Battlemaps
A battlemap is a map you fight on. It shares the same canvas as your lore maps — the same upload, the same pan and zoom, the same tokens — but adds the tactical layer: a measured grid, walls that block sight, doors the party can open, light sources, fog of war, and per-character vision.
Set a map's Category to Battle when you create it (or in Map Settings afterwards) so it sorts with your encounter maps rather than your continent.
Press ? anywhere on the map canvas for the full keyboard cheat sheet. Every tool has a single-key shortcut, and you will want them — reaching for the rail mid-fight is the slow way.
The tool rail
The tools are grouped by what they do. Each has a one-key shortcut:
| Group | Tool | Key | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Navigate | Select | V | Click a token, label, or shape to select it |
| Navigate | Pan | H | Drag to move the map. Hold Space from any tool for the same thing |
| Navigate | Measure | M | Click each waypoint, double-click to finish |
| Draw | Label | L | Drop a text label on the map |
| Draw | Region | P | Click vertices, close on the first one |
| Draw | Route | R | Click waypoints, double-click to finish |
| Vision | Fog of War | O | Drag to reveal, Shift+drag to re-hide |
| Vision | Walls | W | Draw connected sight blockers |
| Vision | Lights | I | Place light sources |
| Vision | AOE Template | A | Drag out a circle, cone, or line |
Display toggles sit alongside them: G toggles the grid, D toggles darkness, F fits the map to the view.
Esc steps back one level at a time — first it cancels the shape you are drawing, then it clears the selection, then it exits the tool. Three presses leave the tool entirely; one press usually does what you meant.
Grid and measurement
Open Map Settings to configure the grid. Set this before anything else — walls, movement, and templates are all measured in cells, so a wrong grid makes every one of them wrong.
| Setting | What it controls |
|---|---|
| Grid type | Square or hex |
| Grid size | Cell size in image pixels — match it to the map's own printed squares |
| Unit and units per cell | What one cell means in play (5 ft, 1.5 m, 2 hexes) |
| Colour, opacity | How visible the overlay is |
| Offset X / Y | Nudge the grid so it lines up with artwork that doesn't start at the corner |
Scale calibration
If you know the map's real scale but not its pixel grid, use calibrate instead of guessing. Draw a line across a feature of known length — a printed scale bar, a corridor you know is 20 ft — enter what that distance should be, and the grid size is solved from it. Measurements then match the source cartography instead of approximating it.
Walls, doors, and windows
Walls are what turn a picture into a playable space. Draw with the Walls tool W: click to place each point, and connected points form one continuous wall. The Draw / Select / Rect sub-menu lets you edit a placed wall, select single nodes, or marquee-select a group of them.
Right-click a wall segment for its radial menu. Every wall has a type:
| Type | Sight | Movement | Use for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wall | Blocked | Blocked | Solid stone, building exteriors |
| Door | Blocked while closed | Blocked while closed | Anything the party can open |
| Window | Clear | Blocked | Shutters, arrow slits, glass — you can see through, you can't walk through |
| Terrain | Obscures with depth | Clear | Undergrowth, rubble, thick smoke — you can see into it and push through it, but not see indefinitely through it |
Sight and movement deliberately diverge on two of the four. A window is glass: you see through it, you don't walk through it. Terrain is undergrowth: it obscures, but you can push into it — pair it with a difficult-terrain region if you want it to cost movement too.
Doors carry two extra states from the same menu: open / closed, and locked / unlocked. Opening a door during play re-computes sight for everyone immediately — the corridor beyond it lights up on the player portal and the table display at the same moment it does for you.
Lighting and darkness
Toggle darkness with D. With darkness on, the map is unlit except where you place light.
Place lights with the Lights tool I. Each light carries:
- a bright and a dim radius, in cells
- a colour, which follows the light everywhere it is drawn — your canvas, the player portal, the table display, and any duplicate you make of it
- a shadow mode — Blocked means walls cast shadows from it; Ambient means it fills the scene regardless of geometry
Set the world's darkness level in Map Settings to control how dark "dark" actually is, and pick a default light colour so new lights start where you want them.
