Battlemaps require much more time to create than other types. This is because you’re working at a level were small object detail is viable or even important. This leads the mind towards wanting to make things as realistic as possible, which tends to take a lot of time.

In this article, I’m going to show you how to make a battlemap for a small, simple inn, such as might be found in any fantasy setting. This is a long post, but there’s a lot of information here.

It is possible to map out an entire dungeon as a battlemap. In fact, I have done so! It took a lot of time. I recommend against doing this. Instead, use a blueprint and a dry-erase battlemat. You can buy battlemaps in all sorts of shapes and sizes (I prefer ones that fold up) and that already have printed grids (usually squares on one side and hexes on the other). You can sketch out the walls and important areas of a room quickly and easily and then erase them when they’re done.

If you actually make full battlemaps for only parts of your dungeon, the players will know combat approaches when you pull out the battlemap and lay it on the table.

Considerations

A Quick Note on Realism

I want to warn you: Do NOT fall into the “Realism is better” trap here. It is not. Maps are meant to convey information. While they can be beautiful, they are not works of art. If you want to make a painting, make a painting.

Battlemaps convey local, immediate information to players. It is highly likely that the players are going to be involved in combat in the area. This means that they will want to know exactly where other things are in relation to their characters: walls, doors, enemies, other player characters, cliff edges, fires, furniture, and difficult terrain are all things that they need to know at a glance. Playing on a battlemap helps people pick targets because they know how far away they are and helps spell-casters not blow up the entire party with a fireball.

When a battlemap looks too realistic, these important details (how far away is the door?) get lost. I’ve seen maps that are absolutely gorgeous, hyper-realistic, and completely useless. Of course it’s darker in the lowest deck of the ship; I still need to know where the ladder is. It will be tempting to blend the Player Grid (see below) to the point where it’s too subtle to notice and your players suffer eyestrain trying to determine the number of squares between X and Y.

For this purpose, you should feel free to ditch “realism” in many places and enhance the map with additional keys. For instance, wooden doors set into wooden walls may not be recognizable as doors without squinting. A solution: add a non-realistic and easy-to-read stroke inside the door itself to help distinguish that it is a functional object.

Printing and Sizing Strategies

Make sure you’ve read the “On File Resolutions and Dimensions” section in Fantasy Map Design Basics.

With most maps, altering the size and resolution can be done after the fact. You want to add more detail to your island? Up the scale, clean some edges, no problem. However, with battlemaps, it is important to start knowing the size of the map.

When starting a battlemap, know ahead of time how big you plan to print it and set your canvas size to that exactly. If you’re going to print at 11 inches by 14 inches, set the canvas size to 11 inches by 14 inches, with a display resolution of 300dpi.

Always use 300dpi, even if you don’t think you’re going to print it. It costs you nothing and you will regret it if you ever have to upscale.

Photoshop has some default canvas sizes you can pick from that may meet your needs but honestly just create a new document of any size and then resize it immediately.

Sometimes you will want to create a single map that is in chunks – like a dungeon, where you want to reveal a room at a time. This is a great strategy and I’ll go in more detail about that below, but if you plan to do so it’s good to pick a uniform size for each section. Further, you’ll want the size to be an even number (so 11×14 and not 11×8.5). The reason why is that when you apply the Scaling Grid you want the grids to match and when the size isn’t divisible by a whole inch, things get funky.

For the inn, I’m not going to go big. I want to be able to print this at home cheaply, so I’m going to set the canvas size to 8.5 inches by 11 inches at 300dpi (it’s going to be a single page, so I’m not worried about the player grids matching up). Set the color of the background layer (the dirt) to a brown color (#603913) by double-clicking it to make it editable and then filling it using the Paint Bucket tool.

Scaling Grid

A hallmark of battlemaps is the Scaling Grid. This is an overlay of squares or hexes that represent a single “space” on the map. In many games, a single “space” on the battlemap represents a 5 foot square area.

The choice to use a square or a hexagon player grid depends on the game. Most character-based role-playing games will use squares, while most tactical war games will use hexagons. Either way, you should always use a “1 inch” grid pattern (measured in inches, not pixels). Battlemaps do not typically have sub-grids.

