Pathfinder Chronicles: Council of Thieves Map Folio

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Pathfinder Chronicles: Council of Thieves Map Folio
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Shadowy scoundrels and infernal masterminds scheme to claim the city of Westcrown in the Council of Thieves Adventure Path. Those who dare to face this villainy find challenges taking them from stinking slums to regal villas, through dilapidated museums and diabolical labyrinths, and on perilous paths beneath and beyond the tarnished city. The Council of Thieves Map Folio leads the way through the first Adventure Path created entirely for use with the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game!

Within lie more than a dozen full-color maps of the metropolis’s most famous and deadly locales! Even if you aren’t running the Council of Thieves Adventure Path, the maps inside can serve as settings for palaces, dungeons, slums, and adventure sites for any RPG campaign. You’ll also find a massive, 8-panel poster map revealing the infamous city of Westcrown, the setting of the entire campaign, presented as you’ve never seen it before! An entire city of adventure awaits!

Cartography by Jared Blando and Robert Lazzaretti

ISBN-13: 978-1-60125-218-0

Note: This product is part of the Pathfinder Lost Omens Subscription.

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3.00/5 (based on 3 ratings)

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One Fantastic Poster Map, Lots of Useless Other Maps

4/5

I bought this product for the large poster map of Westcrown, and I wasn't disappointed. This poster map is vastly superior to the maps of the city that come with the Council of Thieves adventure paths, showing individual houses in a proper top-down view, instead of the styalised 3D perspective view that the city map has in the Paths. It would have been perfect if the map had street names on it too, but even so this maps makes it much easier for a DM to flesh out a campaign in Westcrown rather than simply playing the packaged scenarios.

However, the other maps are simple reproductions of maps that already come with the Adventure Path, and I don't see the point of them. They're useless without the Adventure Paths, and if you already have the Adventure Paths then you already have these maps.

Overall, if you want a poster map of Westcrown then this product is for you, particularly if you're looking to do more in Westcrown than follow the Path. Do not get it if you expect anything else at all.

I'm torn between giving this 3 or 4 stars. 3 stars seems a bit low, as the poster map is genuinely a great product, but on the other hand 4 stars seems a bit high, as the rest of the pack is utterly useless.


Worth it for the city map

4/5

I gave this 4 stars for one reason only - the massive poster map of Westcrown.

An excellent map in its own right, this map has the added benefit of actually being good looking and *useful*, as it is far superior to the (very poor) "map" (rather a picture) found in the original AP in cartography.

Further, being a poster map allows for easy use during a game, the addition of detail, and a better understanding of the PCs immediate surroundings. DMs who enjoy running city campaigns and have players with an eye for detail will appreciate the poster map.

As for the rest of the maps... they're just (most of) the ones found in the AP. Much less value-added there, unless you don't have the AP and love maps.


Pointless Product

1/5

This is the first time I have bought a map folio, and with a few changes it could be a really good purchase but as it is, it is pretty much useless.

Tip 1 : DO NOT SHOW WHERE THE SECRET DOORS ARE...
The GM has the map in the book showing where the secret doors are, if you put them on the map in the folio it can't be used as a handout. I imagine they are created in software with layers, so just turn off the secret layer. Also if it's a secret room, if that could be hidden too that would also make sense.

Tip 2 : I would rather have a poster of Aberian Ruins at 1" scale, or Darkmarket ambush (or any place where there is a fight) than a map of a city with no road names etc. The A4 map of the city is fine. In fact if the pack just contained 6 poster maps (one per book) for key fights or dungeons like the Nessian Spiral (with secret doors removed) I would consider it well worth while.

Tip 3: If you want to avoid poster maps, and want to avoid doing maps with 1" grids then how about putting in a few hand drawn (looking) maps of locations that can be used as handouts, e.g. a rough map of Walcourt, Mayor Aberrians sketch of the spiral (or at least the bits he knows about).

