Sometimes the best safe house is the one you carry with you! From a spell-erected magnificent mansion to the cloudy refuge of a rope trick, from the inside of a genie’s bottle to a dimensional bolt-hole made of the raw stuff of elements, the prepared adventurer has many possible refuges and escapes. But getting there doesn’t necessarily mean escaping from battles with enemies! Paizo Publishing brings a variety of extradimensional spaces to life in this latest GameMastery Map Pack! This line of gaming products provides simple and elegant tools for the busy Game Master. Inside, you’ll find 18 beautiful 5"x 8" map tiles that can be combined to form eight of the most commonly encountered extradimensional spaces, including:
Rope Trick
Magnificent Mansion
Genie Bottle
Dimensional Prison
Air Node
Earth Node
Fire Node
Water Node
Game Masters shouldn’t waste their time drawing a rope trick every time the player characters run away from their enemies. With GameMastery Map Pack: Extradimensional Spaces, you’ll always be ready for a speedy escape or extra-planar ambush!
Cartography by Corey Macourek
For use with all tabletop roleplaying and miniatures games and usable by experienced GMs and novices alike, this product fits perfectly into any Game Master’s arsenal.
Good GMs can never have too many maps at their disposal, and Paizo’s GameMastery Map Packs provide high-quality gridded maps for use with both RPGs and miniatures games.
The artwork is beautiful and the idea is interesting, but there's not a lot that I can do with these. I'm glad I could see what I was getting before I bought these thanks to the preview images on this site: I wasn't disappointed with what I got.
I prefer modular multi-purpose cards that can be linked in a variety of ways, and which have walls and other obstacles that make them interesting for exploration or combat. These cards can be linked to larger dungeons through teleporters and dimensional gates, the elemental cards can probably double as caves in a cavern map, and the mansion would work for pretty much any sort of house, inn, guild, hideout, or front for a dungeon entrance (though it seems like one of the bedrooms should have been a kitchen.)
Unfortunately, almost all are empty single-room areas without much complicated going on for surprise encounters or cover in a fight, with the exception of the mansion, with its various rooms and furniture.
Sadly, I can't really imagine finding much use for the flat empty rope trick (which could have easily been sketched onto plain graph paper or onto the plain grid on the flip-side of a Flip Mat), or the visually stunning genie bottle; they'll get set aside with other stuff I won't be using.
I can't say enough good things about this set. I love cross-dimensional stuff and this set has some great concepts and art. I'm really hoping for Extradimensional Spaces II sometime!
I'm one of those kind of people that knows just enough about art, graphic design and gaming to be dangerous enough to anyone. And I'm really impressed with the Extra-Dimensional Spaces.
One thing I really like is the way that the maps are in areas where I could see it being used commonly for situations or perhaps in such a way that would be not thought of before, like chasing after someone who uses the rope trick to get away. I am really impressed with the genie bottle and the magnificent mansion, which I believe will find a lot of use in play.
My only quibble is that the maps aren't two-sided, one with and one without the square marks to indicate spacing. I also think to some extent, extra-dimensional space plays different, so I really think having a version without the square marks would be good.
