Tuesday, 8 February 2022

Isometric Mapping in Owlbear Rodeo


I've been fiddling around with an isometric map hack in Owlbear Rodeo. It takes a wee bit of work to create the isometric character and monster tokens, but not a heck of a lot more than the normal round ones.

It has the advantage that I could sort of get to use some of the gajillion figures I've painted, but I can foresee a certain amount of clutter and confusion occurring when trying to manage moving and ordering the tokens. Nothing that is insurmountable.

The isometric map image is overlaid on a hex grid, but I haven't worked out how to match the grid and the map as yet, so the measuring function isn't reliable. We'd just have to count squares like cave people.

A plain whiteboard map like this is easy enough, but creating an illustrated environmental map would not be so straightforward. Again, not insurmountable, but quite a bit of work. There are quite a lot of isometric mapping tokens, of wildly variable quality, available here and there on the internet, so doors and chests and furniture and what-not are achievable relatively easily.

I haven't yet played around much with drawing on to the map with the app's drawing tools; they're pretty primitive. Probably good enough to indicate general room extents and that sort of thing.


Here's a pretty pictorial map, which is all very well. However, as you can see, we have no way of seeing what's going on down behind the bridge — the view can't just be rotated, as it would be in a video game.

1 comment:

  1. That looks great!

    Can you do layers? Then if someone wants to look under a bridge, or in a hut, you could just remove the layer that contains the bridge span or the roof of the hut.

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