The roar of a river’s white waters can fill an adventurer’s heart with hope of escaping pursuit or dread at facing an insurmountable obstacle. Whether your heroes are racing down the river in pursuit of villains or investigating rumors of aquatic monsters, there’s no need to sketch every rill and eddy. This Pathfinder Map Pack provides stunningly illustrated 5" × 8" map tiles that can be positioned to form a variety of modular, customizable river configurations. Inside, you’ll find 18 richly crafted map tiles, including:
Fallen Tree
Sandy Banks
Flood-Swollen Waters
Tributary Confluence
Stony Crossing
Exposed Riverbed
Meandering Bend
Cut Bank
Rocky Rapids
Game Masters shouldn’t waste their time drawing maps every time adventurers ford a river or board a boat. With Pathfinder Map Pack: River System, you’ll always be ready to brave the rapids!
Suitable for experienced GMs and novices alike, this product fits perfectly into any Game Master’s arsenal.
Wet, dry, and permanent markers erase from the tiles! With revised packaging that includes a reusable box for easy storage, Map Packs have never been so useful!
The River System Pathfinder Map Pack delivers exactly what it promises: 18 full-colour tiles that you can connect to form a meandering river. I have to give credit to whomever writes the description of the product on the back of the pack, as they make it sound much more exciting than it actually is. Most of the tiles have a three-square-wide river down the center with a square of mostly featureless riverbank on either side. A width of 10-15' for a river is fine for the sort of encounter where PCs are in the forest and attacked from the far side and have to figure out how to get across, but I think it's too narrow for a serious river-based adventure. The pack would have been better if the river were wider, even if not as long (rowboats, barges, and keelboats would barely fit on the regular river tiles, and certainly wouldn't have room to pass). Apart from the standard tiles, there are a few special ones: a couple of tiles that have 90' turns, three tiles that are oriented the other way (with the river 7 squares wide but not as long), a tile with a few small rocks in the middle, and a tile with a log bridge spanning it. The artwork is adequate but not the sort of thing that is going to draw "oohs" and "aahs" from your players. Like with the Road System Map Pack, despite my terrible artistic skills I'm not convinced that this one is a major improvement over simply drawing two parallel lines on a blank grid-mat. It's okay, but for $ 14 there's probably a better gaming product to spend the money on.
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Please, please include some one-sided river banks and rivers that heroes can't just jump across. I know that cover image is just a sample, but it'd only e a DC 5 to jump that stream.
Well, Mosaic's suggestion (above) of one-sided river banks would also work.
And the grid has to be 5 ft in order to fit all the other grids (flipmats and map packs) that will be laid out at the same time. If they suddenly become 10 ft grids, then one also has the issue of remembering precisely which 5 ft section (NE/SE/SW/NW) a miniature is standing in.
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If the set doesn't include any one-sided river tiles, I suppose one could cut that first example down the middle and lay it over a water mat to make the crossing as wide as one wanted. Still, I'd prefer some way to make moderately wide rivers without chopping up tiles.
Bah, the stream is 3 squares wide, just have the middle square be 2-10 squares and you solved everything without needing to add a ton of useless blue tiles.. ad if you want lots of blue tiles.. you got the damn blue side of the flip map pack.. :P
I'm mostly a VTT gamer (Fantasy Grounds 2), so a it is easy to set the grid on a PDF map, making these maps fit the larger scale your going for.
On the table though not so much. The Island Map pack or the Island Flip map with the Island on one side and the beach on the other, would probably be more useful.
Like Mosaic said, you can just cut the tiles. The vehicle map pack was intended to be cut, so that is an option as well.