When it comes time to finalize the map, you’ll end up doing a lot more with this grid. I’ll discuss that later, but for now you have something you can work with.

Design Steps

The steps to to creating a battlemap are:

1. Draw the Base
2. Add Walls, Doors, and Other Objects
3. Add Basic Style
4. Dollhousing
5. Add Ground Detail
6. Finalization

Draw the Base

Ideally you have a vague idea of how the map is going to be laid out. Sketching on paper ahead of time can save some headaches, but don’t import that paper. I will often create a layer called “sketch” and draw on that using a tablet. Either way, you’re going to have to start laying down elements.

Start with the floor. Make a shape (color #dddddd) that will cover the entire floor. Don’t worry about walls just yet. I like to use the various Shape tools to draw in large areas, one layer per room, and then merge them all together (remember to “Merge Shape Components” if you do this!). When I’ve done that, I’ll then futz with the anchor points on the edges to size it how I like, or to make angles, or whatever.

Whatever you end up with, call this layer “Base” (or whatever you like, but I’ll be using the term Base).

Feel free to modify this as you go. Add, remove, reshape, whatever. That’s the point of using vectors here.

The inn isn’t going to be that big: a large room for a bar, a kitchen/storage area, a large common room for sleeping, and a small room for the owners to sleep in. All the walls will be made out of stone and the floors out of wood.

Once you have a floor, you may want to move on to the walls.

Add Walls, Doors, and Other Objects

When it comes time to add walls to a set of rooms, you may think to yourself, “Self, I’ll just copy the Base layer, re-size it by 20 pixels on each side, call it Walls, and then subtract a copy of the Base from that! Simple-dimple!” You’d be right! This is a great starting place. Do just that, and make sure your Walls layer has a color of #222222.

Resizing a layer is easy: hit <command>t to activate the resize controls. Holding down <shift> while resizing constrains the aspect ratio, and you can see how many pixels your increasing the layer by. If you want 20 pixels on a side, increase it by 40. When you’re done, hit <enter>t and then re-center the layer.

Alternatively, duplicate the Base layer and then using the Direct Selection tool select the outer anchors for each wall and nudge them outwards by however large you want (30 pixels is good). Remember: holding down <shift> while doing so moves things by 10 pixels at a time.

But that’s simply going to give you a box around the floor, with no internal walls. How do you make those easily? The Pen tool. Create a new layer called “Internal Walls”. Hell, you can create a lot of these layers. Maybe use a different color for these (the colors will merge later). Draw your walls with the Pen tool. You may want to make sure that they overlap your main Walls layer where they intersect it (you’ll fix this later).

Go back over your interior wall anchor points. Make sure they line up with your exterior walls (either perfectly on the grid or overlapping). Nudge areas around to make sure they’re the right width. At 300dpi resolution, if one “inch” (the size of the grid) stands for 5 feet, then a single foot is 60 pixels. Doorways are often around 3 feet wide, sometimes less, sometimes more. Exterior walls for small structures tend to be a half-foot thick (30 pixels) while interior walls are smaller (20 pixels). Exterior walls for castles and larger building will be even thicker.

When you’ve got them laid out and futzed with them enough, merge all your interior wall shapes with your main Walls layer. Don’t forget to Merge Shape Components. Now you have your walls as a single layer.

Note that if you have different kinds of walls (some stone, some wood, say), that you’ll want to have each of them be their own shapes because you’ll want to apply different patterns to them.

Got some doors? Make shapes for them, too. Place them and rotate them into where you want them. You should keep your doors that run left-to-right on a different layer than the ones that run top-to-bottom because when you apply patterns to them you want them to run the right direction (an alternative – and frankly, better – solution is to create a single door as a template, get your patterns right, rasterize it, and then place them, but you’ll figure that out when you get there).

You may find that you need to make some holes in the walls for your doors. Do that now. You may find that you need to resize the widths of your doorways or increase the size of your Base layer. This is why you use shapes.

Got a stairwell? Just make a shape to block it in for now (there’s a separate set of instructions for them – see Technique: Making Stairs).

