Will's post is a pretty good brief summary, so I'll go into a little more detail.
There are two parts to the book: background on Marchion, the city, and detailed information for Splintered Peace, the adventure.
The city background makes it easy for you to drop Marchion into your current campaign, and there are lots of little bits you could pinch if you didn't want the whole city. It also provides the background that's absolutely essential if you're going to write a political adventure. However, I included lots of other story hooks. For example, the poshest restaurant in town hires adventurers to get exotic ingredients, and feeds them as part of the reward. Eating there will put you into contact with the city's ruling and social elite, all of whom are detailed in the book.
So, there is a city sourcebook, in the first part of the book.
The second part provides the details needed for running the political adventure. There's a chapter about fighting and negotiating with the orcish horde, but most of this section deals with what you do inside the city. The arrival of the orcs has meant lean times for Marchion, and, as people are wont to do, everyone is looking for someone to blame. A number of people with fixed prejudices blame the other races -- and in a highly mixed city, this has the potential to cause major problems.
The main body of the adventure, then, provides guidelines for how a party might go about restoring peace (which has been splintered into several factions, hence the title), and rules to help you handle anything the players choose to do. The basic structure of the rules could easily be ripped out and used to run any sort of political campaign, but there are lots of specific examples to make the adventure as easy to run as possible.
So, there's a city sourcebook, an adventure, and an implicit rules supplement for running political campaigns.
Incidentally, I am putting further background, adventures, and crunchy bits online in the
Marchion Online Supplement. There's not much there yet, but I'm adding more about once per week. Be warned: the crunchy bits are likely to be slightly munchkin, because I'm writing this to relax.
(And to answer the question about the map: I'm told it's printed on the endpapers, so inside the front and back covers, across the double spread. John Nephew says it looks great, but I don't have my copy yet...)
David Chart
Author, Splintered Peace
