Jonathan Roberts, cartographer for Kobold Quarterly, Frozen Empires, and Adventures in the Hyborian Age, presents another Fantastic Map: The Low River.
This multi-page PDF allows you to print out both battlemaps (above and below ground) at a 1 square=1 inch scale as a letter-format map and is also available in a printer-friendly light grayscale version. It contains high-resolution JPEGs of the maps with and without grids. The file also contains two Maptool campaign files set up for quick use in the 4th Edition of the world's most popular roleplaying game and its 3.5 thriving spiritual successor. The Maptool file requires Maptool 1.3b60 or newer.
You can find more of Jonathan Roberts work at http://fantasticmaps.wordpress.com.
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The image on the cover is what you get. Overall an interesting battlefield with a few bridges, a chasm, stairs, and tunnel to hide some reinforcements. The field is a little too open for my taste, but it could be used as a good break in a bunch of subterranean tunnel crawls. The cartography itself is good but I'd like a little more contrast (it is just in tan and greyscale with a river).
The best thing about the product is the different formats the image is in. First you have it in pdf format as one big map and a divided map (color and greyscale) suitable for printing with a 1" grid. Then you have it in 2550x3300 JPEG images with a grid, no grid, black and white, and without the bridges or a grid. The bridges are provided as separate images. Finally you get the map as a 4E or OGL maptools campaign file (just a few settings, not a full suite with elaborate scripting) with topography to handle line of sight. If you already had a campaign setup of your own it is likely you would need to draw it yourself.
A decent buy. More map and counter developers should provide JPEGS for those of us using virtual tabletops.
Thanks from me too. Just to add a couple more details - the maptool files have the vision blocking geometry built into them, along with some movable lightsources (Pathfinder standard issue torches). The bridges are separate objects so you can modify the terrain to suit the nature of the encounter you want to run.
Thanks D.M.T. Let me know if there are tweaks to the format that would be useful. I've been waiting to look at the newer version of maptools before going back and updating the older map packs. It seems to have leveled off and the ability to import/export individual maps to an existing campaign seems pretty stable now. It shouldn't be too long before I go back and make the edits.