Add a Walkway to the inn’s door (maybe use the Freeform Pen tool!).

You’ll want to develop a consistent color scheme for your objects. What colors you use probably won’t matter (unless you apply patterns in modes that bleed the color through), but you want them to be distinct (so that you can work on the map with Layer Styles turned off). I use these colors:

• Background: #603913 (brown)
• Base: #dddddd (super-light grey)
• Walls: #222222 (super-dark grey)
• Doors: #c7a13b (yellow ochre)
• Water: #00aeef (blue)
• Vegetation: #008740 (green)
• Roads/Paths: #c69c6d (tan)

Add Basic Style

Right now your map probably just looks like some shapes and not very different from a blueprint map. Now you can start applying layer effects – especially pattern overlays – to the elements.

Is the map in a cave? Find a good stone texture and use that as the overlay for the Base layer. Are you walls made of wood or stone? Apply the right pattern. Patterns can be found lots of places; I recommend signing up or joining a site like Sketchup Texture Club to find them. Any pattern will do; seamless patterns are the best, however.

Add and remove layer effects as you see fit. Give your walls a subtle outer glow (Blend mode: Multiply, Opacity: 75%; Color: #222222; Technique: Softer; Spread: 0; Size: 20) to simulate depth, or add slight strokes to emphasize things if needed.

You may want to call out interactive objects differently. I like to put a 2 pixel yellowish stroke on the inside of doors to distinguish them, for instance. Purely realistic battlemaps aren’t overly useful: Maps are meant to convey information at a glance.

For the inn, I’ll set the floors to a light wood, the walls to a stone pattern, and the doors to a darker wood pattern. The Walkway gets a flagstone paving treatment and I’ll just apply a simple “dirt” pattern to the outside for now (I’ll revisit this later). Add a layer for the kitchen floor and give it a stone treatment (kitchens were made on stone floors to help prevent fires).

Here are some of my favorite patterns for floors and walls:

Dollhousing

Dollhousing is the term I use to describe the process of filling the battlemap with objects and dressing to give it “life”. Tables, chairs, desks, beds, and other furniture are required to fill out a battlemap. Desks need papers and books, kitchens need barrels and onions and chickens and ham hocks.

Fill your battlemap with these things as need be, either by using pre-made assets images or by creating your own objects. I prefer to make my own assets, but that’s me. I find the process soothing. I recommend making a separate file that contains a library of battlemap assets.

You can search the internet for “Battlemap Assets” or something similar to find packages of pre-made objects like chairs and tables. Be warned, though: these assets may not be set to the scale you’re using, and resizing them (especially enlarging them) will dilute their fidelity.

The section on Making Battlemap Assets goes into greater detail about this process. I highly recommend you work in a separate library for “common” items (chairs, tables, beds, etc.) and pull those into your map from there.

However, it is nearly always true that specialized assets will need to be constructed for individual maps. In the case of the inn, I’ll have to create a specialized Bar.

Create a new layer group called “Items”. This is where you’re going to put all the layers for the dollhouse items. I like to create sub-groups for each room as well (“Kitchen”, “Storage”, “Main Room”, “Common Room”, etc.). This way you can turn on or off all the items at the same time.

Placing an asset is very simple.

You’ll want to give subtle shadows to your assets. Do this with an Outer Glow layer effect: Blend Mode: Multiply; Opacity: 75%; Color: #222222; Spread: 20 pixels; Size: 20 pixels. Objects that are “taller” (have a top surface higher from the ground) may want a larger sized glow, while smaller objects (especially tools set on tables and the like) will want smaller glows.

Much of the time, creating an asset is straightforward. A table is a shape made with the Rounded Rectangle tool, a pattern of wood or boards, and a dark grey shadow or outer glow to indicate depth. Maybe a stroke or two. You’ll probably want to rasterize it if you do rotation so that the pattern doesn’t rotate with it.

Other times, you’ll have to create an object out of multiple layers, each one with its own function and style. A simple bed, for instance, may require several layers: a base, one for the cover, one for the cover’s “tuck down”, one for each pillow. When you create a complex object, make sure to do so within a containing layer group so the object can be manipulated as a whole.

