I love a good battle mat, with nice evocative artwork that tells a story all its own, while making it seem like you've got a top-down view of the world. I own several battle mats, in various forms, but the one thing I've been looking for is an all-purpose dungeon map I can use in one-shot games or in spontaneous dungeon crawls. No exaggeration, every month there's a moment where I want a simple but complete (hallways and rooms) layout for a dungeon, and I just didn't have that map. But a few months ago, I found Loke Battle Mats, and it has solved my dungeon layout problem plus provided a bunch of options besides. This is my review of the Loke Battle Mats: Cells and Shrines book.
The short version of my review is that it's a great product, and probably a thing that every game master ought to have.
A book of maps
The Loke Battle Mat system is a spiral-bound book, and on every page there's a map. And I do mean every page, even the inside covers have tiles on them. Because it's spiral-bound, your maps lay completely flat, so every map can be TODO squares by TODO squares.
The book I got was title Cells and Shrines, but there were several books to choose from at my local game store.
Every map is glossy, so you can use dry-erase markers during your game.
Customised maps
The back cover says you can "cut to customise your maps", and at first I thought it was telling me to cut up the maps. I couldn't fathom how they could have aligned every map such that the front and back side of it so you could freely slice up your maps without losing the integrity of one side or the other. Then (before I cut anything, luckily) I realised it was talking about a specific "token" page, which is indeed designed so that you can cut out groupings of squares for use as an overlay on other maps.
It's a pretty clever system. You can lay down a map with some tiles and walls on them, but then swap out a room by overlaying a "token" room over it.
Combined maps, and user error
The book of maps says proudly on the back that you can combine maps together to create a large battlefield. Having no further information on how the publishers intended for this to work, I found this to be a little tricky, because you can't combine pages in a bound book without unbinding them so they can sit next to one another. Seeing no way around this, I clipped the spiral binding to create loose-leaf maps, and ended up with an utterly unsolvable puzzle. The whole book doesn't seamlessly combine, but there are some maps that sort of fit well enough together, I guess, to believably be the same in-game location.
This trick works, but the holes punched for the spiral binding do impede on the maps. If you remove the pages from the binding, your map tiles have holes along one edge, and there's nothing to be done about it. You can't cut off that column of squares, because there's often important data there, such as a wall.
Well, I've since learned through a Kickstarter campaign for more Loke Battle Map books that the publisher intends for you to buy 2 books and combine THOSE maps. You're not meant to destroy your book the way I did. Just buy 2 books, lay them side by side, long-ways or short-ways, and you've combined maps.
It's still an unsolvable puzzle, I have to admit. You can lay two maps side by side but you don't always get an exact fit. For it to have worked seamlessly, I guess they should have always ensured a "clean" border around each map. Instead, there are rooms that don't have walls, or pits that don't get closed, and when you lay even very similar maps side by side sometimes you just have to use your imagination to fill in the gaps.
I wish the back of the book had been clearer, because the maps are at their most powerful in book format. I love the idea of having a bunch of maps, in a flat-book form, that I can put into my book bag, and never worry about battle mats again. What a great feeling, and what a convenient form factor. I happen to have gaming spaces currently that don't require me to cart everything with me, so having my maps in book form isn't so important, but I still find comfort in knowing that maps in spiral books exist, should I need them in the future.
Thematic maps
I do wish the maps were less specific to a single theme. It's great, I guess, to have a book full of dungeons, but I'd love to see a book with one of each "basic" terrain type (as if any RPG is ever that predictable!): Dungeon, mine, castle, sorcerer's workshop, cultist's lair, grassy field, beach, rocky ground, volcano, swamp, desert, snow, and so on. OK, maybe it's not possible to get every possible terrain I'd need into one book, but I'd love to see someone try.
Maps like HeroQuest
The most satisfying Loke maps, for me, are the ones that resemble the HeroQuest board. These are the maps I bought the book for, in fact. I love the HeroQuest game board, but I can't bring myself to buy the full board game because it's a really big box with a lot of game assets (like miniatures and furniture) that I already basically own. But that board. It's a perfect board, with distinct but generic rooms and hallways that you may into basically anything. You can block off a section, and make it a small dungeon. You can leave it open and make it a big dungeon. You could say it was a town, with each room being a shop or residence.
It's so versatile, but it's [mostly] got what so many maps don't have: Clearly defined walls. I don't know why there are so many battle maps that shy away from clearly defined walls. Maybe they're trying to give you just cause to claim that a spot of darkness could be either a wall or just some shadow in a larger space? Most maps in the D&D-branded "Tactical Maps Reincarnated" are basically earthen textures airbrush with black to gently imply distinct spaces, which mainly causes players to be confused about what's a valid space and what's a solid object.
Loke makes good maps
In general, I'm impressed with the Loke Battle Mat system. It's not perfect, but I also admit that perfect isn't possible. What I want, quite irrationally, is a book of maps that containing just the maps I want, when I want them. I know this is an impossible request, because every RPG adventure goes into unanticipated territory.
What Loke is literally perfect for is a serial one-shot player. I generally consider dnd a board game, at its heart. I basically treat all one-shots like a game of Heroquest. A Loke Battle Mat book is 40 unique boards for 40 unique one-shots that you invent as you go. That's a great tool to have in your kit, if you run one-shots, and it's a happy coincidence if sometimes during a campaign a location for combat happens to match up with a map in your book.
I've backed the latest Loke Kickstarter campaign, so I'll soon have 2 more books, which I won't be unbinding.
DESCRIPTION by AUTHOR. LICENSE.