Or even sell the map-pack as it is, but have a download option for maps at 1" scale so people can choose to print them if they want to. If it saves me having to draw out a huge battle mat I like it, as it is I am paying money for maps I already have from the adventure path, all it needs to be a good product is a little added value but as it is, it is completely pointless.


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RPG Superstar 2013 Top 32

Well I got my CoT Map Folio the other day. First of the map folios I've gotten in my subscription. And all I can say is... is there any way I can remove these folios from my subscription order before it's shipped?

I want everything else that Paizo puts out in that subscription (and most of the others, as you can see by the long parenthetical beside my name), and I really don't want to sound overly harsh, but these are completely useless to me.

In the folio, I get a bigger map of Westcrown. And it has more houses, and I can see the streets. But... so what? The names and character of neighborhoods aren't indicated, and there's no sense of difference between the houses in the block at the northern edge of the map and the houses at the southern edge and the houses on the little islands. I don't really see how this is any more useful than the nearly identical maps in the Cheliax book and the CoT modules. More detailed houses. Which, as described up-thread, is still just representative and not literal.

The rest of the maps are just bolder color prints, on better paper, of the maps found in the modules. Since I get the AP PDFs, I have no use for these. If I want a map on a single page, I can print out what I need when I need it. In fact, it seems to me that the main reason these aren't included in the AP subscription is because it would be redundant with the included PDFs. So if one subscribes to APs, it shouldn't go in that subscription, but if one isn't running APs, then it's even less useful. Therefore, I think this should be included in the card-deck subscription, because those are optional items that are tied into the APs but not necessary to run them.

I agree with the previous posters who said that key encounter areas would have been nice to have scale battle-mats for, but as soon as I thought of that, James's argument against it also occurred to me: how would you decide which rooms were worth printing? Still, final big-bad encounter rooms would be a shoo-in, and if a few of the other maps had been taken out, it might be feasible. As I'm running my party through the Asmodean Knot right now, room B25 would be the obvious choice. Also, a few pages of a cutout pattern of a 30' cylindrical room with a 5' wide stair, with cutout open and closed doors I cold place on it would have been a godsend (as it was, I spent a few hours making some on photo paper with ruler, Sharpie, compass and colored pencils). As James said, what to include would have been a tough choice for the cost window.

I was happy to see it arrive, because I was curious to see what the map folio contained. But having seen it, have nothing but disappointment. I was expecting some added value in any of the maps, and it just isn't here. I'm at a loss as to what function this product actually serves.

However, this statement is relevant to me:

James Jacobs wrote:
And we're shifting away from this due to customer demand once we start Kingmaker up; Council of Thieves is the last map folio that'll feature reprints of encounter maps for the foreseeable future.

So what will future map folios include? If it adds value, I would be more interested in keeping it on my subscription. If you aren't including reprints of encounter maps, what will replace that?


Christopher Dudley wrote:
So what will future map folios include? If it adds value, I would be more interested in keeping it on my subscription. If you aren't including reprints of encounter maps, what will replace that?

The Kingmaker folio will be a series of poster maps covering the entire Stolen Lands, hexes and all. Then in the fall, the Inner Sea poster map folio comes out, and that will be a 32 panel map of the entire Inner Sea region with every named location from every nation or region marked.

The Exchange

What would be real nice is if there were some way to preview what's inside so we know what we're considering buying. Once we have it in hand, and we find it's not what we want, we're tuck with it. At a store a consumer first has the ability to open a book and skim through it before buying it to make sure it's what the buyer really wants, or needs. I know it's not a complicated thing to do as I see other sites offer PDF previews of their products, DriveThruRPG comes to mind as just one of them. Cold-buying a product puts a lot of trust in the buyer to the merchant believing that what's contained will be something the buyer wants.

While I've purchased many Pathfinder products from Paizo and have only had a couple disappointments, I would have no disappointments had I first had a preview of that product.

