Boards ate my longer review - so in short: Great urban maps for a marketplace or for wider urban roads. Very useful in every 'vanilla' urban encounter.
If combined with the rooftops map packs, you have almost everything you need for 'urban outdoor encounters'.
The maps are a great, interesting and very useful collection of 'vanilla' fantasy city alleys and buildings. They look gorgeous and in most urban campyigns will see regular use. If combined with the marketplace map packs, you have almost everything you need for 'urban outdoor encounters'.
This map pack does not rate as high as marketplace or rooftops, for sure, as far as usefulness is concerned. Most of the maps are fairly of fairly situational use, but if these situations arise, the will shine.
The carts, chariots and wagons that make up 8 of the 18 maps will probably see most use. Put on a fairly unspecific 'green grass' background, the will be useful for caravans, escort adventures etc. The Boat and Ship (3 cards) complement nicely to other naval themed cards while the sleds will be useful for the odd arctic themed encounters (with an upcoming AP potentially making them really shine).
The Steam Giant (3 cards) is very specialised, but if you plan an encounter with one - well, there it is.
I can't see any use for the gliders (1 card) yet, especially since they are put on a cloudy background, unless there will be larger 'aerial' maps for special flying encounters, they are a pretty odd addition to a map pack, but then again, it is only one card.
The animals included add to the carts and sleds and may be of use as mounts.
The worst part about this map pack is the fact that you would have to cut most the maps apart for use, so if you have got an affordable way to print these out in color, get the pdf, not the print version.
I rate this with a four star rating, but it is not a map pack that everybody needs, especially not in print.
When I unfolded the map for the first time, somebody who is in no way involved with RPGs sat next to me and commented 'Wow, that looks real pretty'
There isn't much to add. This is the single most beautiful Flip-Mat I have seen (and I have almost all of the Paizo ones and a few other). Both sides of the map look great and both sides will prove incredibly useful for all sorts of wilderness encounters.
I was very much looking forward to this book, hoping that Magnimar would get as excellent a treatment as Korvosa and Kaer Maga, and I was not dissapointed.
From the second AP installment on, one could sense that Magnimar was a unique beast, yet the (good) support article and the entry in the campaign setting did not flesh it out enough to make it more than a nice fantasy city with some unique features, interesting enough, but destined for so much more...
This book is the 'more'. From the brief, yet interesting history of the city, to the distinct look and feel of the districts, to the monuments and their hidden powers to the corruption and the powerful organizations making the city less than the paradise it could have been, this book gives a GM a city to play with and to grip the attention of his/her players.
The presentation is among the best I have seen for setting books from any company. The cartography of the city and its districts is excellent and useful, the inclusion of stat-blocks for the city is great and the art is impressing, with none of the pictures looking like a 'filler'.
The bestiary/antagonist part is good, though if I had the choice between some local critter or NPC and a few additional city locations, I would always chose the latter - but that is a matter of preferrence and as it is the bestiary is a useful supplement and my preferrence certrainly has no bearing on the overall quality of the book.
