Arkadon Castle came with a high-res graphics file of the map, but since this PDF has the map presented in a couple of different ways I think the intention was to print this out and work with it in a physical manner. With the thick walls of the castle I'd say this was about  1/2" = 5' or so.

Personally I'd love to have a couple different small fortification maps like this for my collection. I think I'd get some great use out having these for my players.