Maps you used in Xin Shalast


Rise of the Runelords

Liberty's Edge

Xin Shalast, as described, remains sandboxy and somewaht vague... many buildings have basic descriptions but no detailed maps; encounters can happen in most of those. We use battle maps in almost all combat situations in my campaign, and I'm trying to find appropriate maps to use as I get ready to restart RotRL after a hiatus of more than a year...

Which maps have you used in your campaigns for those buildings? Home-made? Salvaged maps from other adventures? Maps packs & Flip-mats from Paizo?


For Xin Shalast I used Flip-Mat: Mountain Terrain for most of the generic fights on the mountain. One side has some little towers on it that I could use as building depending on where they were. Like in particular they encountered the Leng Spiders near "the Teeth" and I used the towers as two of the towers of "the Teeth", size discrepancy be damned. It was the most useful flip-mat for the whole book since its almost all wintery terrain, and was pretty invaluable for the Vekker stuff...though it is out of print and hard to find, you can buy the pdf and print your own copy still.

For most of the lower city I used a generic "city street" mat I printed out and glued to posterboard that I use for all "generic city street" encounters in different campaigns. It has some random buildings on it that, while smaller than they should be (even when I made them 10 ft squares), get the point across should I need to have an enemy walk out a door and pounce the group. I think that there is a Paizo city street flip-mat but I don't own that one.

I used the Flip-mat "city gates" for the gates of Xin-Shalast (Krak Naratha) but I use that for pretty much all "you're at the gate!" encounters (also used for jorgenfist and fort rannick ha)

My group went up to Shahlaria. I used the flip-mat:watch station for that, because it has a courtyard, and they basically fought an army of giants that erupted from building into the courtyard. I told them the squares were 10ft squares (so it would be giant-sized) and that Shahlaria went farther than what the map looked, but it was mostly deserted except the rooms near the courtyard (aka what was on the map). They later opted to sleep inside Shahlaria, I switched to flip-mat: keep for that encounter (they were ambushed by the Ice Devil).

For the Golden Road (that leads up the mountain) I reused a fan-made map of the Storval Stairs...you can find it under the community made stuff sticky on the boards, or just by google image searching "storval stairs map".

So that's the stuff I actually used, now for the stuff I prepped but never took out. I was just going to use the flip-mat: arena instead of the Heptaric Locus corner map and have Gamigin up in the VIP seats. For the Tangle, I had the map pack "forest trails" that I was going to use, just randomly drawing tiles, with survival checks to avoid getting lost in the labyrinth.

During our sessions no other buildings were explored. I was ready to draw a generic looking temple/building/whatever on the back of a flip-mat if needed. I think there is a flip-mat: temple and flip-mat: warehouse that would probably cover most of the smaller Xin-Shalast buildings.

That basically covered all my maps so I didn't have to draw anything. If you wanted a really deluxe campaign a motivated GM could imagine their own maps and draw stuff out themselves, but I use these APs because I have limited prep time in the first place! So I shortcut that kind of stuff as much as possible. And for good thing too, I would have been bummed if I took the time to draw out an elaborate map of the Tangle only to have my group completely skip it!

Liberty's Edge

Thanks for the advice! I have many of those and will put them to good use!


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I have all the old WotC DDM maps and there were a number of those that came in handy for individual locations. Off the top of my head, I used:

Fane of Lolth for the ruined temple of Lissala
Tomb of Queen Peregrine, Hellspike Prison, and Temple of the Prismatic Flame for subterranean levels in Shalaria

We use the Flip-Mats as well but I don't recall needing any of them for Xin-Shalast in particular.

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