One Dungeons and Dragons fan has created the ultimate moving battlemap, a plywood clocktower with moving gears. This delightful invention comes from Gavin Scott, founder of D&D resource website Redcap Press, who shared their work via Reddit on May 12. Scott tells Wargamer the intricate design “probably took four hours to make”.
Scott apparently crafted this DnD map for a high-stakes clock tower battle. “The party was attending the grand opening of a large clock tower built by a local university of artificers, and noticed some people slipping into the clock tower from the roof”, Scott says. A local crime lord who’d been causing the party problems had sabotaged the structure “so the clock face would shatter at midnight and fall into the crowd below”.
Arriving just one minute before midnight, the adventurers had only 10 rounds to fight off these thugs and reverse the sabotage. This sounds like a tense encounter with major Basil The Great Mouse Detective energy, and we imagine the moving pieces threw some extra chaos into D&D‘s strategic combat.
As for how the clock tower was made, Scott says that the map has a plywood base with paper print-outs of a hex grid covering the components. “Then laser-cut plywood gears were attached to the base with screws (these are the only things that actually function as gears), more paper grid was added to the gears, and then additional (and purely cosmetic) large cardboard gears were glued onto some of the wooden gears.” Scott says “this was to emphasize the rotation and maximize chaos in-game”.
“The floating walkway and platform were made from cardboard covered in the hex grid, and held up by hot-gluing them to the top of some longer screws that acted as risers”, Scott continues. Finally, the decorative cog in the center of the platform is made from wooden gears, cut in half and glued back together.
You can see Scott’s battlemap in action in the original Reddit post. If you’d like to share your own D&D creations with us, we’d love to see them in the Wargamer Discord. Or, for more on 5e, here’s all you need to know about DnD classes and DnD races.
Source: Wargamer
