An Interview with Matt Henderson of Loke BattleMats

I had the chance to interview Matt Henderson of Loke BattleMats, to learn about his process, and how he came about designing their impressive battle mat books.

Special thanks to Tamzin at Loke BattleMats for setting up the interview.

I’ve previously reviewed their Dungeon Books of Battle Mats, and will be reviewing their Cyberpunk book soon as well. For now, enjoy the interview!

How long have you been creating battlemaps? How did you start off?

I’ve been drawing maps for my own games since I started running RPG games back in the mid-80s at school, so battle maps have been a part of my hobby for a long time! I’m also a long time miniature gamer, so introducing tactical combat elements into my games has long been a big thing for me and I like to use a map to track everything as Theatre of the Mind can be a little confusing in tactical scenarios.

What’s your background in graphic design and art?

I concentrated on photography at college and discovered Photoshop as part of those studies and have been using it ever since to create pictures for use in my gaming hobbies. I use a lot of real-life textures in my design process and I spend a lot of time photographing walls, flagstones, grass and moss to use in my maps!

I am lucky as here in the UK we’ve lots of old sites and architecture for me to work with, and my daughter is a fan of exploring old castles, so I’m kept busy on “research” trips! Its nice to link the maps into real historic sites, for example one of the doors in The Dungeon Decorations token set is actually the front door of Leeds Castle!

What inspired you to begin making battle maps professionally?

I DM a weekly game and that was moving more away from theatre of the mind and into tactical combat scenarios, so I was spending quite a lot of time drawing maps for that every week. At that time Loke was focused on tabletop wargaming mats (another passion of mine) so I started by designing half a dozen generic RPG Maps and getting them printed at my local printer in PVC to see what people thought.

I wanted to go further so we then ran a Kickstarter in 2017 to produce a set of mats in a more suitable range of sizes and themes for rpg battle map use. That really helped as Kickstarter backers are great and we spent weeks discussing designs and encounter ideas and I got thoroughly carried away and we released about 200 maps for that one!

As I travel to my games and am quite tight for space at home, I was finding it a struggle to store all my rolled maps safely, and that was really what led to the concept of the map books. We published the Big Book of Battle Mats in 2018 and that really took off and has led to a whole range coming out!

Your battlemaps are designed to link together. Was that a conscious choice from the beginning, or did you decide to implement that later in the process? 

It came about from my experience as a user of maps really. I liked the idea of having more options to expand encounters while not having to carry and store huge maps!

From a design point of view whilst putting the pages together for the first book it was apparent that just by having drawn maps with some symmetry that there was potential to double-up on available map space by having two books used side-by-side. This led to several designs being modified so that they could work alongside the same pages in a matching book.

Expanding on this idea led to the modular book sets, where you get two one-foot square books that work together in a lot of different combinations. It’s a great thing because as a DM I get a lot of use and reuse out of the maps and its really easy to create new maps from the same books to keep my group on their toes!

When designing a new book, what considerations are you taking into account? 

First would be theme, or themes, as this would set the tone for the book. This is usually a big list of idea for encounters and locations that gets trimmed down before any drawing starts.

Re-usability is important, even with the high number of maps you can fit in to the book format, it’s important to consider how a GM would use a map and make sure it’s not limited to one very specific scenario whilst still creating an interesting map.

Modularity, either throughout or on key maps, is a focus for us so we go through several phases that test maps used together, from lining up pencil sketches or digital maps to printing prototype books and testing with physical books prior to a full print run.

What are your future plans for new books?

Right now I’m drawing the maps for the ‘Wilderness’, this will be the third set in our modular 2 book set range and join the ‘Dungeon’ and ‘Towns & Taverns’ to add a whole set of outdoor themed maps, with the plan to launch this set via Kickstarter early next year.

There has been a lot of interest in adding modern and sci-fi battle maps to the modular 2 book set format, so that’s something we’re exploring too.