Really, this is not hard to do, nor complicated to do. For the money Paizo makes, I'm sure they can add this one simple feature.

Liberty's Edge

Just a quick note, the new Westcrown map in this folio is very appreciated by my group. Thanks for producing this, GREAT job!

Dark Archive

Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber

I loved the poster map of westcrown for me it made this the first map folio that I was happy with getting. I do still wish the cover had little pockets like the school folders that would hold the maps in place once you take the plastic off.


Dark_Mistress wrote:
I loved the poster map of westcrown for me it made this the first map folio that I was happy with getting. I do still wish the cover had little pockets like the school folders that would hold the maps in place once you take the plastic off.

You know, I think I am just going to buy those school folders, it sounds like an excellent way to keep them safe.

Dark Archive

Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber
Robert Miller 55 wrote:
Dark_Mistress wrote:
I loved the poster map of westcrown for me it made this the first map folio that I was happy with getting. I do still wish the cover had little pockets like the school folders that would hold the maps in place once you take the plastic off.
You know, I think I am just going to buy those school folders, it sounds like an excellent way to keep them safe.

Yeah that's what I have been doing, but I just wish the covers came that way in the product. I would just be so nice to have them set up like that.


Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber

Okay, I've read through the thread and the product description, but I would like the basic question answered as clearly as possible. Forgive me for being dense. ;)

What is the best way to get 1 square=1 inch scale encounter maps out of the AP products?

Grand Lodge

Having just bought this folio, I was kind of disappointed in the map of the city of Westcrown. Now it is a beautifully rendered map do not get me wrong and wonderful to say the least. What disappoints me is the fact is there is no legend on the map, no street names listed on the streets, no scale showing distance. A Map showing a bunch of buildings while beautiful is just a bunch of buildings with out any context as to where everything is located and what is in certain buildings.

Mr Jacobs, Is there a reason they did not include this?

Grand Lodge

Stone Dog wrote:

Okay, I've read through the thread and the product description, but I would like the basic question answered as clearly as possible. Forgive me for being dense. ;)

What is the best way to get 1 square=1 inch scale encounter maps out of the AP products?

I am not sure at what you are getting at here. Each of the maps in the Folio of Maps for "Council of Thieves" is to scale with the exception of the city map that has no squares listed on it. All the other maps have squares listed with them. Each one unless stated other wise is a 5 foot square and when you draw it on to a flip mat or chessex vinyl map can be drawn on a 1 inch square.

Liberty's Edge

Deanoth wrote:
Stone Dog wrote:

Okay, I've read through the thread and the product description, but I would like the basic question answered as clearly as possible. Forgive me for being dense. ;)

What is the best way to get 1 square=1 inch scale encounter maps out of the AP products?

I am not sure at what you are getting at here. Each of the maps in the Folio of Maps for "Council of Thieves" is to scale with the exception of the city map that has no squares listed on it. All the other maps have squares listed with them. Each one unless stated other wise is a 5 foot square and when you draw it on to a flip mat or chessex vinyl map can be drawn on a 1 inch square.

I believe he was asking if anyone knew a good way to enlarge the maps so that the map could be used with out drawing.

IN fact, I would love this product if the maps made large enough so that you could use them for miniatures right out of the package.

Paizo Employee Creative Director

Stone Dog wrote:

Okay, I've read through the thread and the product description, but I would like the basic question answered as clearly as possible. Forgive me for being dense. ;)

What is the best way to get 1 square=1 inch scale encounter maps out of the AP products?

By printing out the maps on several hundred sheets of paper. It's not a low-cost option. As for how to enlarge them... that technology doubtless lives in Photoshop but I lack the know-how and skills to provide much advice. The maps themselves weren't built to look good at that resolution, though, because doing so would have been VERY expensive for us to order the maps from the cartographer.

