Building maps is part of worldbuilding right?
During yesterdays session of DnD one of my players mentioned a new VTT (Virtual Table Top) called TaleSpire. It functions as both a 3D map making tool and a VTT to play on. It's up for $25 on Steam so I decided to get it and play around with it for a couple of hours this morning. Let's have a look.
Steam
What does it offer for the players?
As mentioned TaleSpire gives you a place to both build maps for RPGs and to play on them. It's not tied into any specific system so it can be used by pretty much any RPG. As of now it really only works for fantasy settings but apparently they're planning to add building tiles and assets for Cyberpunk and other futuristic settings. That's pretty cool!
When playing players can take control of one or more tokens. These can be moved around freely during what's called exploration mode, or they can be tied to turns during turn mode. Players can chat, making speech bubbles appear over their token and make them perform various emotes. Virtual dice can be rolled on the board and there's tools to help players draw up AoE shapes like cones and cubes. Quite helpful instead of spending 10 minutes discussing who does and doesn't get hit by fireball.
Steam
There is also the possibility to tie stats to the player tokens but it's quite limited. Things like HP and AC from the DnD system can be added but you'll still need your good old character sheet for everything else.
What does it offer for the GM?
A lot! You can literally build entire worlds with this tool, although it would be quite time consuming. As of now there's 750 tiles and assets to build your maps with and 150 miniatures to inhabit them with. This asset library is ever expanding as well. Since it was released to early access on the 15th of April they have already released two content packs with new assets. This is something they plan to do every month apparently.
What's really cool is that you can build, expand and change maps on the go. If you get a sweet new idea while playing that you didn't have while preparing the map you can just add it.
Anything you build can be easily copy/pasted and moved. Not only on the current map but across different maps. Structures you build are called "slabs" and if you select your slab and copy it a string of text is created. This string can then be saved for later use or uploaded to sites like TalesTavern or TalesBazaar where other people can use them. If you want to use something someone else has made you just need to copy the string of text from the website and paste ir directly into your game and the slab appears. That's an amazing feature.
While playing there's tools in place to control the atmosphere, which music playing, where the sun is shining from and you can even flood the map in an instant if you so wish. If you're on a rural map or playing in a multi story building you can easily adjust a slider to remove all tiles at a certain height to easily reveal the insides of the first floor. Just slide it back up when your players move up to the second floor!
Let's build!
We're all here for the worldbuilding, I know, but I felt it was necessary to introduce the tool first. As you've probably already understood this is a tool for visualizing your world. Some like to draw their worlds on paper while some, like me, like to visualize digitally. That means a tool like this is perfect for me.
I decided to do some building. My players are closing in on the Eye of the All-Father in Storm King's Thunder. They finally get to meet the fabled frost giant Harshnag who will take them there. I plan on having them meet him in a mountain pass leading up to the Eye where he will first test their strength. I Decided to build a map for this encounter.
Mountain pass
I spent a fair amount of time figuring out the controls. It felt quite clunky in the beginning but as I got used to the buttons it got smoother. I rebound some keys and eventually it was all good.
Everything is pretty much tile based when building which I like. There's a grid, of course, and you can choose to build with or without tile snap. For things like the ground you can click and drag to place a wide area of ground. Quick and easy.
Building the stone ridges wasn't as easy. There's only two assets of snow covered rocks. I had to place these one by one while rotating them to get rid of the repeating pattern. It would be cool if they added a feature that Inkarnate has which automatically selects a new variant of the same rock or tree type after placing one.
All in all though it turned out pretty cool. I would say that after figuring out the controls this took me about 20-25 minutes to build. That's for something like a 10x12 tile slab. I spent a fair amount of time on the ridges to make them look real and dynamic and to eliminate repeating patters in the stones. I'm gonna put in some more work before out next session to enclose the area so they're not staring off into the foggy distance.
Prison/Dungeon
I wanted to try some indoor building as well so I build a small prison. Which campaign doesn't need a prison right? I don't really need a prison or dungeon like this for my campaign right now but if I do in the future I can just move this over to wherever I need it. Copy/paste baby!
Thoughts on the tool
The post is getting quite long so to limit myself I'll finish off my thoughts with a list of pros and cons instead of typing them out over another 500 words.
Pros
- Easy to use, hard to master.
- Great for playing across several systems!
- Great for playing TTRPGs!
- Great GM tools (atmosphere, music, lightning, water levels).
- Price. $25 one time purchase.
- Community shared content!
Cons
- Building can be clunky when utilizing all 3 dimensions.
- Limited building assets for certain biomes and locations.
- Price. Everyone in your group has to buy it so if you're a group of four that's $100 in total. You own it forever though.
- Resources intensive. My PC was working like crazy even in the menus.
- Can't import user made assets or miniatures, but that could still come.
Will I use it for my games?
Depends what my player wants. Long term it's cheaper than subscribing for Roll 20. I think it's a great tool and I would probably be open to using it a couple of times. If I'm moving my games over to this though it means I need to put in a lot more work building maps. At least until the tool gains a larger community and the aforementioned community sites get more content. If I were to use it it would probably be for combat mostly and not exploration.
People have already started building maps for official adventures like Curse of Strahd and Storm Kings Thunder though so I'm quite certain the future of TaleSpire is a bright one. Reviews have been great and the people who use it seem to love it. I'm very excited to see what the devs have in store for this in the future.
All on-sources images in this post are screenshots taken by me.