Keep placing lights without switching tools — the newest light stays active until you click empty space to finish it, and that finishing click doesn't drop another light.
Vision and lighting style
Vision & lighting style in Map Settings decides how sight and light are computed and drawn:
| Mode | Look | When to use |
|---|---|---|
| Radial | Soft, wall-clipped circles | The default. Works on square, hex, and gridless maps alike |
| Hex | Wall-clipped reveal on true hex cells | Hex tactical play, regardless of the map's own grid type |
| Square | Jagged grid-cell reveal — the original look | Classic square-grid dungeons. The fog, wall, and light tools need a square grid in this mode |
Imported VTT maps are set to Radial automatically, since it is the only mode that clips to walls no matter what the grid is doing.
Wall-occluded sight
With walls drawn, a character's view stops at them. What lies around a corner is shaded even on a fully lit map — line of sight limits the view, not just darkness. Players see their own character's sight in the portal and on the table display; you see everything.
Fog of war
Fog is separate from lighting. It's the map memory: where the party has been.
- Fog of War tool O — drag to reveal an area, Shift+drag to hide it again
- The fog overlay toggle in the Display group shows or hides fog on your own screen without changing what players see
Use lighting for what a character can see right now, and fog for what the party has explored.
Templates, pings, and measuring
- AOE Template A — drag out a circle, cone, or line at a real size. Click a placed template to remove it. Area actions taken from a stat block arm the exact template that action describes; see Running combat.
- Measure M — click each waypoint, double-click to finish. Measured in your grid's own units.
- Ping — Alt+click anywhere to flash a ring everyone at the table sees, on your screen, the player portal, and the table display. Pings are deliberately available to players too — it's the cheap "look here" gesture, and it never persists.
Animated battlemaps
Maps can be video as well as image. Upload an MP4, M4V, or WebM and it loops beneath tokens, walls, lighting, and fog exactly as a still image would — rain on the flagstones, torchlight flicker, water moving under a bridge.
Video maps are capped at 500 MB. Everything else on the canvas behaves identically.
Importing a map from another VTT
Dungeondraft, Dungeon Alchemist, and most commercial map packs export a .uvtt, .dd2vtt, or .df2vtt file. That's a single file carrying the map image and its wall, door, and light geometry.
- Open Maps in the world sidebar and click + New Map.
- Choose the VTT File source.
- Drop the
.uvtt/.dd2vtt/.df2vttfile in. - Check the summary — it reports how many walls, doors, and lights were found, the grid size, and the image dimensions.
- Name the map and create it.
Walls, doors, and lights arrive already drawn and positioned. Doors come in with the open or closed state the source file recorded. Lights are given a bright radius from the source's range and a dim radius twice that, which is the convention every VTT importer follows.
If a file has problems the import can work around — a light with no range, a malformed polyline — it imports anyway and lists what it skipped. If the file can't be read at all, nothing is created and the error says why. A half-imported map is never left behind.
Troubleshooting
Walls don't block anything. Check the vision mode. Square mode needs a square grid for the fog, wall, and light tools to compute against — on a hex or gridless map, switch to Radial.
The grid doesn't line up with the map's own squares. Set Grid size to the map's actual cell size in pixels, then use Offset X / Y to shift the overlay onto the artwork. If you don't know the pixel size, use scale calibration instead.
A light is lighting through a wall. Its shadow mode is set to Ambient. Right-click the light and set it to Blocked so walls cast shadows from it.
Players can see around a corner they shouldn't. Make sure the wall is a Wall or a closed Door. A Window is fully see-through by design, and Terrain only obscures with depth — a character standing at its edge still sees a short way in.
My imported map's walls are offset from the artwork. The source exported a sub-region of a larger map. Re-export from the source tool without cropping, or nudge the grid offset to match.
A video map shows a black rectangle. Check the format — MP4, M4V, and WebM are supported. Other containers won't decode.
See also
- Running combat — tokens, initiative, and resolving attacks on the map
- Table Display — putting the battlemap on a TV at the table
- Maps and locations — lore maps, pins, regions, and routes
- GM Screen — running the map inside a live session