Goals and Pillars

First, following a Mix of Chris Perkins' Map-Fu method and a little tweaking, I came up with a workflow that let's me get the battlemaps fast, with quality and fresh for the players. I linkedin to think the map first from a narrative view. What was the space porpouse when it was built? What porpouse has now? Who lives in the space, how do they use it? How did players arrive to it? Giving this context first helps a lot contextualizing specific mechanics and creatures in a battle map.

After answering these questions, second I like to remind me a few things that I believe are important in order to make a fun map, these are: interaction, enemies, simplicity, mechanics. In summary, these are:

1. Taking into account the context of what are the players doing there, keep the intentions for the map obvious.
2. Maps are not static: they should evolve during the fight and offer ways to the players to change it.
3. Take into account which creatures the players are gonna be fighting there.
4. Battle Maps are rearly an empty rectangle. Making it believable allows for more inmersion.

With these into account, and before jumping into the map, I like to design what enemies are gonna be there. What abilities they have, what resources, what they can do to help figuring it out the map and avoid inconsistency later. For example, if I want the players to face creatures which can borrow, wouldn't make sense the battle map to take place in a fully iron chamber. I will not deepen into this subject (monster design) as its another fully independent topic, but it's nice to keep it in mind.

Gimmicks

The following terms are taken into account as things that make the map come alive, interactive and changing. When creating a map, I try to pick at least 3 of this gimmicks and combine them to create unique but still mechanically challenging maps.

1. Melee just run across map to the enemy and stay there. Ranged will keep their distance. To solve this, choke points. Disrupt the flow of movement.
2. Elevation is important: creates covers, makes parts of the map accessible only from certain spots (like ladders), creating choke points.
3. Scatter some loot around the corners: Either things for the fight (a dead body has a potion of fire resistance in a dragon’s lair) or things to interact with, levers or things alike.
4. Cover: put covers in the middle, not in the start of the map. This way we make players move to more strategic spots.
5. Evolving: things that change through actions or randomly: barrels of oil, windows that can be broken, all change the map and paths that were safe now aren't, or new paths open.

With these 5 gimmicks, I choose the ones I think fit most nicely in the narrative context of the map. After that, the next step is grabing some paper and pencil.

Drawing the Map

This step is the first look on the final map. We know the place, we know what gimmicks should be here and we know what creatures are fighting here. Taking these 3 things into account, we follow this steps:

References

Gathering some references of the place I wanna build can help making the map believable. Even if it's a cave, or a lost temple, we can gather references from the real world or other maps.

Sketch

In this sketch, I try to lay down the shape of the map, the gimmicks and interactable objects around the map. It's more a conceptual sketch than the final map. I try also write down things like heights differences, covers, interactable objects and it's effects to clarify if I meet the gimmicks for the map. I go back and forth until I have an iteration that I like for the playstyle of my players.

Final Version

When the sketch is completed, I jump into Inkarnate to bring the final aspect of the map. It's a pretty well known program and has a lot of assets that allows to give the sketch a good final appearance.

Battle Maps

After explaining how I create my battle maps from start to finish, below are some examples of real battle maps I created. If you like them, feel free to use them in your games too!