If you have a pen tablet and know how to use it, add layers for shadows or details that you can add with brushes. I like to keep a layer for “Lights” (set to Screen) and a layer for “Darks” (set to Multiply).

Start populating the inn with things. The kitchen needs a stove and a fire pit as well as some sacks and chickens and cutting boards. The store-room needs barrels and crates. The sleeping rooms need beds and chests. Add whatever details you feel are necessary. Do some research about what kinds of things would be there.

Creating the Bar

Inns serve food and drink. That means that they have bars. You need to put a bar in the inn. The bar is going to serve both as a place to order drinks and as a gateway to the kitchen. Since barrels and crates will have to be moved through it, it will need a lifting door. The bar area itself will need casks and barrels (obviously) but for now just concentrate on making the bar itself.

Start by creating the shape of the bar itself.

So far so good, but it doesn’t quite feel realistic yet. Add some hinges to the bar for the lifting door.

You should now have a rectangle where the hinges are supposed to go. Next, you’re going to add some details using the Brush tool. Don’t worry! You won’t have to know how to draw at all, just how to click on the canvas. You’re only using two colors.

Now add a subtle shadow to the hinge using the Brush tool.

Next, add a subtle highlight in the same manner, except using the Highlights layer and the color #dddddd:

You’ll notice that if you don’t click exactly in the center that the lines will be larger than 1 pixel. That’s fine. Trust the layer modes.

Now add in the hinge marks. For this, use the Pencil tool as it draws perfect lines. The process is similar but you’ll be doing this multiple times.

Play around with the opacity of these layers. The Hinge Marks layer may want to be at 75% opacity, for instance. Use your best judgement.

At this point, you should have a fairly decent bar shape! You can add more details as you desire (spills, cups, etc.) but the heavy lifting has been done. Now you may want to rasterize it so that it doesn’t eat up a lot of CPU power simply being drawn (see “Tip: Temporary Rasterizing” in the Photoshop Layer Styles and Effects article for details).

Throw a couple of barrels underneath it. Bars need barrels. Add some chairs underneath it as well.

Add Ground Detail

You’ll notice that the outside looks kind of… plain. Time to spruce it up. You do this with a technique that is simple but uses the brushes. You’re going to paint texture over the ground in a several places.

First, you need to import some textures. For this tutorial, I’m going to be super simple here and use a single grass texture and a gravel texture.

Add some grass.

You will use this painting technique a lot. If you have a pen tablet with pressure sensitivity, use a brush with pressure sensitivity set to opacity.

Add some gravel around the path to the inn’s door.

That doesn’t look quite right, though. The path is difficult to discern since it’s similar in color to the gravel. So change the color of the gravel.

The edges of the walkway should now look much better!

You’re mostly done with the basics now. It’s missing a lot of things that should be accounted for, though. The place is probably pretty dreary without windows, for instance, and there don’t have any assets for cups and crockery – but this is good for this tutorial.

Finalization

Finalization of a battlemap has a few extra steps beyond the normal finalization routines.

Cleaning Some Effects

Sometimes you’ll find that there are shadows or glows cast by some objects that are creeping into places they don’t belong. The shadow of a table crossing through a wall, for instance. In these cases, rasterizing the objects makes their shadows “solid”, so you can then remove or trim them using any standard tool (select and delete, or an eraser, or whatever). I usually have to do this with doors that are casting shadows into their containing walls, for instance.

Cleaning the Scaling Grid

By default, your Scaling Grid will be covering the entire map. That may not be necessary or desirable. As such, you may want to reduce the grid’s coverage to only the “playable” areas on the map. You’re going to delete sections from your grid layer to do this.

I typically delete along these lines:

• The inverse of my floor or base layer (so immediately only the playable area)
• My various “wall” layers (so that the grid lines don’t show up in the walls)
• My various “door” layers (so the lines aren’t inside doors)

Scaling Grid Finalization

The display mode you select for a battlemap’s Scaling Grid is different from other maps. With battlemaps, the Scaling Grid imparts essential information so it shouldn’t take much effort to pick out.

