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So much for "The Fabled City of Xin-Shalast"
I'm really dumbfounded by the decision to print the location of Xin-Shalast on all of these maps. It's such a spoiler.
My party is in the process of searching for Xin-Shalast in the last of the ROTRL series. Having it printed on the map kills some of the suspense.
I've asked my players not to look but that's kinda silly.
So much for there being any suspense to that module. Or the Lost Cities supplement for that matter. Not very lost any more.
<shakes head>
As I'm currently GMing this series, I can see where you're coming from... but first it's been 4 years. Hard to cry spoilers after that much time. Especially related to products that are from "GM-centric" product lines.
Second, if it matters that much for you and your game that these things remain secret (and I'm down with that), then you should make a standing rule to limit your player's reading of anything to the Player's Companion line. That should help limit the spoilers.
You can always do what I do and put it someplace else. Those mountains are plenty big enough. If my players get the bright idea to go to a certain place printed in some map they may have seen, rather than one their characters have researched, they will most certainly find something else. There are plenty of dangers in those mountains.
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So much for "The Fabled City of Xin-Shalast"
I'm really dumbfounded by the decision to print the location of Xin-Shalast on all of these maps. It's such a spoiler.
My party is in the process of searching for Xin-Shalast in the last of the ROTRL series. Having it printed on the map kills some of the suspense.
I've asked my players not to look but that's kinda silly.
So much for there being any suspense to that module. Or the Lost Cities supplement for that matter. Not very lost any more.
<shakes head>
Just say "OH yeah, everyone knows it's up there... SOMEWHERE. Mapmakers have been choosing a random mountain and labeling it for hundreds of years."
Besides, the city is is only partially in phase with the material plane. Knowing it's location is only half the battle.
But the fact that it's been four years matters. From the point of view of the materials currently being published, the RotRL campaign is done, the RL is defeated, and now various factions are jockeying to exploit the riches of Xin-Shalast.
You can't expect the Golarion timeline to be frozen indefinately at the start of the first AP.
The new maps as well as the Inner Sea World guide are not necessarily suppose to be player friendly. Both products are under the Pathfinder Campaign Setting line of products, not Player Companions.
Should the new map, specially the huge poster map have been player friendly? Perhaps...but then of course some could argue that a truly player friendly map would have no labels at all.
Creative Director
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We thought about omitting "spoiler" locations that are supposed to be lost, such as Xin-Shalast and Saventh-Yhi... but in the end, we decided that if this map was intended to be as complete as possible, we kind of HAD to put those locations on the map. It'd look like an error if we didn't.
As such, yeah, they do kind of spoil the "No one knows where this location is!" element of some adventures, but as mentioned above, it's certainly possible to move the exact location in your game.
Either that, or remind your players that their characters don't know everything they know. If players can refrain from using their knowledge of modern technology to make gunpowder or penicillin or whatever, pretending that they don't know the precise location on a map that their characters haven't seen should be easy.
Cracking open any recent campaign setting book is going to give them all sorts of "spoilers" about the Runelords; they were originally "long-forgotten" but now have been retconned to well-known history.
I would rather have had Xin-Shalast omitted, but it's an easy fix. In fact, having incorrect or misleading map items added to the equation makes X-L more hidden, not less.