Book 2 map E scaling issues

[GreyYeti]

While preparing that book i ran into problems with map E.
According to map these are supposed to be 5ft squares but this makes the map very cramped.
Is this an error and these are in reality 10ft squares?

[NateK]

GreyYeti wrote:

While preparing that book i ran into problems with map E.

According to map these are supposed to be 5ft squares but this makes the map very cramped.
Is this an error and these are in reality 10ft squares?

I know this was posted a long time ago, but I'm just getting to the planning stages here and I have to agree. ESPECIALLY with E30, which is supposed to be a boss fight. This room is the worst part. How am I supposed to have this battle (especially with a party of 6)?

The rest of the map seems manageable. I'm either going to have to convert this one room to 10 ft squares or use an entirely different map. Extra sad, because when you compare E30 to the art of this cool open set-piece in a large cavernous room seen on page 37, I had to do a double take.

[Maestro Tallis Reed]

I know this post is old, but I came to this forum to ask this very question. My players are entering the black site and I decided I'm going to replace the 4th floor because it just doesn't fit as written. I really like the image on page 37, so I'm going to use theater of the mind for the other rooms, then show them that image while I awkwardly move them to a different map on our VTT. It's the same issue we had in the AotS AP - we just couldn't visualize how the provided art fits the text descriptions of the room.

[Akumamajin]

If someone is still not past the final fight of the blackside, I can share my experience with it and the quick map that I came up with on roll20. I don't know, though, which image hosters paizo is fine to link too, if any.

[Akumamajin]

As a general note, Paizo seems to often go for this small and cramped maps, in order to fit them into the books on one page (like with the three places you have to visit on Curacava to search for the transmitter boxes). Amd while that is understandible, many of the maps are borderline (or utterly) unplayable with the published grid. Many just declare the grids as 10x10ft instead of 5x5ft squares as a hotfix, but as we are playing on Roll20 right now, due to social distancing, I just size the map to my liking and just tell my players to ignore the printed squares and just go for the once overlayed by Roll20.

At the very least I hope that Paizo learned from this and downsized the grid a bit. Many maps are fine with the details and everything, but the grid could easily downsized without much problem, right? And it helps so much with positioning, cool tricks or class abilities and just emersion, when not everything is so cramped.

Regarding the final battle on the black site: I guess that a more open environment was originally planned, but it just wouldn't fit on the map, that was already somewhat sprawling. So I just said that E30 overlooked the room that you could see on that art, and there was some sort of elevator there that lead down.

The room I came up with was just an ice cave, with a round shape in the back (the generator/accelerator), surrounded by a 5ft catwalk.I also thought that the fight was rather lackluster with just the two Umbral Disciples and Kaeon Rhyse, so I added one shadow-touched guard on the catwalk and one Sexton in the room.

This was some though opposition, but it worked our reasonable well for my group.

I rebuild the Umbral Disciples as Lvl 9 Mythics of the Mindbreaker connection. All their abilities were very thematic with the Hellraiser theme (Backlash, Share Pain, Mental Anguish) and their spells just consisted of Mind Thrusts of various strength.

The Shadowtouched guard (and the ones earlier in the blacksite on Floor 1) I rebuild as Soldiers with the Squad fighting style, and this also worked really well. He switched places with Kaeon Rhyse, when that one was engaged in combat, and proceeded to carve the Uplifted Bear Vanguard up with his cruel hookknife.

The Sexton didn`t do too much, but his painful gaze occasionally wracked one of the players.

So, all in all the final battle, with my modifications, was a much more memorable occasion and my players still talk about how they hated Kaeon Rhyse.

[Darius Silverbolt]

Yes I think MAP E needs a little fine tuning. If doing this on a VTT I would say cut up the map and I would double the scale of floor 4 myself but the map gets a little fuzzy when you do that and lining it up gets a tad tricky but I needed to do it as I have people play large wither with power armor or just the race itself is large.