Even if you already own some other miniatures-scale tavern map, as I do, you still might find Tendril's Oak Inn to be a good purchase if, like me, you don't want every inn or tavern your PCs visit to look the same. As the product description and the cover illustration show, Tendril's Oak Inn sits along a road running alongside a wood—a classic fantasy trope useful in almost any fantasy RPG campaign.
The artwork depicting the inn is very nice and seems to have been created using Campaign Cartographer (or a similar tool). The product includes several different types of maps—battlemaps (in black and white, color, or color with a white background), overview maps, and "scratch maps" suitable for adding DM or player notes—though I'm not quite sure why Encompass found it necessary to distribute so many different PDFs; I can't see any good reason, for example, why the scratch maps come in four one-page PDFs instead of one four-page PDF. (Personally, I also don't like having animals depicted statically on the maps. I can just hear it now: "We'll hide our loot under the third pig on the left. He never moves.")
If all you want is a good map of a woodland inn, this product will serve you well. But the author goes beyond that, and supplies a key to the inn's layout as well as notes on NPCs, plot hooks, and so on, all of which the DM can use or ignore as desired.
Tendril's Oak Inn was my first experience with the Encompass line, and I certainly like it well enough to check out other offerings in the series.
|