There has never been a better time to be a tabletop gamer in search of battle maps.
There are Patreons in which talented artists and cartographers hand-create amazingly innovative and breathtaking maps. Sites like DriveThruRPG sell packs of maps, ready to print or import into virtual tabletops and the VTTs themselves give plenty away for free.
But what if battle maps were endless and nearly free? What if it was possible to have such a large supply of digital battle maps that you could chart out an entire empire or run a procedural hex crawl?
Marc Jammy of the challenger virtual tabletop package Battlemapp can show us how close that future is.
Marc uploaded more than 50 randomly generated maps using the BattleMapp.io tool. Marc says random, but it’s clear that these maps aren’t entirely random as there are both cohesion and logic to them.
Rocks huddle together, passageways to adventure through are formed and every now, and then there’s a building.
I think it’s fair enough to say that these maps aren’t the same level of imagination as the hand-drawn designs. That’s to be expected. However, for me, these maps benefit from the fact that they are all so similar. I think it would be comfortable and realistic to create a vast natural landscape from them.
The downside is that these maps don’t line up that well and they’re not a standard size. How come? BattleMapp is dynamic, and these are all presented from an in-game camera. The software isn’t really designed to create a mass of maps to print off and line up, or even import into a rival VTT.
This is just a glance at what the near future could hold.
Fancy adding these maps to your collection? Pop over to Imgur and download them for free.
What do you think? Sound off in the comment section below.
