The first five AP map folios contained all (or most of) the maps from within the adventures. These weren't very popular, so the last few map folios have contained poster maps of areas relevant to the AP as a whole.
I vastly prefer the new approach, although a combination of the two would be nice (although likely too expensive for most buyers).
I think the main reason is cost. I would love to have access to miniature-scaled maps for every encounter in the APs, but I doubt Paizo would be able to do it for less than a hundred bucks. Personally, I'd be a fan of them experimenting with just one or two of the 'main combats' being included in the map folios - I'd also be happy for them to be non-erasable, if that is a significant driver of the cost.
At least there's been an increase in 'theming' the map-packs and flipmats to the current AP of late. That's a good halway step.
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If the map folios contained every map used, yes it would make the product prohibitively exspencive. But they could include a few main maps.
The fact is, after I found out that there are no tactical maps in the map folio products, I decided not to purchase them. So what costs more, no sale at all, or including some useful tactical maps.
or just get the PDFs and blow the maps up to the appropriate size. (Or get a subscription and get the PDFs for free...)
IMHO, I'd much prefer useful maps (such as encounter ones, be it in a pdf or paper format) to basically near useless-ones (the ones that we currently have now). Even if it means paying double the price of the current folios.
While I appreciate running an AP with every map on a separate sheet, it's something that I could do by printing the select few pages that have those maps in the free pdf I get as a subscriber. However, I can't get the encounter maps this way (or if I can, I don't know how).
Yeah, I've got no use for the maps packs as they currently are. The previous incarnation was perfect for me, as I used the PDFs on my lap top so I didn't have to switch back and forth so much...that and if I needed a specific map, it always wound up easier to open the map pack file and find it there than it was to open the adventure file and try to find it. Doesn't hurt my feelings they changed, just means I won't be giving Paizo that bit of money.
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I've got a giant stack of flip mats to use for tactical encounters where the party will be spending at most half-a-session. Worst comes to worst, I blow up the PDF and print it.
The current format, where we get maps of entire islands and cities, is FAR more useful to me since the party is apt to remain in that locale for prolonged periods of time. Case in point: my PbP group has been on Smugglers Shiv for a couple months now in Real Time. The low-res community-use version of the Shiv was inadequate whereas the high-res one from the Map Folio is prefect for zooming in and laying down a hex grid with MapTool.
Were I running Serpent's Skull locally, you can rest assured I'd have the map of the island mounted on a giant cork-board or metallic surface so that we could use map pins or magnets. A large area map like that is something I can't feasibly reproduce on my own. Yet a particular locale for a fight? That's much simpler.
I suspect that I might not be subscribing to the Map Folios if they went back to the old format. They can't please everyone.
I've got a giant stack of flip mats to use for tactical encounters where the party will be spending at most half-a-session. Worst comes to worst, I blow up the PDF and print it.
The current format, where we get maps of entire islands and cities, is FAR more useful to me since the party is apt to remain in that locale for prolonged periods of time. Case in point: my PbP group has been on Smugglers Shiv for a couple months now in Real Time. The low-res community-use version of the Shiv was inadequate whereas the high-res one from the Map Folio is prefect for zooming in and laying down a hex grid with MapTool.
Were I running Serpent's Skull locally, you can rest assured I'd have the map of the island mounted on a giant cork-board or metallic surface so that we could use map pins or magnets. A large area map like that is something I can't feasibly reproduce on my own. Yet a particular locale for a fight? That's much simpler.
I suspect that I might not be subscribing to the Map Folios if they went back to the old format. They can't please everyone.
How do you guys blow up the maps to proper size?
I use Some PDF Image Extract to pull the images out of the PDF. Then I'll use Photoshop to resize them so that the print scale is correct for minis.
Did this for the lower level of Crypt of the Everflame. Added each room like a puzzle piece taping it to the flipmat as the party explored. Worked great.
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Any one else think that the map folios should contain tactical maps that are used in the ap?
No. Tactical maps are useless to us.
I much prefer what they're including now - poster maps of important areas (especially city maps).
The maps included in the APs themselves are often so small to be nigh-useless (Zirnakaynin, underground regions, and Westcrown - I'm especially looking at you) that the poster maps of these areas are extremely valuable to us.
I actually buy the Folios now.
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What Arnywn said.
If I have a tactical map, I can draw it on a Flip-Mat in a jiffy.
If I have a large scale map, ouch, I really need a BIG map. I'm not sure if my RotRL campaign went off so well if I didn't have a poster-sized color map of Sandpoint to roll out in front of my players.
When I did that, they went "woooooow". It was a major shame that the other maps in early folios were pretty much a waste of money, and it's really great the way folios are now.
