The World of Arkara: Gazeteer of the Known World is a 25-page setting supplement written by Charles Rice and published by Vigilance Press for use with OSRIC (Old School Reference and Index Compilation), although like most OSR products, it is easily adaptable to any other retroclone rules set.  

Note: This is the third of what I hope to be many OSR product reviews, so if you have a smallish OSR product (around 50 pages or less) you want reviewed, send it along to petespahn –at— yahoo.com.

SPECS
The PDF uses a two-column font bordered by a nice, unobtrusive runic script along each side of the page.  The writing is not as polished as the last VP supplement I reviewed (Old School Magic) and probably could have used another good edit or two.  A few of the descriptions are clunky and at least one sentence makes absolutely no sense at all, which leads me to believe there were extensive cut-and-pastes used during the lay out process. *shrug*  It happens.  Overall though, it was an easy enough read.

INTRODUCTION
The World of Arkara is an overview of the fantasy world of Arkara, including its gods, social structure, nations, and history. Most of the book is presented clearly in a "guidebook" style, however, a couple of brief entries appear to be drawn from a fictional work titled "Lessons," written by a royal scholar and tutor named Lamthan the Wise.  I suppose this can loosely be classified as game fiction, which some people hate.  Not me.  I love bits of setting flavor like this.  It makes the read so much more enjoyable.  I'll also note that you can skip these brief entries if you like (there are only a few) without losing any real setting information.  But for my part, I would like to have seen more.

THE GODS
This section details the gods of Arkara.  The gods are divided into three different pantheons (Light, Gray, and Darkness) who dwell in three separate cities on the Storm-Tossed Mount. The city of Light is a city of gardens and laughter that occupies the highest peak, the Gray city is located beside a mist-shrouded waterfall halfway up the mountain, and the Pantheon of Darkness dwells in the caves deep beneath the mountain.  I'm assuming the Storm-Tossed Mount is not a physical place because I don't see it on the map.  

The gods themselves are pretty standard fantasy/mythological fare with each one being master of a certain aspect(s) such as fire, the moon, sickness, death, etc. with occasional overlap of spheres. There are a few neat standouts (like the God of Rabies!), but not much here you haven't seen before.  A description of each god and its motivations and goals are given with each entry.  One thing I do really like is the attention to detail given to each god—each is listed with things like holy days, associated colors and dress, appropriate sacrifices, bonus spells and limitations, etc. that can help provide motivation for followers, inspiration for adventures, and really help make the god come alive in the eyes of the players.  Rival gods are also listed for each god, providing a ready source of conflict for any PC cleric.  

OVERVIEW OF THE WORLD
This section contains the meat of the supplement.  A map of the Known World of Arkara is presented at the beginning and end of the book and an entry for each nation or region on the map is provided in this section along with a brief history of each place. You've got pretty much every fantasy trope represented here, from fallen empires, to free city-states, pirate isles, to vast desert kingdoms, magocracies, trackless jungles, dwarf realms, and much more. Demihumans are also represented (some not so flatteringly) as well as several monster realms, especially in the north. One cool thing (something I feel Mystara did well and something I tried to model in one of my own published campaign settings) is that many real-world cultures have Arkaran analogs.  Just at a glance, you see western European, Egyptian, Mongolian, and Arab cultures all nicely represented. They're not exactly the same of course, but they're close enough that one can readily envision what kind of people you're dealing with, and the differences are pretty interesting once you start reading the entries.

The setting overview was easily my favorite part of the book. It includes just enough to whet your appetite for more and plenty enough to spark ideas for your own campaign. I will say that the information probably could have been organized a little bit better.  The entries are given in alphabetical order which means the history of Arkara comes off a bit jumbled.  For example, the first entry is the Axelands which talks about the Kingdom of Damask, but it isn't until you get to the Fractured Realms entry that you find out there is no Kingdom of Damask anymore.  I would have preferred reading about the Fractured Realms first (since the history of Damask is largely the history of Arkara) or perhaps having a simplified timeline of events included at the start of this section.  In any case, there are enough potential conflicts between nations, factions, and races here to power a campaign for some time.

CHARACTERS
One new class is presented here, the Crusader, which is sort of a holy warrior (not necessarily Lawful good).  Variant classes (standard classes that have been tweaked) include the Anti-Paladin (evil paladin), the Bounty Hunter (rangers who specialize in hunting men and bring them back alive), Hunters (rangers who specialize in hunting animals), and Poachers (sort of an anti-ranger).  If you like new rules and classes, these are ok.  Like I said, the only full class is the Crusader; the others just have some variant descriptions and powers, but progress the same way.  

A writeup for each standard OSRIC class is also given here, explaining how that class fits into the World of Arkara.  One really interesting thing here, which I feel probably deserved its own subsection, was that all magic on Arkara comes from the stars. That is, a mage draws spells by researching various constellations and inscribing those down in his book.  It also means that a mage who loses his book can regain spells simply by spending the night outdoors.  Wizards live in labs and observatories located high in the mountains.  It's a variation of one of the magic systems presented in the previously mentioned Old School Magic and it's pretty darn cool.  I can only assume the powerful Jadakan Wizard faction supplement is going to be pretty impressive.

The next part of this section takes a detailed approach to social class and social advancement in Arkara as well as a table for typical crimes and punishments.  Let me say that you don't want to go around committing a lot of crime in Arkara.  Lashes and fines are the most common form of punishment, but banishment and death are also options.  One thing that made me chuckle were the penalties for dealing with guardsmen.  Failure to submit to a valid search carries a 50,000 gp fine, impeding a guardsman from his duties results in 10 lashes, and simply attacking a guardsman carries a penalty of death!!!  Needless to say, I don't think Conan would have lasted long in Arkara.  :-)

APPENDIX
The book ends with an appendix that details how classes from OSRIC Unearthed fit into the world.

OVERALL
If you're looking for a living fantasy setting (i.e. one that is still being actively developed) The World of Arkara is a solid product that accommodates almost all standard fantasy tropes and still manages to inject some new ideas for inspiration.  The writing could have been a bit more polished, but as an overview of the setting, it does its job well enough that I'm interested to see how these areas are further developed (I'll be tackling some in future reviews).