"Thanks to the hard work of our 2015 D&D Extra Life team and the generous donations of fans, we’ve made available a detailed, high resolution of the northwest corner of Faerün."
There's a map on the website, but it's not a good resolution, so I found one:
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| Just in case, here's a link. |
I came across this while looking up stuff on the previous post ... and I just have to say. What the hell?
Oh, it's pretty and all, nice artwork, not the kind I can do. Then again, I wouldn't have room for art having decided to put information on the map instead!
I wonder if there are more than a thousand words on the whole thing.
But then, the gentle readers are all familiar with the two hundred modules represented by this thing, so that's enough. And it is basically a poster.
I love maps. I've spent my whole life studying them, drawing them, researching them, living by them. I can kill an hour travelling with a road map from a gas station. But this ... this bores me.
I must be broken.
I printed a poster of the map I'm using, hung it up in my game room and the players have looked at it once; maybe twice. But every time I bring up the working copy of our local area map, on Hexographer, they perk up and pay attention. It looks very little like the fancy "world" map but it has all the information they need to make a decision in the game.
ReplyDeleteSo I guess at least five other people in the community are just as broken as you...
Broken ? No. Used to so much better ? Definitely yes.
ReplyDeleteThis map does inspire me. As I brought my players there many times, and read quite a lot of stuff on it, I can add data to the dearth that it is, and make something of it. It also bring back memories, and taht count for something.
But all said and done ? You're right, it's a poster, and useless at that. And it still is even after all I've read about the place. It give me nothing much that's gameable, only the barest idea of the different places, nothing about relations, trade, land type, population, or anything else really.
Of course, one can say that the place is very big, so it can't give much to keep being readable - so fuck it, that's a poster.
Or maybe that it's a map for the player, and that they can't have access to better data - why not, but give me a DM map then.
And I think we can shoot down any other justification.
So no, you're definitely not broken. It's the common man that haven't yet got a taste of a real, useful Game Map (instead of a Poster "map").
So here's my experience with maps in Pathfinder world...
ReplyDeleteStep 0: Need to go to town.
Step 1: Hunt down a town of sufficient size on the wiki.
Step 2: Hunt down where we are in the module (hard part, we've miss guessed at least three times in about 8 of these runs now)
Step 3: Try and figure out the map scale for the 4th time (twice got this one wrong.)
Step 4: Stop looking at the map and travel there via teleport as many times as required.
The map is only used for finding the direct line of how far to point B from A. Which could be approximated using coordinate systems in the wiki. (with standardized scale for coordinates on the effectively flat world this would be easy enough to calculate)
The maps that matter are few and far between, because most are crap. Either we need to fight in them, we need to know what threat is blocking us, or there's no easy way to estimate distances so we pull out a map and spend most of the time debating where X is on it.
Gee, that sounds like a lot of fun, Oddbit. Pathfinder sure is a fun game.
ReplyDeleteAh, I remember trying to have a sailing game on that map (or another nearly identical one) when I just started out. "How far apart are those islands" "I'll be fucked if I can tell". "Do they have people living on them?" "No Idea".
ReplyDeleteAnd that was with the complete atlas in my hands. Just wonderful.