Pick a blend mode for the grid. Overlay usually works very well, but you should play around with it. You may want to experiment with applying a color overlay, rasterizing that, and then selecting a different blend mode, even. With the inn, I’ve set the Scaling Grid to Color Dodge with a 50% opacity.

Place the grid layer in the stack where it works best: Below any legends, markers, and labels (game information), but above any room contents or details (location information). If you’ve “cleaned” it, you may not need to move it at all.

From time to time you may want to delete a pattern from Photoshop’s presets (they can eat RAM) so you’ll want to get one back if you do.

I will update this post with patterns as they are added to other or new articles.

Grid Patterns

General Noise Patterns

Forest and Vegetation Patterns

Wood Patterns

Stone Patterns

I will be updating this post with links to new techniques as I write them.

• Moss – how to paint on additional textures to surfaces
• Puddles – how to add wet effects to surfaces.
• Stairs – moving between levels.
• Tree Stumps – treacherous terrain.
• Water – the wettest of wet things.
• Windows – punching holes in walls and filling them with glass.

This post describes a technique for painting in your puddles. It uses layer masks and filters. You can adapt this technique to use other filters with experimentation if you want – and I encourage you to do so.

For the example, I’ve got a subterranean stone bridge that crosses a pool of water. The water had been higher than the bridge and was drained through the bottom, leaving the bridge wet. A monster lurks in the water and will attack while the players are crossing. The wet stone will give them disadvantage in their combat.

The bridge is already designed and exists in a layer called “Bridge”. This is where I want the puddles to be.

The first thing to do is make the entire thing wet using the Plastic Wrap filter.

Add some color to the water with a color overlay so that it isn’t crystal clear and pure.

Reduce all that water to puddles by erasing what is not puddles.

You can also do this using a layer mask instead if you know how to do that but you’ll be painting where the puddles are rather than where they are not.

You won’t find sets of stairs in many asset packs, so you’ll need to make your own. Fortunately, it’s a fairly easy (if tedious) process. You will often want to build your sets of stairs in your own battlemap asset library.

In my example, I have a pit with a lowered walkway. There are stairs that lead down into it from the previous level, so I need to add the stairs to block the area out.

The first thing to do is create some shapes for each stair and apply a pattern to them. Dungeons stairs are made of stone but you could use a wood pattern as well. This is tedious work and involves dragging the pattern around.

For stone steps, you will want to clean the edges of each stair using the Eraser tool to dip into where the grout would be. This is not important with wooden steps.

All that clean up work is for nothing if there isn’t visible depth by adding shadows and strokes.

If you find that you don’t have enough stairs, you can always duplicate step layers and mix them around. Just remember that each one is 15 pixels above the other.

Now, you can either merge the stair pixel layers together and treat them as a single layer or move and modify them. I recommend saving the individual layers out into a battlemap asset library.

For my pit, I’ve pushed the stairs down against the pit wall, further than the edges of it, selected all the Wall pixels, and deleted those parts of the stairs so that they fit with the circular shape.

A tree stump is made from three layers (the top, the rings, and the roots) and then grass and moss is painted over them in their own layers. Note that if you don’t want to have these appear as “stumps”, you can skip all the ring-creation steps and just set the Stump Top layer to be solid grey.

A Freeform Pen drawn shape with a grey stroke produces a really basic, crude tree stump shape.

Add some rings. You might think to yourself, “Self, I bet I could do this with inner strokes!” and you would be correct, but the result will not enthuse you for three reasons:

1. Inner strokes within odd shapes end up getting sharp corners, which don’t feel organic.
2. Inner strokes always step on each other regardless of how you order them. You have to do your “spacing” strokes in the same color as your base. There are ways around this using multiple layers and fill opacity settings, but they look just as janky.
3. You have a limited number of strokes, which won’t be enough to fill the stump.

Thus, you have to draw them with a brush. Now would be a good time to bust out your pen tablet. You are going to draw rings in their own layer by hand.

