Finally got this from Troll & Toad games. I like the artwork on the cover. One of my players at our pathfinder game last night had to explain what "Skaven" were to the other players at the table..that was good for a laugh considering the recent topic on "how could Imperial folk not know about skaven?"

The details on Ubersreik should come in handy as another detailed town in the Empire [wink, wink..Lf7]

jh

I'm very dissapointed by the "map" and "towndescription" of Übersreik. There's only a quarter of the town described. No full townmap.

Ok, it's easy for me to create the rest but if I make up the rest of the town and FFG e.g. release sometime the rest of the Übersreik-map it will surely be different. The next reason is that I payed about 24 € for it and got a small sheet of paper with 20% of a town on it.

Agreed on the map. I'm not sure if it's only 20% or if it's a birds-eye view from the south wall or something. When I opened the package, I kept looking for the rest of the map!

I wonder why they would do such a half-assed job on that. Is it really that hard to finish the rest of the map and put it on a sheet in the book? I can understand if they didn't want to put more effort into the details of the town, but at least give us a complete map of the town as is standard of quality for all other gaming company supplements and previous editions of the game. Sigh.

jh

Emirikol said:

Yeah, because that map of Weissbruck in The Enemy Within was such a masterpiece.

Weissbruck is complete from what I can see: s286.photobucket.com/albums/ll89/abrockisland/

Masterpiece isn't the key here. Completeness is. You can have half-way masterpieces and that's what the Ubersreik map is. I'd rather have a complete map than a half-finished product.

Regarding completeness of maps, I'm talking about ALtdorf, Nuln, Middenheim, Bogenhafen, etc.

jh

There's a very good reason for it, which I can't discuss. Just please, trust me it has nothing to do with the designers making a "half assed" decision in either case. And don't bother asking me about it, because I won't say why...well...ever. Only reason I'm making this comment in the first place is to end some pointless vitriol against a great design team. Trust me, I get your frustrations, but just calm down, and enjoy what they did give you.

Edge of Night is a great module overall. I give it a 3.5 out of 5 now that I've read it. There are some things I'd like to see from modules these are currently lacking, but as far as modules go, WFRP modules are way ahead of the curve.

commoner said:

A reason unspoken is not a good reason around my parts...and anyway customers are entitled to make theirs comments, since it is not "pointless" to says FFG is not dooing a good work whit maps, and they definetly have to make some efforts in this compartement to keep the quality of their products top-notch...

I'm going to jump in and make a complete wild guess. Considering that this is based on an IP. Perhaps GW has something to do with it. But who the heck knows... I certainly don't.

commoner said:

I can accept that I spent some babysitting time this morning going through much of it and it seems pretty solid. I've run a lot of "masquerede & party" scenarios over the years however. I hope it breaks the mould !

jh

Ghiacciolo said:

I'm with you - if there's a good reason, come out with it, otherwise, it's simply smoke and mirrors.

As for the lack of a complete map, was it laziness, or do they have a 'Return to Ubersreik' adventure planned? Either way, it's not exactly great - I don't want to harp on about Enemy Within, but practically every town, city or hamlet encountered in that had a complete map. Sure, much of the map wasn't labelled, but you had the place laid out in front of you nevertheless.

Sausageman said:

I'm with you - if there's a good reason, come out with it, otherwise, it's simply smoke and mirrors.

I really don't agree with that. There's loads of reasons for loads of stuff, behind the scenes. Tiny and obscure or big and obvious GW policies can affect WFRP output in many different ways. And these reasons are generally kept in-house. Personally I can see why these things are kept inside GW and FFG. Fans love to chat about the setting itself, but they also love to chat about the meta-setting. And fans often get the wrong end of the stick, and the internet is one huge chinese whispers machine, etc.

That's not to say there is any reason I know of for the Ubersreik map, or its final look had much to do with GW, or anything like that. I've no idea. But generally I've made loads of small changes to loads of stuff for loads of reasons, and istm just allowing open-season on all those factors wouldn't necessarily be productive for anyone.

Of course that's easy for me to say, coz I have some small insight into how things get done now. I know for other versions of WFRP, I was often on the internet typing, 'What the f. did they do that for??!'

And, of course, that's not to say fans shouldn't be welcome to comment on stuff like this, too.

Marc Gascoigne at BI once explained the mapping ambiguity policy for v2 as retaining a sense of mystery about the setting. A similar explanation had been offered by MvS for keeping certain parts of the magic metaphysics vague. The Marienburg book covered several districts in detail but left others untouched. So it's possible that FFG is following a long (or at least, post-90's) tradition by leaving part of Ubersreik a blank slate for your imagination to explore, unfettered by preconceived notions or images.

Sitting with Edge of the Night and having read through it, I simply don't understand how anyone can suspect FFG for being lazy.

Do people honestly think it's easier to leave out 15% of a map than to make it a full map? It's like calling people lazy for leaving out tomatoes in a salat.