Paizo Employee Creative Director

Deanoth wrote:

Having just bought this folio, I was kind of disappointed in the map of the city of Westcrown. Now it is a beautifully rendered map do not get me wrong and wonderful to say the least. What disappoints me is the fact is there is no legend on the map, no street names listed on the streets, no scale showing distance. A Map showing a bunch of buildings while beautiful is just a bunch of buildings with out any context as to where everything is located and what is in certain buildings.

Mr Jacobs, Is there a reason they did not include this?

The reason we didn't include this was pretty much that we didn't have the time and resources to name every street. Also, the majority of the feedback we've had is that most folks didn't WANT tags on the maps, so they could use them as player visual aids. And as for the missing scale... we didn't put a scale on there because that would have given the wrong idea. It would have made it look like the smallest building on the map was enormous.

What it boils down to is that mapping a city the size of Westcrown, which has a population of over 100,000 people, is very difficult to do in the same way that we would map a city 1/5 that size, like Korvosa. You should NOT be able to see individual buildings on a map of a city Westcrown's size if you want that map to fit on a page or even a poster map, but folks want to see those individual buildings. The map we printed in the adventures themselves was deliberately representational so that GMs and players could visualize the shape of the city and the relative positioning of the buildings and locations to each other, and thus no scale was really needed. The amount of time it takes to go from point A to point B in the adventures honestly never really matters much because we deliberately avoided building encounters that are timed.

In the end, it was something of an experiment to do the city maps like this, and I guess the experiment proves that most folks aren't comfortable with non-hyperdetailed city maps. Next time we do a big city adventure, we'll tackle the maps in other ways.

Liberty's Edge

I am still considering buying this. Besides the big map of Westcrown, can anyone tell me what maps come with it?

Liberty's Edge

CapeCodRPGer wrote:
I am still considering buying this. Besides the big map of Westcrown, can anyone tell me what maps come with it?

Every map in the AP is included. The poster map of Westcrown is a kind of a bonus. I will say that I do find the maps to be useful as I do not have to continually flip back and forth through one of the volumes.

On the subject of the City map, I am considering getting it laminated. Once it is, I then envision getting a label machine like a P-Touch and using that to mark the sites and streets.

Scarab Sages

I'll be skipping any future map packs, unless there are player-friendly versions.

I already have all these maps. What would be great would be versions without traps, or secret doors, or whatnot marked. Then I can (depending on scale) either use them, or print out and blow up from the pdf. But if I'm going to have to rip out all the spoiler-text, to use it in-game, I can just do that through the AP map.

First thing I've gotten since I signed up that I didn't like.


Mike Lindsey wrote:
I'll be skipping any future map packs, unless there are player-friendly versions.

Note that the format of the map packs is changing with Kingmaker, which will consist entirely of poster hex maps of the Stolen Lands for players to fill in as they explore the region. After that, the next one will be the 36-panel Inner Sea Poster Map detailing every nation and location within the Inner Sea region. So don't write off the line just on this one, since it's the last one of the format we've seen thus far.

Sovereign Court

Pathfinder Battles Case Subscriber; Pathfinder Maps, Starfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Maps, Starfinder Roleplaying Game, Starfinder Society Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Charter Superscriber
Mike Lindsey wrote:
What would be great would be versions without traps, or secret doors, or whatnot marked. Then I can (depending on scale) either use them, or print out and blow up from the pdf.

I agree that this would be great. Very useful.


Mosaic wrote:
Mike Lindsey wrote:
What would be great would be versions without traps, or secret doors, or whatnot marked. Then I can (depending on scale) either use them, or print out and blow up from the pdf.
I agree that this would be great. Very useful.

I also support this idea. I use maptools software to run my games online and I cannot copy and use the maps in the map folio PDF's or the adventure PDF's as they include all the text overlays. This ruins things like secret doors and traps, so it forces me to basically create the map from scratch, which takes up way too much time.

