Drier? 😉

Since Jim already hijacked his own thread by mentioning Lord of the Rings and maps, and knowing several others here are fans of such things too, I'd recommend also taking a look at the new second edition "The One Ring" RPG, recently published by Free League Publishing, as the artwork and maps for that are simply gorgeous. The main rulebook has two endpaper maps of Eriador, the primary setting for this new version of the game, while the Starter Set has two poster maps, printed back to back, again of Eriador, but a more artistic vision than in the rules, and the most detailed map of The Shire I can ever recall seeing. Both the poster maps give a hat-tip in style to the great Pauline Baynes, who did the original poster map for LotR, in collaboration with JRR Tolkien himself, and which included roundels with scenes of specific, key, places around the edge. Both the Eriador and Shire poster maps have those as well. The Starter Set descriptive book on The Shire includes further B&W maps of segments of the Shire area, while the main rulebook has detailed maps of segments of the Eriador map in its text when discussing specific places.

I've struggled to find good-quality images for these online, unfortunately, to demonstrate what they look like, but this blog review has some very low-res versions of the Starter Set poster maps, while this one has some better res versions of just The Shire side, but largely hidden behind other stuff from the set. The second linked site does though have some shots of the books that come in the set, showing the artwork standard, and one of the segments of the Shire maps.

Intriguingly, only one of the Eriador maps has a scale on it - and that purely using a superimposed 20-mile hex grid (only shown on one of the rulebook endpaper maps). The Shire map has a scale, but only in leagues, which is, of course, rather vague too, as there is no standard definition of a league!

But if the H P Lovecraft Historical Society do another boxed set of props to go with it... 😏🤑

Like their occupants...⚰️💀👻

Actually, I wasn't talking about the grid at all, but the scalebar, which is still more or less unreadable, because it's set on top of the mountains. If it was placed on the plain-texture open land, it would be easier to read, to see how it relates to the grid size.

When you're using a grid like this, it's really important that the scalebar shows what size the grid is, especially because the grid isn't covering the whole map. This is difficult to tell currently also on both the Zaras Lake and Jibarut maps.

And on the same topic still, the As Sutat map needs some sort of scale adding!

On this As Sutat map as well, there seem to be several flat animals in the NE quarter, towards the lower left of the "Al Diqaq" label. They probably need some shadows adding, I think. Unless of course they really are meant to be flat to the surface - the carpet sheep of As Sutat, perhaps? 😉

They're good looking maps, don't get me wrong; they just need a little tweaking here and there 😊