Snowy’s Maps has again found Kickstarter success, this time with a project called Tome of Maps: A Forest Battlemap Book.
It’s a hefty tome, with 100+ maps and three ways to play. These are physical maps, and are we in a world of virtual maps these days? That’s easily solved, as there are VTT formats in this battlemap collection as well.
There’s more than just the tension between physical and virtual. As Snowy tells me, there’s also a sweet spot to find between cartography that looks artistic and playable maps that GMs can use frequently and easily.
A thought and reflection piece by Snowy on this debate follows.
Battlemaps
By Snowy
My introduction to the TTRPG world was an in-person d20 homebrew system that one of my college friends at the time had created. I joined a little later than the rest of the group, having been captivated by the intense roleplay and loose combat sessions that an in-person table brings!
At university, I played in-person sessions of The Expanse RPG, before moving onto mainstream systems like Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder Second Edition. However, at this time COVID hit and our sessions were quickly moved online!
I will admit that I have always felt conflicted about playing in-person vs being online – each bringing a completely different experience! There is certainly something magical about in-person play that you cannot match online (at least I don’t think so). The rush of excitement you experience when you grab snacks for the evening, boast a well-used character sheet, and have fun with friends, is intense!
However, for these sessions, we often used theatre of the mind, and I can say I really struggled, especially when it came to movement and combat within The Expanse system. We all needed to agree on enemy locations, and sometimes mild disagreements broke out, or players got a little bit cheeky! Later, we moved to a whiteboard and pen and that felt a bit easier to navigate, although I still found it difficult without a grid.
After that, my partner started a campaign using Roll20, and used all these beautiful maps from artists like Czepeku, monster art online, and incredibly difficult-to-kill homebrew monsters. The Roll20 interface (at the time) felt incredibly intuitive and fun to use, and my frustrations regarding in person play – particularly surrounding measuring distances and using my surroundings to a tactical advantage, just disappeared. However, I missed the closeness that in-person play can bring to a party – and honestly still miss it to this day.
With this, I wanted to find a new way to bring the immersive nature of VTT-based maps to in-person play, helping other DMs and players alike who may also be struggling with theatre of the mind, or want a new level of immersion for their in-person games. Here, I started to draft up the idea of a forest-themed battlemap book. I also don’t want the book to look pretty on the shelf and instead be genuinely used.
I took to Reddit and asked what type of maps DMs wanted. Many wanted generic maps – pristine wilderness, no human habitation whatsoever. Us battlemap creators are partially at fault here – we make battlemaps that look pretty with little-to-no functional use – to be used once by a group and then never again. I want to normalise generic battlemaps – the maps that DMs need.
So, I created the Tome of Maps: Forest Edition – an 82 paged battlemap book designed to be played in three different ways, saving space where needed, while bridging the gap between beautiful VTT maps and dull maps from the office printer, or whiteboards used for in-person play, bringing a new level of immersion to TTRPG sessions.
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