Pathfinder Flip-Mat: Ravages of War Brings Siege and Beachhead Combat to April 2026

When Paizo reprinted Jason A. Engle's Pathfinder Flip-Mat: Battlefield as a Classics title in 2018, five years after its original March 2013 release, the message was clear: players wanted war-terrain maps on the shelf. Ravages of War, which dropped April 1, is Engle's direct return to that space, this time scaled to Pathfinder's largest-ever in-world conflict.

The mat's two sides cover the two broadest categories of large-scale Pathfinder combat. One side depicts a besieged city; the other shows a contested beachhead. Both run at the standard Flip-Mat scale: 24" × 30" unfolded, folding down to 8" × 10" for storage. Line design credit goes to Stephen Radney-MacFarland, who holds the same role across the broader Flip-Mat series, and the mat's coating supports dry erase, wet erase, and permanent marker, with permanent ink removable by tracing over it with a dry-erase marker, waiting ten seconds, then wiping clean.

The practical payoff is shorter prep and faster scene-setting. The besieged city side anchors trench infiltration scenarios cleanly: mark victory-point objectives at the gatehouse and flanking towers, apply Pathfinder's hazard rules to collapsing rubble or boiling oil, and the spatial logic of the encounter is already built into the art. The same side handles breach-and-hold fights, where the party defends a section of wall against counter-attacking forces. Pair the mat with the Monster Core 2 Pawn Box, which also released April 1, and the troop tokens for a full counter-surge are already in hand.

The beachhead side runs two distinct scenario types without modification. An ambush-line encounter positions the party mid-landing against pre-set defenders, using the shoreline as a natural chokepoint; hazards representing incoming arrow fire or catapult strikes add the timed pressure that keeps amphibious fights from stalling. For a no-man's-land rescue, scatter cover tokens across the exposed beach and task the party with reaching a downed Hellbreaker operative before Chelish reinforcements converge. Artillery objective scenarios work on either side: plant a pawn on a siege engine position and run a countdown track until it fires.

All of this arrives at the exact moment it is most useful. Ravages of War released alongside Lost Omens: Hellfire Dispatches, a 128-page sourcebook that maps every front of the Cheliax-Isger-Andoran conflict and introduces 10 new archetypes for characters embedded in the war. The Hellbreakers Adventure Path, the first full-length Pathfinder AP published as a single-volume 256-page hardcover at $79.99, came out March 4. The Pathfinder Society campaign is running Hellfire Crisis scenarios in parallel, which means organized-play groups and home tables are drawing from the same in-world conflict simultaneously.

The Hellfire Crisis began fictionally with the Battle of Hellknight Hill in the summer of 4725 AR, with Cheliax pressing hard against the rebel nation of Isger and its Hellbreaker guerrilla forces, while Andoran stands against the infernal empire. Thirteen years after Engle first mapped the war-terrain genre for Pathfinder, Ravages of War gives every table in that conflict a surface that actually looks the part.