Book of Maps: Tor Akul Campaign Setting

This is an interesting book. 

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08J21KNJJ

I love these system-neutral campaign setting books, and this one features a huge area of the world, and an amazingly detailed large city map with districts and names of every establishment in the city. If you wanted to run a fantasy-themed urban campaign with GURPS, this is a spectacular resource and place to start, with plenty of gritty and dark fantasy inspirations, especially with such a huge red-light district featured here. A thief's campaign is right up this setting's dark and crime-filled alleys.

The rest of the world is mostly left for you to fill in, with lighter details as you start exploring the world, with many places left to your imagination. The central city and another town are the stars here, and the world is a great tapestry to create upon.

I can't find a PDF, and I don't really want one. There is a certain magic to a book without a PDF, as if it were an ancient find before the digital age, and I am left to leaf through the pages and make of it what I wish. Would a PDF make this more useful? Clearly, yes. Do I need one to play? No.

We get a few dungeon maps with numbers, but they are left for you to fill. We also get maps of the main city, a town, and a keep. We have brief descriptions of various places in the world. Most of it is left up to you. Most of it has an old-school flavor, but it's left generic enough that converting it to GURPS is trivial. We get "levels" of some characters, but no stats, and that can be used as a relative character point value for these NPCs.

This one is Amazon-only, and a strange find by a hobbyist who printed a world for you to make come to life. It has a generic feel, presented in a plain format, in full color, and even the title font is a bit basic. The maps are beautiful, and the descriptions are just enough to get my mind working.

It is also not that expensive, and it is a good starting point for you to fill in the rest. This is also a labor of love, and that enthusiasm shows through the setting. While this is not done by a professional publisher, you can feel the love and attention to detail here in the descriptions. That creator enthusiasm is contagious.

In contrast to the genre-best HarnWorld, where you get every character, map, and door down to the lowest level of detail, this book is more freeform and loose, giving you more room for your imagination and creativity. HarnWorld is clearly the superior setting, far more detailed, with so many more NPCs, a richer history, and more detail in every location.

HarnWorld has a very medieval feel, and it feels more traditional, with humans, dwarves, and elves represented. As for other races, like the more modern ones, you will need to fit them in yourself. Tierflings and Aasimar don't fit in as well here and would stand out starkly against the more realistic world, not to mention Dragonborn, Dark Elves, and other exotic kin. While the big three races have lore and history here, the others you will need to make up yourself, or just leave them out entirely.

Tor Akul is the more freeform setting, with less detail, scarce NPCs, and generic descriptions rather than exacting detail. If you want a generic setting with maps and a few loose descriptions, and you don't want much detail, then Tor Akul is a fine backdrop for your ideas. The capital city map is the star of the show here, where HarnWorld lets you go anywhere, explore, and have maps and NPCs ready to use. I could easily fit exotic kin into this setting and give them a homeland on the map.

HarnWorld is my ultimate GURPS fantasy setting.

Tor Akul is a more generic, malleable, interesting, and "fill in the blanks" setting with a single book and beautiful maps, where you can do whatever you want. If you wanted, the main city map could be dropped into any campaign world and used as-is, and the rest of the world could be ignored.

I like this book; it is inspirational and a fun starter for DIY projects.