John Cooper
Explorer
LOCALES, VOLUME ONE
By Nicholas A. Kristof
The Fantasy Cartographic product number TFC001
46-page PDF, $3.00
Locales, Volume One is the very first product from a brand-new RPG company, The Fantasy Cartographic. As you might expect from a company with such a name, this product is a series of maps for use with fantasy roleplaying games.
The most obvious comparison to make concerning this product is with Dungeon magazine's "Maps of Mystery" series. However, there are a few differences: while the "Maps of Mystery" were full-color maps, the maps in Locales, Volume One are all black and white. On the other hand, all you got with the "Maps of Mystery" was the map itself and a list of numbered areas with the title of each area; the maps in this product all have a short background describing the area the map depicts, some notes for the DM wishing to use the map in his campaign, and some other possibilities beyond the main one given for each map. Also, with a (potentially) unlimited scope, the maps here are as large or as small (and cover as many pages) as is needed to best describe the area; Nicholas is not constrained by having to limit each map to one or two pages like Dungeon needed to do.
My first impression was that this is a pretty cool product. Nicholas, who does the cartography as well as being the product line's creator and main writer, does a really nice job on the maps. He has a wide variety of areas as well, ranging from natural formations like cavern complexes (one of which includes a fortress carved out of the meeting of a giant stalagmite and stalactite that covers 18 different levels!), to man-made structures like a keep and a temple, to really weird stuff like a temple tomb that wraps around itself in a spiral. (I like the way he did the various levels for that last one: he does a "fading out" effect at the edges of each level where it "becomes" the next highest/lowest level.) There are nine different locations provided, but it takes 35 pages of maps to detail those nine places.
On closer inspection, there's one really vital ingredient missing in this product, and that's a scale indicating how big the "graph paper maps" are. The natural caverns have an accompanying scale that says how many feet each inch is equivalent to, and you'd expect that the maps that have a grid (as if they were drawn on graph paper) would state somewhere whether each square was intended to be 5 feet (which would be the standard for a D&D map), 10 feet (as it appears at least the 18-level map is, judging by some accompanying text that describes a staircase that's two squares wide as being 20 feet wide), or something else entirely. I suppose you could try to turn the lack of a scale to a positive ("it's not a bug, it's a feature!") by claiming that this allows each DM to scale the map as best suits his needs, but that could be done whether there was a scale printed there or not, and it would be nice to know what the default was intended to be.
The other thing that really bothered me about this product is some of its naming conventions. Some people are really good at coming up with evocative place names, and others...not so much. Nicholas seems to be close to the edge of the "not so much" side of this particular scale. Names like S'siyerteresk Falls, Bgixilidynon, Lainda X'bsith, Shayarraz Aarack'Ai, and Shalde'eyn Vorai lead me to believe that many of them were created by letting a cat walk on the keyboard for awhile.
Proofreading and editing was pretty good, to which credit goes to editor Michael P. Garfield. I did note a few errors, though, along the lines of some capitalization issues, spacing issues (especially in conjunction with "ft." - as in "500ft"), punctuation issues (hyphens and periods, mostly), and a typo or two. There were also a couple of factual errors, such as when it's stated that two intertwining passages in that 18-level column fortress don't meet up between levels three and eight (when the map of level 5 clearly shows a secret passage connecting the two), and a town that's only mentioned twice, once as "Forsyce" and once as "Frosyce." I also didn't see an OGL section, despite there being references to SRD material like gelatinous cubes. As always, I provided a list of errors noted to the author with the hopes that they can be quickly attended to. (PDFs are neat that way.)
Locales, Volume One is a good product for DMs looking for a quick jump-start to a cool adventure, who don't mind (or actually prefer) filling in the details of each room themselves. At $3.00, it's a decent purchase as well, and the negatives I've pointed out are far outweighed by the positives - these are, after all, some pretty cool maps, and they're easy to read. I give it a "4 (Good)" on a 5-point scale and look forward to seeing more in the series.
