The following review was originally posted at Roleplayers Chronicle and can be read in its entirety at http://roleplayerschronicle.com/?p=33921.

Trader’s Wharf is perfect for a fantasy encounter by the sea or the river. The depicted terrain includes a small merchant ship docked on the shore next to a nice little warehouse, with quality terrain features for fantasy encounters. This battlemap is perfect for some serious medieval mayhem!

OVERALL

This is a beautiful battlemap. The art is excellent and the terrain allows the characters or their antagonists to approach the dock from land or sea with equal facility. What players get, once the sheets are assembled, is an artistic depiction of a medieval or renaissance private dock with suitable surroundings.

RATINGS

Publication Quality: 10 out of 10 Jonathan Roberts has done an excellent job with this publication, which includes a square-grid depiction in full color as well as one in printer-friendly greyscale. The panels are sized such that they can be printed on both letter or A4 paper. Owners of this product should print this at actual size, with no scaling. There are complete instructions, and the panels are set with an overlap for precise positioning and taping. The white edges can be entirely removed and the pieces will combine seamlessly. One excellent way to make this last is to get adhesive lamination sheets from an office supply store and cover the sections, cutting the plastic to fit. Alternately, a print shop can easily laminate the sections. Either way, once assembled and taped together using the slight overlap provided, nothing shifts or stains when players get excited and spill their beverages during a hasty boarding action or while attempting to pillage the warehouse.

Visual Appeal: 9 out of 10 If you’ve been spoiled by multiple-layer PDF renditions, be aware that this is a single-layer file, so what you see is what you get. In my opinion, this map is perfect. The debris and stacked items inside the warehouse are well-depicted, as is the dock and surrounding terrain. The color selections are beautiful, and they give this battlemat a realistic appearance. The ship at the dock is well-rendered. If you’ve seen the Princess Bride movie, this ship is very close to the size and shape of the ship operated by Vizzini the Sicilian villain, roughly 60 feet from bow to stern, and is fully detailed in another product: Fantastic Maps – Merchantman. If you want internal details of the lower decks or would like to float off in the ship after leaving the dock, pick up that product as well.

Desire to Use: 10 out of 10 As a high fantasy genre gamer, I’m using this! I’ve already laminated my set and will be enjoying it at the next gaming convention. This battlemap perfectly depicts a shoreline haven for characters or their foes. Whether the characters are armed with swords, crossbows, or magic wands, this is an excellent product for the ragged edge between the land and sea!

Overall: 10 out of 10 Trader’s Wharf is a high-quality addition to your fantasy environments and another fine product from Rite Publishing. Trader’s Wharf allows the Game Master to establish a rich tactical shoreline situation that is visually appealing.

This installment of Jonathan Robert's Fantastic Maps-series is 35 pages long, 1 page front cover, 1 page how-to use, leaving 33 pages for the maps, so let's take a look!

This map depicts a wharf with one one-mast ship as well as a storage house that sports multiple planks of wood, crates, barrels, sacks and similar goods. Detailed in gorgeous full-color with grids, the one-page map is beautiful and the pdf also provides 16 pages of blown-up versions of the map in color and 16 in B7w to print out the map with its grid and put miniatures on it. The map also comes with 3 high-res jpegs: One with a grid, one sans grid (for people like yours truly who don't want necessarily grids in their maps) and one jpegs with something new: Old-school gamers can enjoy the map overlaid with hexes instead of square grids. Nice! Maptool files are also part of the deal, as is a separate pdf of 43 pages that has the map in A4-format for Europeans like yours truly. Cool!

Conclusion: These maps are gorgeous, as is befitting of Jonathan Robert's craft and the map is useful, neat and a joy to see - the additional jpegs and alternate A4-format being icing on the cake. There is only one thing I'd complain about and that is, that in contrast to other ship-featuring pdfs of the line, we don't get the lower decks of the ship. Also, be aware that the maps don't come with layers, meaning that if you want the storage house instead be a contor, you'll be out of luck: One level of layers to get rid of planks, barrels and the like to further customize the map would have made this good map stand out as awesome. As provided, I'll settle for a final verdict of 4 stars for this installment of the series.

Endzeitgeist out.