The Strategist's Tower - Tabletop Battlemap System

Welcome to the Strategist's Tower

When my friend group started playing DnD last year, I started designing a system for quickly assembling battle maps to help us visualize encounters without too much annoying prep work. I made a first draft that was very rough around the edges, but it got me a lot of experiences that went into the creation of the Strategist's Tower.

The Tower was designed with convenience in mind, and can be stacked into a single, compact package for stowing and transportation. Every tile fits neatly into the Tower's organizer, all the AoE indicators along with other utensils fit into the Compartment of Holding, and both of these stack perfectly with the base plates to form the Tower.

Even somewhat complex battlegrounds can be built in a few minutes, and some smaller encounters can begin almost instantly. These battle maps will obviously fall short of dedicated dioramas in terms of detail and immersion, but at least for our group they were a vast improvement.

On Tiles

The Strategist's Tower offers a few basic types of Tiles that should suffice for most tabletop games' battles. 

Player tiles: These will represent the players in-game. They are designed to be a blank canvas, and should ideally be printed / painted in a color that suits the respective character.






 

Enemy tiles: Keeping track of which enemy did what, whose turn is it, etc. can be a pain. I decided to enumerate enemies, so keeping track is a breeze. They are designed with a color swap in mind, and I've prepared models for numbers 1 through 25.





 

Wall tiles: These are meant to be used to show where walls or other immovable obstacles are. Obviously they aren't perfect, especially since I chose to design around a hexagonal grid, but they will do the job none the less. Like enemies, these tiles are designed around a color swap, but it is less important here.



 

Blank tiles: These tiles are meant to stand-in for specific objects, should they be relevant to the battle map. A blank could indicate a window in a wall, a table, a fire place, etc.






 

Surface tiles: Surface tiles indicate a special area, like water or acid. Since creatures can move onto a surface, these tiles are socketed to hold another tile in place.






 

Stair tiles: Whenever a battle takes place inside a building, stairs might get involved. The stair tiles are designed in pairs; there is a 2-tile wide tile for the downstairs, with one tile being elevated to show the direction, and a single tile to indicate the upstairs connecting point. This way, the upstairs part of the map can be built separately and still connect in the right spot. These tiles have sockets on top like surfaces, so creatures can stand on the stairs.

 

Large blanks: These are meant to indicate a large object or creature, for example a horse. Since many large creatures and objects can be mounted or climbed, these blanks have tile sockets on top like surface tiles.





 

The compass tile: Whenever a player cannot reach the battle map, they will have to give instructions to another player who can. For these cases there is the compass tile, whose only job is to establish cardinal directions. it can be placed anywhere on the map.





 

Status rings: The way I came up with for status tracking was to make a ring with 6 slots, in which “status sticks” can be wedged. This way, even at the small scale of the Strategist's Tower, up to 6 statuses can be tracked per creature. The ring will fit both players and enemies. The status sticks can be cut from any 1.75mm filament. There is a model for a container for the sticks that will perfectly fit within a stack of rings in the organizer.

 

On The Organizer

The top-most part of the Strategist's Tower is the tile organizer. It has 30 slots for regular tiles and 3 slots for bigger tiles, as well as 6 slots for player tiles along its outside. The regular slots each fit 5 walls, enemies or blanks, 7 surfaces, or 6 status rings and a stick container. The bigger slots are meant for large blanks and stairs, though only one slot can be filled with large blanks, due to it also occupying the middle of the organizer. A big slot will fit 7 large blanks or 3 stair sets. Alternatively, it can also act as two regular slots.

The organizer can be closed either with its dedicated Lid, emblazoned with a majestic D20, or a base plate. There is also a blank version of the lid for you to put your own designs on. If you glue some cloth into the lid, you could also use it as a dice tray.

On Area of Effect

Dealing with AoEs can suck, especially persistent ones. So I tried to make it not suck with AoE indicators; There are models for 1, 2, 3, and 4 tile radius AoEs. They are meant to be placed on top of any tiles, and have cutouts so enemy numbers can be read and player tiles can poke through. The 4 tile readius' outer-most affected tiles are cut off to ensure every AoE can fit into the Compartment of Holding.

