To Battlemaps or Not to Battlemap (hint: here's a free Battlemap!) (Patreon)

So, are we going for theatre of the mind for combat, or are we using battlemaps and miniatures?

Well...

This was a matter of some debate here at LAWhammer. Some of the party wanted it to be battlemaps all the way, others wanted theatre of the mind, but most figured somewhere in the middle made most sense. After all, it would be hard to have a map ready for every potential eventuality our live stream will kick up!

After several playtests, it was decided that battlemaps really helped everyone visualise the combat. But no one wanted us to use a virtual tabletop - after all, we were all gathered around a table!

So, it fell upon me to make some maps for us to try out our preferences - thank goodness I'm a cartographer and can whip up maps quickly!

However, we also had to figure out how to best show these maps to you at home watching the stream. Miniatures may work well for us at the table, but they wouldn't be easy to scan on camera.

So, I went with coin holders.

Yup, you read that correctly.

I printed out some tokens, cut them into circles, them popped them into coin holders. This gave me counters that I could move around the map with ease, and also looked great if viewed from above with a camera!

Win!

So, that means that every major combat we have during our playthrough of The Enemy Within will have a battlemap.

And, yes, I'll be creating those as needed and putting them on the blog afterwards.

Many of these maps will be posted up for free. Others - special locations I've created myself, mostly - will be posted for All Access patrons and higher (if you want to know more about that, check our membership page).

That process has already begun. As we playtested the various rules we plan to use, I build quick maps and printed them out for us to use.

The maps up already for our All Access patrons are Forest Paths, The Winter Circle, The Battle For The Ruin, and The Battle 'Tween The Stones - they were all made for our playtests.

For example, this is the lo-res version of the Forest Paths map. It'll give you an idea of what to expect.

In fact, I'll just add all the Forest Paths maps here for you to take a look at. Seems a good way of saying thanks for dropping by the blog. Find the various versions of the map attached to this post as jpegs. Use them any way you fancy for non-commercial purposes (no nabbing the map and putting it in your books, please!).

Here's the different versions I've posted:

1) Gridded map. 44x40.
2) Gridded map with special squares marked. 44x40. Yellow squares for PC deployment area. Green squares for forest. Brown for difficult terrain. And, finally, red for objectives.
3) Gridded map. 22x20.
4) Battle map with no grid!

Actually, on that, do tell me if you use this map in a streamed game. It'd be awesome to see the map doing the thing!

This is the low-resolution version of The Winter Circle map for you to also have a look at.

Super fun drawing that one. Whipped it up the night before we were playing, and it just kinda fell into place. Nowadays I'm doing the Mapping Kalegen streams in the same time slot, so no more impromptu maps the night before!

So, mapwise, what's next?

I'll be dropping another big battlemap for The Bride of von Carstein (the free adventure I'll be posting as a part of our pre-launch 20-day countdown), and it will be free to everyone. I've not finished it yet (it was created very quickly for our session last Friday), but I do have a preview of where it is just now. The finished map will be a bit different (mostly, tidier).

So, yes, lots of battlemaps are upcoming from us here at LAWhammer. We hope you enjoy using them as much as we do!

Also: 16 days to go!