GameMastery Map Pack: Campsites contains 18 full-color 5 x 8-inch map tiles, stunningly crafted by cartographer Corey Macourek, that unite to form a completely customizable campsite adventuring area.
Locations include:
Mountain Cave
Wooded Glen
Snow Fort
Pavilion Tent
Swamp Island
Desert Oasis
Abandoned Barn
Ruined Outpost
Mushroom Glade
For use with the industry’s most popular roleplaying or tabletop miniature campaigns, and useable 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.
I feel like I got exactly what I paid for with this product, and being able to see all the contents on this site before hand was a very nice touch: 2/3 of the tiles are something I could use, the last 1/3 I have no use for.
Most of the tiles look beautiful, with very nice detail.
The building interiors, forest, and swamp are great places to stage small encounters, perhaps with a villain and a couple henchmen. I'm quite satisfied with these, and they are what I bought the pack for: fairly non-specific, multi-purpose, re-usable areas to supplement WoTC "Dungeon Tiles" for use in dungeon crawls. The outdoors camps could stand in for pretty much anyone's campsite, the outpost can as easily be a farm house, bandit hide-out, hermit's shack, or last hold-out for the zombie apocalypse, the barn could do double-duty as a warehouse or blacksmith's worshop.....
I will probably never use the snow trench, desert oasis, or mushroom path, though: the art is pretty, but they are rather dull open spaces, not much in the way of walls or obstacles or anything else going on. Something like these could just as effectively have been sketched by hand in dry-erase marker on the plain side of the Flip Maps. I'll be setting these three areas aside in my "bits bin", I'm afraid; I wish a couple more shacks, caves, or dungeon-type areas could have been used in their places.
I really don't know why we haven't seen more of these ... I mean, honestly, in every fantasy game, people camp on the road, right? And they tend to confront critters there, so these are a natural :)
One of my first purchases of the map pack line to see how useful these would be at our table.
They did not disappoint. Probably the most used pack I have currently and the players really like them for the added realism.
I guess my only complaint is that each sample put together is not really all that big. However combine these with say a flip map, these add to those areas nicely.
For those looking to try something new and only want to purchase one to get the feel, this is the one I'd go for as you have a campsite for almost any area you might want.
I have most of the Map Packs and this is the one I use the absolute most. Even, if it gets a little repetitive for the players, it is nice to have a small battle map for those encounters while most of the party sleeps. I agree that thicker would be better, but I am very happy with the product I have. A second set of different campsites would be great as well.
Hi Paizo, you will get a higher rating for map packs when they become thicker still. It is true the newer ones are thicker than the older ones, and the art is uniformly excellent, but Dungeon Tiles put these to shame and are double-sided to boot. I want to play D&D with the children I will one day have, and I'm just not convinced map packs will survive till then. That said I will keep buying all of them because they are cool and because I am a crazy person.
Campsites is a useful-looking pack (have it but haven't played on it); it's all 2-tile sets which form one campsite per set. Some of the tilesets feature tents, etc., but some don't - those can serve dual use as forest tiles, since the forest set didn't have many generic tiles in it.