Once you’ve got a stump with some rings, it is time to grungify the bark on the main stump – to make it irregular. You’re going to rasterize the Stump Top layer and attack it with the Eraser tool and then add an outside stroke to it.

It’s time to add a shape for the roots. You’ll create a basic shape with the Freeform Pen tool and then apply some texture and a smooth inner bevel.

Now it’s time to blend some grass and moss overtop the roots. This is done with a technique similar to that described in the adding moss tutorial.

If you want to add moss, do so using the same technique in a new layer (below Stump Grass and above Stump Roots). Remember that moss mostly (but not exclusively) grows on the north side of trees in the northern hemisphere and on the south side of trees in the southern hemisphere.

* Contrary to popular belief, tree bark is usually a grey and not a brown. Children have been conditioned for decades to use brown crayons to draw trees, but that is yet another lie perpetrated by the main stream, fake-news media.

** If you’re dealing with redwoods, the color is closer to #673d22.

Is the water running or mostly still? Is it in a fountain or pool, or is it free-standing? Is it murky or can you see what’s beneath the surface? Are there things floating in it? Each of these things can add complexity to how you create it.

We’ll discuss a couple of ways to do this but the magic nearly always lies in the blending mode of the Water layer.

I’m going to use the same water pattern (Water – Seamless).

Sewer Water

This style is super-simple and is made with two layers: a Base layer and the Water layer. These layers look like this:

• Water: 0% fill opacity, Normal blend mode, and a pattern overlay of “Water – Seamless” set to Multiply at 100% opacity.
• Base: A tan-brown color (#a67c52) and that’s it.

Changing the color of the Base layer will change the color of the water itself. The color switches aren’t intuitive, however, given the Multiply mode for the Water pattern.

Beach and Shorelines

This one is a bit more complex, if only because the water is a shape and the application of the sea foam. This one is three layers: a Foam layer, a Water layer, and a Base layer.

• Foam: Normal blend mode with a pattern of “Sea Foam – Seamless” set at Normal. You paint the foam in with a brush, using increasing opacity, like how I explained in the moss tutorial.
• Water: 0% fill opacity, Normal blend mode, and a pattern overlay of “Water – Seamless” set to Multiply at 100% opacity.
• Base: any color with the “Sand – Seamless” pattern applied to it in Normal mode.

A Pool of Water

This is the most complicated example, but only because of the strokes. There are three layers, two circle shapes (Base and Water) and a pixel layer that is the kraken image (Kraken).

• Water: 0% fill opacity, Normal blend mode, and a pattern overlay of “Water – Seamless” set to Multiply at 100% opacity.
• Kraken: Set in Linear Burn mode with a color overlay of #222222 set in Color mode at 100% and a pattern overlay of “Tiles – Seamless” set in Color Burn mode (“link with layer” is unchecked).
• Base: a blue #0072bc circle, Normal blend mode with 100% opacity values, an inner glow (color #222222, 60% opacity, Multiply Mode, choke 0, size 250), a color overlay of #3cb878 set to Color Burn mode, a pattern overlay of “Tiles – Seamless” set to Normal mode, and an outer glow to provide depth (color #222222 at 75% opacity, Multiply, and 250 size). It also has the following strokes:
  • 1 px outside, Multiply blend mode at 70%, overprint, color: #222222
  • 9 px outside, Normal blend mode at 100%, overprint, pattern: Brass – Seamless
  • 10 px outside, Multiply blend mode at 70%, overprint, color: #222222
  • 75 px outside, Normal blend mode at 100%, overprint, pattern: Light Marble – Seamless
  • 76 px outside, Multiply blend mode at 70%, overprint, color: #222222
  • 81 px outside, Normal blend mode at 100%, overprint, pattern: Brass – Seamless
  • 82 px outside, Multiply blend mode at 70%, overprint, color: #222222

This post describes a technique for adding windows to walls for use in battlemaps. Windows are constructed with multiple layers: the walls, the windows themselves, and the window sill at a minimum, and there’s a gradient to design to apply on the windows.

That’s pretty much all there is to it. You can get fancier with it (add hinges, handles, moulding, etc.) or change the way the walls draw away from it.