By Nicholas A. Kristof
The Fantasy Cartographic product number TFC001
46-page PDF, $3.00
Locales, Volume One is the very first product from a brand-new RPG company, The Fantasy Cartographic. As you might expect from a company with such a name, this product is a series of maps for use with fantasy roleplaying games.
The most obvious comparison to make concerning this product is with Dungeon magazine's "Maps of Mystery" series. However, there are a few differences: while the "Maps of Mystery" were full-color maps, the maps in Locales, Volume One are all black and white. On the other hand, all you got with the "Maps of Mystery" was the map itself and a list of numbered areas with the title of each area; the maps in this product all have a short background describing the area the map depicts, some notes for the DM wishing to use the map in his campaign, and some other possibilities beyond the main one given for each map. Also, with a (potentially) unlimited scope, the maps here are as large or as small (and cover as many pages) as is needed to best describe the area; Nicholas is not constrained by having to limit each map to one or two pages like Dungeon needed to do.
My first impression was that this is a pretty cool product. Nicholas, who does the cartography as well as being the product line's creator and main writer, does a really nice job on the maps. He has a wide variety of areas as well, ranging from natural formations like cavern complexes (one of which includes a fortress carved out of the meeting of a giant stalagmite and stalactite that covers 18 different levels!), to man-made structures like a keep and a temple, to really weird stuff like a temple tomb that wraps around itself in a spiral. (I like the way he did the various levels for that last one: he does a "fading out" effect at the edges of each level where it "becomes" the next highest/lowest level.) There are nine different locations provided, but it takes 35 pages of maps to detail those nine places.
On closer inspection, there's one really vital ingredient missing in this product, and that's a scale indicating how big the "graph paper maps" are. The natural caverns have an accompanying scale that says how many feet each inch is equivalent to, and you'd expect that the maps that have a grid (as if they were drawn on graph paper) would state somewhere whether each square was intended to be 5 feet (which would be the standard for a D&D map), 10 feet (as it appears at least the 18-level map is, judging by some accompanying text that describes a staircase that's two squares wide as being 20 feet wide), or something else entirely. I suppose you could try to turn the lack of a scale to a positive ("it's not a bug, it's a feature!") by claiming that this allows each DM to scale the map as best suits his needs, but that could be done whether there was a scale printed there or not, and it would be nice to know what the default was intended to be.
The other thing that really bothered me about this product is some of its naming conventions. Some people are really good at coming up with evocative place names, and others...not so much. Nicholas seems to be close to the edge of the "not so much" side of this particular scale. Names like S'siyerteresk Falls, Bgixilidynon, Lainda X'bsith, Shayarraz Aarack'Ai, and Shalde'eyn Vorai lead me to believe that many of them were created by letting a cat walk on the keyboard for awhile.
Proofreading and editing was pretty good, to which credit goes to editor Michael P. Garfield. I did note a few errors, though, along the lines of some capitalization issues, spacing issues (especially in conjunction with "ft." - as in "500ft"), punctuation issues (hyphens and periods, mostly), and a typo or two. There were also a couple of factual errors, such as when it's stated that two intertwining passages in that 18-level column fortress don't meet up between levels three and eight (when the map of level 5 clearly shows a secret passage connecting the two), and a town that's only mentioned twice, once as "Forsyce" and once as "Frosyce." I also didn't see an OGL section, despite there being references to SRD material like gelatinous cubes. As always, I provided a list of errors noted to the author with the hopes that they can be quickly attended to. (PDFs are neat that way.)
Locales, Volume One is a good product for DMs looking for a quick jump-start to a cool adventure, who don't mind (or actually prefer) filling in the details of each room themselves. At $3.00, it's a decent purchase as well, and the negatives I've pointed out are far outweighed by the positives - these are, after all, some pretty cool maps, and they're easy to read. I give it a "4 (Good)" on a 5-point scale and look forward to seeing more in the series.
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