The Map Prep Workbench

The Workbench is where an encounter stops being a list and becomes a battlefield. You get here by tapping Stage on Map in the Encounter Builder (chapter 12, Building Encounters). It is a DM screen from top to bottom. Players never see it, and nothing you do here reaches them until you tap Start Encounter.

The four benches

A slim bar across the top holds the back arrow, four bench segments, Save, and Start Encounter. Tap a segment to switch benches. On a phone or tablet each bench puts its tools in a strip along the bottom; on a Mac or Windows machine the tools sit inline and a roster rail stays open beside the map.

The Workbench always opens on Floor, because the later benches depend on it.

• Floor. Trace where the walls are, and set the map's scale and terrain from the Map... pill (map width in feet, terrain, darkness on or off, floor texture). This bench also carries Undo mark, Start over, and a "Scale not set" flag until you fix it. Chapter 9, Preparing a Battle Map: Define Space, is the full guide.
• Doors. Cut doors into the walls you traced, at 5 feet or 10 feet wide, secret or plain. Long-press a placed door for its state, size, removal, and Reposition, which slides it along its wall. Reposition exists only here, not during play.
• Lights. Drop light sources at the four standard radii, with All lit and All dark shortcuts on maps built from rooms. Chapter 10, Doors and Lights, covers both benches properly.
• Monsters. Place tokens.

Doors is gated on scale and then on floor, and Lights is gated on scale, so a bench you have not earned yet tells you why when you tap it. Switching benches commits whatever the outgoing bench had pending; you throw away work one item at a time, not with a single Cancel.

Placing monsters and the party

The Monsters bench shows a chip for every combatant not yet on the map. Tap a chip, then tap the spot on the map. Party chips are outlined and carry a person icon so your players read apart from the opposition at a glance.

Party chips only appear when a session is live. Prepping offline, you place monsters and nothing else, which is the normal way to build a fight the night before.

To move a token, drag it. Dragging empty floor pans the map instead, and you can zoom in to four times size. A freehand pen is there for scratch marks, with Clear Drawings to wipe them.

Tap a token and the combatant panel opens, the same panel you will use in combat (chapter 23, Managing Combatants). While staging it offers status and conditions, View as to look through one placed party member's eyes, and a Light chip that gives a single placed party member a carried light of none, 15, 30, or 60 feet. There is no hide control here. Everything is visible while you work.

The Lens eye button

A floating eye button sits on every bench. Each tap moves it one stop around a loop of four views:

• Plain. The raw map with no lighting on top.
• Lights. Every light pool drawn, nothing hidden.
• Darkvision. The whole map filled with darkvision gray, with lit pools carved back to color.
• Eye. The same gray rendering, plus a draggable eye marker. Drop it anywhere and the map clips down to what a creature standing on that exact spot would see, modeled at 60 feet of darkvision. Drag it into a doorway, behind a pillar, down a corridor, and check the ambush works before your players find out it does not.

Your own authoring marks stay visible in every view, secret doors included. The eye marker is a preview only. It is never saved and never sent to a player.

Save, or Start

The two buttons in the top bar do different jobs.

Save writes placed monster positions to your device and keeps you on the screen. That is the only thing this screen saves. Party placements and carried lights are session gear, not campaign data, and they are gone when the session ends.

Start Encounter goes live. It needs a running session and at least one placed token, and it is dimmed until both are true. It saves everything, then flips your placed monsters to hidden as play begins, so the party arrives at a room that looks empty until you reveal what is in it. Chapter 21, Setting Up a Fight, picks up from here.

Tapping back with unsaved placements asks whether to save or discard first, so you cannot lose a staging session by leaving.