If someone knows how I can copy the maps from the PDF without the overlay text can you please let me know? I have access to both Acrobat 9 and Reader 9.3 and have tried using the select tool, but it doesn't appear to work and I'm not sure if there's security on the PDF that's preventing this?

Paizo Employee Creative Director

Pop'N'Fresh wrote:
Mosaic wrote:
Mike Lindsey wrote:
What would be great would be versions without traps, or secret doors, or whatnot marked. Then I can (depending on scale) either use them, or print out and blow up from the pdf.
I agree that this would be great. Very useful.

I also support this idea. I use maptools software to run my games online and I cannot copy and use the maps in the map folio PDF's or the adventure PDF's as they include all the text overlays. This ruins things like secret doors and traps, so it forces me to basically create the map from scratch, which takes up way too much time.

If someone knows how I can copy the maps from the PDF without the overlay text can you please let me know? I have access to both Acrobat 9 and Reader 9.3 and have tried using the select tool, but it doesn't appear to work and I'm not sure if there's security on the PDF that's preventing this?

While I agree that this would be a nice bonus... there's a very practical reason we can't do this.

We print our books on a regular, monthly schedule. That means there's a finite amount of time to get everything worked out and perfect before we move on to the next month's books. Filling each month with enough product and work is a tricky stunt, and to date I don't think we've managed to do it—we constantly OVERfill our months with work. (I'm pretty sure that, for whatever reason, Adobe disabled this functionality in version 9.)

As a result, there's simply no time to provide multiple versions of maps. In some cases, presenting a version of a map that omits secrets and traps and stuff might amount to little more than removing a few tags—that's a pretty easy trick. But in a lot of cases, we would also have to remove entire rooms and areas and other GM-only elements of maps. Since these are actually part of the artwork in most cases, that means either we have to take the time to do image manipulation here and produce a second version of the map, or we have to ask the cartographer to provide us with multiple versions of the map (which would mean we'd need to spend more money, which would mean that we'd have less artwork overall in printed products).

So as a result, it's not something we'll be able to do. If you're using these maps as battlemats and the presence of those elements is unwanted, I'm afraid you'll have to mask those elements out yourself. Not the perfect solution, I know, but it is what it is.

EDIT: I do know that some PDF readers DO allow you to extract images without the text tags. I'm pretty sure Adobe Reader version 8 is one of those readers. Try extracting images with different readers and, in theory, some of them should be able to extract the images without the number and word tags.

The Exchange Contributor, RPG Superstar 2008 Top 6

I downloaded Some PDF Image Extractor. It sucks the images out of a PDF. A bit of sorting to find the right ones, but it works.

Acrobat 8.2 appears to be as defective as Acrobat 9.


Russ Taylor wrote:

I downloaded Some PDF Image Extractor. It sucks the images out of a PDF. A bit of sorting to find the right ones, but it works.

Acrobat 8.2 appears to be as defective as Acrobat 9.

I heard about Acrobat Reader 8 being able to do this, will need to look into that further! Also, I wasn't needing any special versions of the maps that omitted entire rooms etc. as I can hide this stuff from my players using the fog of war and vision blocking tools within maptools :) My request was simply for a way to copy the awesome maps in these PDF's without the text, so my bad for not being clear on that ;)

Russ, can you provide me a link to the image extractor you used? I tried a free one somebody developed but it ended up just pulling the maps with the text included, which is completely useless.


Figured it out! Apparently Adobe removed the ability to copy images in Acrobat Reader 9.x.

I rolled back to 8.0 and it works beautifully and I can copy images out of PDF's no problemo! Odd that they would remove such a handy feature.


A completely pointless and worthless product. Sad I bought it, whats even worse is the fact that Paizo put it on the market. Don't buy it for any reason.

Though it does occur to me that it might be useful if you have a projector. These things should be listed on the cover so I know what I am buying.


It's not that bad. The poster map of Westcrown is pretty neat :)

To Pop'N'Fresh and others with the same issue: Adobe Reader X has regained that ability.

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