Although I am happy with the overall qualitiy of the 3ed products I find the lack of quality maps quite disturbing. I had my hopes up that HC would change that. But all that's included is a very crude map of the Teufeltal region. Unfortunatley, for maps I can't see any product on the horizon that could change the fact that maps are neglected in 3ed. The map extracts are just too small to enable people to put them into a bigger context. I think players who haven't played previous editions and have their maps might have a hard time to get a feel of the the Empire's geography.

In this regard the former editions did a better job.

Same with handouts. We get a few but compared with campaigns like EW1.0 the handouts FFG includes in their products seem insufficient, imho. I hope EW2.0 will pick up the the handout standards the original campaign set back in the 80s.

Maybe those are just small drops of bitterness in an otherwise delicious dish, but they are bitter nevertheless, if you take my meaning.

I agree. The maps produced so far have been very disappointing and near un-usable. Given that FFG do such a great job on all of the other graphical bits I find it amazing that they drop the ball on this.

I keep a folder full of photocopies of every city and town map that was produced for 1st and 2nd Edition and find it an invaluable aid when planning adventures or explaining the empire to players. So far I haven't added a found a single 3rd Edition map worth adding to this collection.

Yes, most of the maps look like they were drawn by a 5-year old. Maps like that I can sketch on the fly. Or they are so small that they are useless, like you said.

Treehorn said:

I do see what you mean, and I wholeheartedly agree that we definitely NEED a nice set of Fantasy Flight produced maps in the future, however I think that most of the maps produced for the 3rd edition up until this point are supposed to reflect what a contemporary map, drawn by someone that actually lives in the Empire, might look like (i.e. not completely accurate, hand drawn, with some features appearing more prominent than they actually are, etc).

Examples:

The map of Ubersreik above even says in the upper right corner that it was "Commissioned by....for....." implying that it's a contemporary map, drawn by someone that lives in the Old World.

That being said, I would LOVE if Fantasy Flight were to put out a nice Empire/Old World boxed set campaign setting that would include not only full page, full color maps of various locations and regions, but a nice foldout, hardback board map of the Empire, perhaps with a hex overlay to allow PCs to track their travels throughout the Empire. That would be boss!

I actually like having inaccurate maps so the one thing i do approve of is the "map commission by...." seen on a couple of the examples. I often give players two different, slightly contradictory, maps of the same area to reflect the poor knowledge of geography held by the empire. However that shouldn't be an excuse for producing small, barely useful maps. Is there a reason why Lord Ashenfeld comissioned a map of a section of Ubersreik and not the rest?

I really like the map in Hero's Call. It is the best WFRP3rd map I have seen so far. There is everything on it you need. I also like the Fauligmere and Übersreik maps.

I don't see any need for improvement there. I rather think that there should be more floor plans and stuff like that.

Yes, and handouts would be nice.

The managers for the WFRP brand for FFG have chosen to use maps that aren't industry standard either in an attempt to "be dfferent" or to "fit their style.

I do not care for the maps that they have chosen to repeatedly produce (under our incessant protest).

i believe they need to hire a cartographer that is more in tune with what actually works in the RPG standard.

jh

I don't think it's just WFRP; I can't remember seeing any useful maps in Dark Heresy, Rogue Trader or Deathwatch (apart from the cool ones on the inside covers of those books).

Anybody seen a good fan produced Ubersreik map? Link?

Thx!

No new map, but I did up a location key in the back of Liber Fanatica #7

jh