Creative Director
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This question comes up often. The first time it did, about 3 years ago, I took a typical adventure path volume (Pathfinder #11) and looked at its maps. There's a HUGE map of a multi-level castle in that one, and making things even more exciting, the castle's so big that we had to use 10 foot squares for it. Turning that whole castle into a minis-scale map would require hundreds and hundreds of square feet of maps—I forget the exact size of what it would be, but someone tried it out and a single level of the castle pretty much covered the floor of his entire living room.
We'd need to do all four or five levels of that castle. And that'd still only cover one of six volumes.
Doing ALL of the maps in an AP as minis-scale maps would be prohibitively expensive for us, especially since we pay artists/cartographers by the full page. I'm not sure there'd be a market for a line of maps that cost like $100 per month or more.
We DO have a line that does minis-scale maps. Two of them, in fact—the map packs and the flip maps. Now and then, we do incorporate these into adventures, but it's not something we do often. We print too many adventures to do this TOO often.
Doing ALL of the maps in an AP as minis-scale maps would be prohibitively expensive for us, especially since we pay artists/cartographers by the full page. I'm not sure there'd be a market for a line of maps that cost like $100 per month or more.
We DO have a line that does minis-scale maps. Two of them, in fact—the map packs and the flip maps. Now and then, we do incorporate these into adventures, but it's not something we do often. We print too many adventures to do this TOO often.
I would like to throw my hat in with the encounter-maps-please crowd. I don't mind if not every encounter area is included (and some areas are clearly madness to include - too HUGE!). But if a selection of encounter areas was made available, particularly those that can easily double for "other" purposes, reinterpretation, that would get my blessing. Along that line: the selection could try to cover the range of options: rather than 5 encounter maps that are all dungeon, rather 1 wilderness, 1 dungeon, 1 urban, 1 building, etc.
It's always been very satisfying, as a GM, to be able to put down an encounter map that in glorious color and detail describes the area my PCs can explore. I'd welcome the AP support material to extend on this experience.
My first map folio was Kingmaker.. I opened it up then promptly scratched my head thinking... "this is useless... there's no numbers on the buildings... or any sort of key... how do people use these things?"
So yeah, from that point forward I generally felt they were useless to me. If the map is a town or something, without numbers and a key its a pretty picture... that I paid $15 for... that I didn't even really want but hey- its part of the campaign setting sub, so suck it up I guess.
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This question comes up often. The first time it did, about 3 years ago, I took a typical adventure path volume (Pathfinder #11) and looked at its maps. There's a HUGE map of a multi-level castle in that one, and making things even more exciting, the castle's so big that we had to use 10 foot squares for it. Turning that whole castle into a minis-scale map would require hundreds and hundreds of square feet of maps—I forget the exact size of what it would be, but someone tried it out and a single level of the castle pretty much covered the floor of his entire living room.
We'd need to do all four or five levels of that castle. And that'd still only cover one of six volumes.
Doing ALL of the maps in an AP as minis-scale maps would be prohibitively expensive for us, especially since we pay artists/cartographers by the full page. I'm not sure there'd be a market for a line of maps that cost like $100 per month or more.
We DO have a line that does minis-scale maps. Two of them, in fact—the map packs and the flip maps. Now and then, we do incorporate these into adventures, but it's not something we do often. We print too many adventures to do this TOO often.
The small map was still very useful.
Using Adobe and Irfanview I was capable of removing some layer of the images and darkening other sections, removing most of the information the players should not see.Then I printed the map and instead of drawing the castle room by room on a piece of paper I was cutting out the different sections while the player were exploring them and giving them out.
it saved a lot of time.
My players liked the castle very much and they wanted to repair and use it.
As James mentioned this has come up before. I was part of the "we wants it please?" crowd, and in that long forgotten thread we asked for just specific tactical maps as being asked now. Again James countered with good logic, when a cartographer turns in a map they turn it in, in a certain amount of data (how big or small it is) the bigger it is the easier it is to print big (like to scale) so a one page map of a building is easier to do than a 3x3 page size tactial poster map just because of the data. Now it was brought up that they could just blwo it up and print low def versions, but they were against that for multiple reasons, the main being quality. They strive for quality in what they charge for, and its why they change so many little things. They would never put a fuzzy overblown map on the market just for the sake of it being tactical size, and since its cost prohibeted to do a lot of them that size (see flipmats and map packs) then we wont get ap specific maps until they can find a cheap and good quality way to do so.
My first map folio was Rise of the Runelords, and it was useless. It was just a reprint of the maps in the AP, and it was useless to me. I can use the PDF file to keep track of the map (with Foxit notes) and when I needed to draw it on the battle map I just used the hardcopy. I stopped buying them after RotRL.
Now when Kingmaker came out and it wasn't the small tactical maps, I gave it a try. I just love them. My guys can use post-its to keep track, etc. and I still have the PDF and hardcopy for my needs.
Just a different perspective,
-- david
Papa.DRB
My first map folio was Kingmaker.. I opened it up then promptly scratched my head thinking... "this is useless... there's no numbers on the buildings... or any sort of key... how do people use these things?"