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Review for City of Thentia – The Wanderer’s Stock Maps as of 3 Sep 2017.
I gave this product 5 stars, though I have some issues they are mostly nits, and have found it useful for both content development and for online D&D gaming.
This product serves as a launching point for those creators intending to base adventures in the Moonsea region of Thentia. The maps and especially the description of the keyed location will serve the DM (and content creator) as a valuable resource for developing and running content in this city. Overall, I found this product to be useful in both developing adventure ideas and in running games using the Fantasy Ground VTT (Virtual Table Top). Despite being developed primarily for those intending to create content for the DMS Guild in Forgotten Realms the maps could easily be used for those running a home brew campaign and looking for a small port trading city – simply use the “everything off” version and there isn’t even a city name on the map.
The maps are well designed and scale fairly well depending on your intended purpose. One of the series prints out at 4 ft. by 3 ft. at the standard 300 dpi – think wall banner – and could easily be rescaled to print a standard 5 ft. to 1 in. for those wanting to run a full-scale assault on the town. The only issue would be the no cropping part of the copyright (discussed below) for those running miniatures and looking for a battlemap type product to cut up.
The file comes with 3 pdfs, and 3 series of maps – one for electronic use (at 72 dpi) and two sets for printing (11”x8.25” and 48”x36”) at 300 dpi.
The three pdfs consist of 1) a building key for the maps with all the versions keyed alike, 2) a description of the keyed locations and 3) a copyright notice.
The building key is broken into 3 sections; Gates, Temples/Shrines and an unnamed group (nit). Just looking at the maps the first thought is that the keyed locations are scattered randomly which makes finding a specific location a hunt. While the key being broken into sections is a nice touch I still would have preferred to have some kind of organized distribution of keyed locations – something as simple as clockwise or CCW from the top to help find a specific location; this is a common cartographic failing.
The description of the keyed locations is where the City of Thentia product really shines; a quick description with some backstory makes these an ideal reference for the DM and could even be shared with the players as background they know when journeying to the city. Jeremy has taken the basic info for the city from various sources and expanded on it to bring it up to date and account for changes over time.
The copyright notice (V 1.3) is fairly liberal and would allow users who have purchased the product to include the maps in products they develop for the DMS Guild. Note the copyright release does not extend to products that are not placed on DMS Guild. Nor are you allowed to crop the images so technically if you want to blow up and print one of the gate images as a battle map, for instance, you would be in violation. My local printing shop is death on copyright so I always look carefully at the releases since Adventurers League has been slack in this area with some of their products and I have run into problems getting stuff printed.
The electronic versions (72 dpi) of the maps are really only useful for thumbnails since most modern systems are using a display that is excess of 100 dpi. But they are a welcome addition; I would recommend using the 300 dpi versions and letting the system rescale otherwise you will end up with some pretty small maps on the display.
I play predominantly online using a VTT – Fantasy Grounds. It was easy to import the files into a mod and key it using the FG system. Having different versions, keyed, unkeyed, black and white and color made it easy to generate different versions of the maps for the players and the DM. The only key piece of information missing was a scale for the maps. One of the original maps of Thentia, from the long ago Profantasy Forgotten Realms Interactive Atlas, had a scale but that appears to have been lost over the years and would have been a nice addition to the current map.
Overall, I think the product is well worth the asking price – developing good looking and useful maps is tedious at best and the additional research and writing that Jeremy has put into the product definitely increases the value for the end user.
Disclaimer: I was provided a copy of this product to review.
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