AoE Shapes and Mid-Combat Additions

Fireball needs a circle. Burning Hands needs a cone. Lightning Bolt needs a line. Far Table gives you those three shapes on the battle map and nothing else. There is no square and no cube.

Finding the tool

The area-of-effect tool lives in the map toolbar, next to the rangefinder. Its icon is a circle outline when nothing is armed, and it changes to a triangle or a dash once you pick a cone or a line, so you can see what your next drag will draw.

Tap it and a small menu opens with three labeled choices: Circle, Cone, Line. Pick one and the tool is armed. Tap the icon again while a shape is armed and the tool switches off.

The tool is locked until the map has a scale, because a shape measured in feet is meaningless without one:

• The DM tapping the locked icon goes straight to the scale sheet, so the fix is one tap away.
• A player tapping it gets a note saying the map needs a scale and that the DM sets it from the Set scale chip on the map.

Chapter 9, Preparing a Battle Map: Define Space, covers setting the scale.

Drawing a shape

Drag on the map. What the drag means depends on the shape:

• Circle. The point where your finger or pointer goes down is the centre, and dragging outward sets the radius.
• Cone and Line. The origin snaps to your own token on the map, and the drag sets the direction and how far it reaches. You do not have to start the drag on your token, and you should not try. Drag from wherever the effect is going.

A live preview follows your drag, so you can see the shape land before you let go.

Two notes on the origin. If you are acting as a familiar or a movable spell-effect token, as described in chapter 26, Familiars, Spell Effects, and Auras, the cone or line anchors on that creature's token instead of your character's. And the DM has no token on the map, so a DM's cone or line starts where the drag starts.

The Clear drawings button in the toolbar sweeps drawings off the map when a shape has done its job.

Who sees it

This is where the DM hat and the player hat differ.

As the DM, every shape you draw goes straight to the shared map. It appears on every connected phone, tablet, Mac, and Windows machine the moment you lift your finger, in your color. There is no confirm step.

As a player, it depends on what is happening at the table:

• During combat, on your turn, your shape broadcasts to the whole table. That is the point: you show the DM and the other players what your Fireball covers before you commit to it.
• During combat, when it is not your turn, the shape is discarded when you release. Nothing appears, on your screen or anyone else's.
• Outside combat, your private-drawing toggle decides. It is the eye icon at the end of the toolbar. With the eye open, the tooltip says everyone sees your drawings, and your shapes, pen marks, and rangefinder measurements all go to the table. With the eye crossed out, the tooltip says you are drawing privately and to tap to show the table, and everything you draw stays on your own screen.

The toggle covers all of your scratchwork. Use it when you want to measure something without announcing it.

Adding a monster mid-fight

The reinforcements arrive. As the DM, tap + Monster. On a phone or tablet the form mounts inside the combat tracker; on a Mac or Windows machine it is Monster in the Add menu of the top toolbar.

The form is short:

• A name. Required. Typing a name that exactly matches a monster with bundled art binds that art automatically.
• An initiative number. Required, and it has to be a number. The app tells you if either field is missing.
• A token art chip, optional, which opens a picker with three tabs: Bestiary for bundled monster art plus your own monster photos for this campaign, Assets for any image already in the campaign, and Photo for taking or importing a new one, cropped square for you. The first cell in every grid is No art, which falls back to a plain colored token.

Tap Add and the monster slots into the turn order at its initiative. It always starts hidden from players. Place the token where you want it, then select it and tap Reveal in the combatant panel. Chapter 23, Managing Combatants, covers hiding and revealing in full.