Ghiacciolo said:

Never said that making your comments were pointless. I said pointless vitriol, meaning anger or frustration that will do you and these boards absolutely no good. I also said I understand the frustration and asked everyone to calm down about it rather than feeding more anger-fuel to this game.

Absolutely customers have every right to say what they want, whenever they want about their products.

I mean, just look at it this way...if we can quickly point out, "the map is not complete," then don't you think the designers who were working on this game full-time might have realized the same point. Then, stop and consider, that obviously if they left it out it was for specific reasons.

Furthermore, Edge of Night is a module. To play the module as written you don't need more map than they have supplied us. The module is not a sandbox, it follows a linear format. If you want to go "off map," you will be going "off module." In that case, you will have to make up whatever happens over there anyway, so why not have the freedom to let your imagination detail the region you are about to create for the needs of the story you are creating. What if I wanted there to be a series of grates beneath a statue of Sigmar that releases some pestilen nastiness. Lets say I want it situated in a the center of a town square, where five roads join together. Well, I created it, but the map doesn't support it. So now I have to change the map for adding this angle to the module, which is just as much work (or more), as quickly sketching this addition to the module that I felt I needed for my story.

This also gives us freedom, if our players stay in the city past the module, to create what we need for our expansion. Sure a map would be helpful to make some decisions, but it would also limit us as well.

That was my point. Again, it is a great module and gave us everything we need to play it well.

The only reason I gave it a 3.5 is over the small, character cards they provided for us. In my opinion, I would have preferred new talents, madnesses, or more mutation cards instead of these cards. It is the only component to date I saw as useless. Edge of Night is not as good as The Gathering Storm in terms of components to be used in other games and that, if any, is my largest disappointment with it and why I only gave it a 3.5. Otherwise, I would have given it a 4.5.

Do you really think the alternative to the small cards was more talents, mutations, etc? I don't think they would have released that much extra "crunch" in a module and the small cards for the partygoers were really just a nice addition that they could have skipped.

If the expansion hadn't come with the small npc cards at all, would you have even noticed the lack or graded the module as low?

jeffeoff said:

Yes. I did. I bought The Gathering Storm for the additional content. I wasn't disappointed with what I got in the set on top of the module. Additional content such as The Gathering Storm Presented offered me as a GM and player a number of valuable resources I could use in my games. These types of additions I hope to see as a trend for all modules. It will not only increase module sales, but it will give them more bang for their buck.

Instead of the seven or eight talents, the handful of wounds, and other effects we received in TGS we instead got these small npc cards. I can see why they did it, I just don't like it as an overall product because it lacks incentives to purchase other than the module and tie ins to my standard games outside of the module.

What I'd like is for any postcard sized map in any expansion to also be included as a full-page within the adventure booklet. These tiny maps don't cut it for me however much information is on them or missing. I want a map I can see/use/pass around/make notes on, not another die cut card. It's doable as the PDF upgrade for TGS shows, just make it SOP rather than months after the fact.

commoner said:

I'm with you on this one. The modules will sell alot better (to more people) if they include extra careers, actions, talents or similar tidbits that can be used outside the module.

-L

My original point is that it's "Standard to the Industry" to have good, usable info for the GM to take his game beyond the adventure. If that's not in there, well, it's a lesser product.

Nevermind that this product DOES have good outside useful content in the Ubersreik descripbtion, but not the tidbit extras that TGS had or the extensive backgrounds that you see from other game companies (and previous products). It's pretty, but not extensive or complete.

I'm still looking forwards to running this scenario however. I can't wait to TPK the party with some scrawny, weak [spoiler creatures]..heh heh heh.

jh

Yes-yes!

I'm going to thank FFG for reading my above post, traveling back in time, and reworking EoN to address my concern. I just purchased it last night and was very happy to see that along with the postcard-sized map there's a full paged map with locations marked IN the scenario book. YAY!

I really like the product, but I did wonder with both SoC and EoN, why they didn't include 1 career in each of them.

Just as extra fluff, think many would love that concept, because who doesn't want their career pool to be larger?

Spivo said:

Personally, I think having to buy a whole product you don't want just to get one component you do want would annoy far more people than it would please. If new career cards were included, it would look like FFG was cynically attempting to get players to buy GM-focused products.

That said, I can see the inclusion of new careers in scenario pack sbeing reasonble if the scenario has a setting or theme that requires new careers to properly develop that theme or setting. Generally, though, it makes more sense for scenario packs like this to provide components that are useful to GMs in designing and running their own scenarios.

Cheers

Sparrow

I found the south half of the city. It's on p. 10.

jh

Anybody know what Ubersreik map listing #21 is? "The Waterfall"

Thoughts?

Is it a church to the river god? Tavern? Inn?

jh

Emirikol said:

It's the Waterfall Amusment Park, complete with a fake waterwall and cotton candy.