Manor of Horrors - Master Map Pack

Just wanted to give you some feedback on this map. First off, it's visually incredibly beautiful. The way you've drawn the walls and fireplaces with embellishments and ornamentation is quite unique and fantastic. The textures for the floors are also stunning, very well done not making them repetitive. The lighting is amazing, making the map is also super atmospheric. The design/map flow is simple but straightforward. A nearly fully linear flow from the bottom to the top, but with lots of side elements. While the passages on the sides of the house are very narrow, the fact that they're there and useable is excellent. Some players always want to take the circuitous route. You have clearly made an effort to give the map lots of tactical obstacles, cover and things to stand on etc. That's awesome! (but see below) Now, to some more critical feedback. The main issue with the map is that you can only really run it one way. What I mean here is that the map is so linear you really need to run it from one end to another. You could conceivably start the party inside the house, but that basically just either shortens the run, or inverses it (escape). It also feels a bit weird that buildings this big only have 1 floor. That reinforces the feel of linearity. A bigger problem is that the visual elements present on the map enforces some pretty specific plot lines on the GM. A few of the carpets look extremely worn, but the rest of the furnishings and the house itself look totally pristine. Why? There are tons of crates everywhere, and in one room everything is covered in sheets. Why? Of course I can totally understand that the crates are there to create a cool tactical battlefield (and they do that very well), but their presence demands that the GM explain it somehow. Well at least I think that way. The coffins and *cough* the huge chained demon at the end is also kinda hard to overlook and demand an explanation. In short, this is not just a map, this is a map with a premade adventure. That's both good and bad. There's pretty much only one story I can make up on the fly that explains this whole map, and that involves a cult recently moving into a big old mansion, and clearly doing nastiness there that must be stopped. That's cool, but I can't help but think I'd be more likely to use the map if I could run MY adventure in it, instead of having one "enforced". One solution to this would be to re-release the map without the furnishings, and having those as assets in a separate pack. That would make the map much MUCH more useable. Some other minor comments: I think it would work very well if you made the floor textures a bit darker or something. They're currently visually competing for attention. The way you've drawn the doors looks really weird, it's like you've only drawn the top half? Allright, if you've bothered to read this far, hope it was useful somehow. Cheers!

Asherett