On Transportation

In my case the Strategist's Tower needs to travel for every session we play, so safe transportation was a concern. The provided solution here is a tensioning puck,  to be used with a length of slightly stretchy string (for me the drawstring from an old hoodie worked well). Tie the string into a large loop, place the Tower on top, and tension the string around the puck like in the picture.

On Sizes

This entire project was parametrically modelled (source f3d and step files in the download section), with almost every parameter being based on the sizing of a tile base. The standard tile base is a hexagon with an edge length of 10mm, so typical minis won't fit on the grid. But this way most print beds will still fit decently sized grids. The provided base plate at 100% scale requires a build area of 180mm*200mm, or 185mm*210mm with printing aid. The largest part - the organizer's lid with printing aid - needs 195mm*210mm. This however is an optional part, as the organizer can also be closed off cleanly with a base plate.

As for the translation from game world to battle map: As mentioned above, the Strategist's Tower was designed primarily with Dungeons & Dragons in mind. In the case of DnD, the distance from one tile to the next is intended to be 1.5m / 5ft. So a base plate of 9 tiles across would be 13.5m / 45ft across.

On Printability

Every part of the Strategist's Tower was designed to print without the need for any supports. However, since almost everything has a fairly small contact area with the build plate, every part at risk of lifting / warping has a version with built-in printing assistance. This assistance takes the form of brims optimized for easy removal, with only thin connections having to be cut away. This will still take some time, especially for base plates, the Compartment of Holding, and the tile organizer, where the underside needs a lot of these connections.

Some pieces were designed for multicolor in the form of a single mid-print color swap, so any printer that accepts pause commands should be able to print them. color swaps for tiles are at 4mm, while the swap for the D20 version of the organizer lid is already at 0.4mm (don't make my mistake of using a very dark filament above the swap, it will likely look bad).

Recommendations

With the Strategist's Tower, the more filament colors you have, the better. I may not be as bad as some others, but I'm a bit of a filament hoarder myself, so 9 different flavors of PLA went into my set. The most obvious benefits of multiple colors are the color swap tiles and customized player tiles, but other tiles can also benefit from color diversity; different color blanks can represent different types of objects, different surfaces could be a puddle of acid next to a creek, etc.

You will need a large number of parts. While the exact composition is up to you, I'll give my configuration as a starting point. In my Strategist's Tower, there are…

• 7 base plates
• 1 tile organizer
• 1 Compartment of Holding

The tile organizer contains

• 6 player tiles along the outside (different colors)
• outer ring (18 slots)
  • 15 enemy tiles
  • 21 surface tiles (14 blue, 7 grey)
  • 60 wall tiles
• middle ring (12 slots)
  • 20 blank tiles (4 colors, 5 each)
  • 40 wall tiles
• inner ring (3 large slots)
  • 3 stair sets
  • 6 large blanks
  • 6 status rings + status sticks
  • 1 extra player tile
  • 1 compass tile

The Compartment of Holding contains

• 1 AoE (1 tile radius)
• 1 AoE (2 tile radius)
• 1 AoE (3 tile radius)
• 1 AoE (4 tile radius)
• dice set (not included)
• stationery (not included)

I didn't need one of the large slots, so I put the status rings and an extra player tile there. So far we never needed this many walls in our campaign, so you might want to reduce walls in favor of something else, or leave some slots empty until you know what you'll need.

As for print settings; this project was made with a 0.4mm nozzle at 0.2mm layers in mind, though coarser and finer layers should work just as well. All images are of prints with 0.2mm layers. Should your status sticks not stay wedged into the status rings, try lowering elephant foot compensation in your slicer (compliant mechanisms are difficult to make). 

With my configuration, color choices and print settings, the Strategist's Tower comes in at around 900g of white filament, for a total just short of 1.2kg of plastic (not counting failed prints before I made the assisted printing models).

If you're interested in the pattern on my organizer lid, it's silk filament with the first layer infill pattern set to octagram spiral.