Become a Great Game Master with Epic Battlemaps

I can’t even guess how many times I relied almost exclusively on a great map to help run a fun tabletop roleplaying game session. Vibrant maps catch your eye, inspire your imagination and evoke a sense of realism and being there. Details provide touchstones for description and dynamic scenarios, scenery hints at fantastic locales and the space on a map simply provides context for the adventure space. So a book of ready to play, immersive and indispensable fold-out maps that fit in your backpack and make a Game Master’s life easier makes the best kind of resources for your RPG collection.

Epic Battlemaps make for epic experiences

Guy Sclanders of How to Be a Great Game Master and great friend to Nerdarchy sailed to great success with his first Kickstarter for A Complete Guide to Nautical Campaigns and he’s back with more awesome stuff for the RPG community with Epic Battlemaps. There’s so many cool things charted out on this project it’s making me want to roll some funny shaped dice right now. For starters something Guy mentions in the video above is a narrative running through the 24 maps in the spiral bound book. This is outstanding and 100% my favorite part of Epic Battlemaps.

This means it’s got value for players and GMs alike. A big book of beautiful, versatile maps holds value for a GM without question. If I’m honest I almost never actually deploy maps during games I run but they are still incredibly useful. Maps are just as much a visual aid for a GM as a player on the other side of the screen as a reference for size, space and other details. Sometimes a room on a map might have symbol drawn on the floor, a mosaic pattern or whatever and these become entry points for characters. What do they mean? Have they seen such things before? When those moments emerge in your games that when the players are hooked. The juice!

Including story elements linking the maps together even loosely gives context and meaning for the material, something I feel can be really inspiring for players interested in stepping into a GM role. I’ve been running games for decades and I love a good narrative thread to follow myself by the same token. So kudos to Guy and the design team for adding those touches to the project. After seeing the prototype map with humongous monster footprints gouged into the ground running across it I’m definitely intrigued by this story!

Please note: Maps appearing in the images on the Epic Battlemaps Kickstarter may not be included in the final book or may appear but in an altered state. But come on — GIANT MONSTER PRINTS!

Battlemaps you can trust

Epic Battlemaps are designed with the Dungeonfog application and the project team spent a good deal of time playtesting the book until it hit all the marks. The book is compact and the writable maps fold out and lay flat and smooth on your gaming table. Digital maps for your favorite platforms are also available. Since the maps fold out in landscape format these digital versions look slick on devices like your laptop or tablet too.

Another clever thing Epic Battlemaps does is create expandable enhanced maps. With two copies of the book many of the maps link together and make huge spaces for exciting adventure. This kind of stuff frankly is just plain neat. It’s fun to show during a game session. One minute you’ve got a couple of spiral bound books behind the screen and the next a large, detailed map for heroes to explore. During these times people get together to play online a lot more but you can take a nod from Nerdarchist Ted and set up a table camera if you’re so inclined. He loves maps and terrain when he’s the GM.

The best reason to check out Epic Battlemaps is the people behind the project. Guy puts a lot of thoughtfulness and consideration into the content he creates because he wants to help people have memorable, awesome game experiences. We’ve worked directly with Guy on his contribution to Out of the Box and gamed with him a bunch so when he puts a ton of work into creating something he uses in his own games we know it’ll be excellent.

Discover the best Epic Battlemaps pledge level for you and your gaming group here.