After years of hiatus, in early 2019 I decided to get back to running RPG campaigns as a DM and I wanted to run a one-off DnD session just to refresh my storytelling skills. I had been preparing for these gaming session a lot, and I knew that there was a bit more in the story; it could even be a mini-campaign of three or four sessions and I started to called it The Tales of Silversand. After three completed adventures, I realised that I had enough ideas for dozens of run-on stories and by now we have had more than twenty sessions – many of them proper, full-day sessions – full of adventures, laughter and drama, memorable and heroic moments. Then came the pandemic, and the lockdown made face to face meetings impossible, and after a couple of online sessions -where I couldn’t use my miniature and map collections- I started to feel that I failed to deliver the same level of gaming experience, so decided to put the campaign on hold and do some research.
I started to explore ideas and tools that can bring us closer to the immersive experience of the face-to-face sessions in an online environment. This will be a long journey, which will most probably lead me to a virtual tabletop at some point. The virus will not go away overnight and even when it’s gone, the ability to manage an enhanced virtual session will be useful.
During my research for tools, I came across Inkarnate, an online map-making tool. I had tried similar tools before, some were better than others but I wasn’t really happy with any of them. What makes Inkarnate better? Many things: it’s versatile, simple to use and the maps look amazing.
By versatile, I mean that you can create the map of a smaller area, a region or a complete world and you can do these in different styles. You can also add either square, isometric square or hex grids and use them as battle maps.
The interface is simple, logical and intuitive. Usually, intuitive is a synonym of “we can’t be bothered with making a user manual, a useful help or a tutorial, you’ll figure it out yourself…”, but the developers of Inkarnate have found the sweet spot where the simplicity doesn’t impact the function and using it is super straightforward for the first time.
Once you created a map, you can send its link, or you can export it in either is 2048×1536 or in HD quality.
These maps are full of details and character, many of them can pass as an illustration. In the Explore section you’ll find loads of amazing maps created by other users and you’ll see that some creative souls have found an unexpected but very cool alternative way to use the tool and they set up custom character sheets instead of just maps! (Here, here and here – Note that these links can only be accessed by registered users).
You can get surprisingly far with the free version but you can unlock the complete (and impressively huge) catalogue of textures and stamps with the Pro version. The Pro version is subscription-based, it’s either $5 per month or $25 per year. That’s roughly the price of a printed RPG map book or a box of map tiles, so I think it’s totally worth it.
Is there anything I don’t like about Inkarnate.com? Creating rivers is a bit difficult, if they added a few river stamps that would be helpful. I was also wondering if they plan to add Sci-Fi themed features as well, which would be awesome.
In spite of these minor points, this is still the best tool that I have seen so far and I can only recommend it. If you are a DM and want to engage your players, you need to know the tricks of the trade and you need some tools. A set of good maps or a tool to create them is a must-have. A map is not just a nice picture, but a functional device that makes your games more plausible. Go and try Inkarnate.com, see it for yourself. You won’t be disappointed.