01 Terrain
Paint the floor
Drag to lay stone, water, dirt, grass. Paint over something and it is replaced, not stacked underneath, so a room you have redrawn four times is as clean as one you got right first time.
PRODUCT 02 / MAPS AND GAME NIGHTS
Draw the room.
Run the night.
quartermaster is private software we build and run ourselves. You use it to draw the place your players are about to walk into: paint the floor, raise a ledge, close the walls, hang the doors, push the furniture around, mark where the ambush is waiting. Then you run the night on it, with everyone at the table looking at the same board.
Where it runs
One laptop
Internet needed
None
Biggest map
40 × 30
Status
Mid-build
01
Building a map
From an empty grid to ready to play.
This is the whole job, in the order you actually do it: paint the floor, raise the ledge, close the walls and hang the doors, push the furniture in, mark the ambush, then set where the party walks in and where the monsters are waiting. The overhead view below is where you square things up. The 3D beside it is what the table will see. You are not drawing it twice: it is one map, and both are showing it to you as you work.
Overheadwhere you square it up
In 3Dwhat the table will see
Both views drawn from one map file, not a screen capture9 areas of floor · 198 squares of wall · 22 pieces of furniture
02 Elevation
Raise the ground
Push a square up or down to get a ledge, a pit, a raised dais. It keeps whatever you painted there: you are lifting the floor, not swapping it. Squares you never painted stay untouched.
03 Walls and doors
Close it in
Click the line between two squares to wall it, click again to open it, and mark the gaps you want as doors. It is the same wall from either room, so you cannot end up with two stacked in one gap.
04 Props
Fill the room
Furniture, crates, braziers, rubble. Copy an arrangement you like and paste it into the next room; if the whole thing will not fit, none of it goes in rather than half of it landing.
05 Zones
Mark the interesting bit
Draw round a patch of floor and name it, so later you can say "when they step into the courtyard" instead of listing squares. The ambush on the board above is one of these.
06 Spawns
Set the starting places
Where the party walks in, and where each group of monsters is waiting. This is the last thing a map needs before you can open a session on it, and where the building job ends.
A finished map is the easy half. The night itself is the other one, and it is the half where the way this is built starts to show. When somebody moves, their screen does not decide what happened: it asks, the server checks the move against the map and writes down what it allowed, and then every screen in the room draws that same result, including the one that asked. That is what event-sourced means here. What it means at the table is that nobody quietly drifts out of step, and a laptop that dies in the middle of a fight comes back exactly where it left off.
02
Three ways to look at it
One map. Three ways to look at it.
Square it up from directly overhead. Turn it round in 3D to see what the room actually feels like from the floor. Find it again months later as a card in your library. It is one map the whole time: there is no 3D version to export, nothing to keep in step by hand, and no way for one view to be out of date because you edited another.
The three panels below are not an illustration of that, they are it. All three were drawn from the same map file: 9 areas of floor, 198 squares of wall, 6 doors and 22 pieces of furniture. There is no version of this page where the 3D shows a room the overhead view does not.
Straight down, one scale, no perspective. This is where you get the room the size you actually meant.
Drag to paint, right-drag to look around. Moving the camera never puts a stray brush stroke down.
Every map you have built, as a wall of cards. Open one and it is exactly as you left it.
Both surfaces
Either view, same map
Paint from overhead or paint in 3D. Same tools, same map, same result either way, so there is no view where something you can do elsewhere turns out to be quietly missing.
Undo
One action, one undo
Dragging the brush across ten squares is one press of undo, not ten. An action that changed nothing never lands on the pile either, so undo does not waste a press putting you back where you already were.
Selections
A group moves as a group
Drag five pieces of furniture toward a wall and the arrangement keeps its shape: everything stops together, rather than the ones with room sliding on and pulling the whole thing apart.
While idle
It sits still while you think
The 3D view stops drawing when nothing is happening. An editor left open while you take a phone call is not quietly cooking the laptop it is open on, or draining the battery of one that is not plugged in.
03
Starting from something
Four maps nobody drew.
An empty 40 by 30 grid is a bad place to start and a good place to finish. Ask quartermaster for somewhere to begin and it hands you a whole map: rooms, walls, doors, a bit of furniture already in place. Do not like it? Roll again.
Rolling again steps forward through a sequence rather than throwing a fresh dice, so the map you passed on two rolls ago is still there to go back to. And a map is only ever a number: the same number is the same map, on any machine, next year, from nothing but the number.
Drawn by a small model of quartermaster’s generator, not by quartermaster; these seeds name these four pictures
Dress the scene
Fill it in for me
One click scatters furniture that suits the place, and one press of undo takes the whole scatter back. When there is nowhere left to put anything it says so, rather than looking like it ignored you.
No network
Works with the router unplugged
Nothing is fetched to make it look like this. No asset host, no font server, nothing pulled in from anywhere. It runs on a laptop on a kitchen table with the wifi off, which is where a lot of games happen.
Live checks
It tells you what is broken
A room nothing can reach, a door hung on the edge of the map, a starting square outside the walls. It flags them while you build, and clicking the warning jumps you to the spot, instead of leaving your players to find it for you.
04
Where it actually is
Mid-build, and the rule we hold ourselves to.
quartermaster is not finished and is not for sale. It is private software we build for our own use, and the reason it is on this site at all is that it is the hardest thing we have built and the clearest evidence of how we work. Its roadmap carries one rule worth more than any feature above: no milestone closes because the code merged, only because the demo passed.
That rule exists because we broke it. An earlier milestone was declared finished on the strength of the code being merged; a later audit went through the built system function by function and found roughly thirty capabilities that were merged, tested in isolation, and never wired end to end. The declaration was withdrawn and the milestone re-cut around demos that fail if the wiring is still missing. Every row below is where it really is today.
FoundationAccounts, the connection that keeps every screen in step, the record of what happened, and picking a session back up after a crash.Demo passed
The boardEverything on this page: the map editor in all three views, every tool, undo, the live checks, the generators, and dressing a room in one click.Demo passed
The tableRunning a night on a finished map: opening the lobby through to wrapping up, initiative and turns, movement the server checks rather than trusts, and a shared display that follows the action.Demo passed
CorrectnessThe list an internal audit produced: everything the software already claims to do, doing it end to end rather than one piece at a time.In progress
1.0Export a campaign, import it into a fresh install, play it. Back up in the middle of a session, restore it, check it came back identical. Upgrade a running install through every version without losing anything.Not yet
What this page is not
There is nothing here to sign up for.
quartermaster is private: no repository to read, no trial, no waiting list, and every figure on this page is a drawing rather than a screen capture. If it were public we would link it, the way we link the source of the other product on this site. What it is instead is the honest answer to "what do you build when nobody is paying you to cut corners", and the reason to read it is that the management software we build for clients is built the same way.
The map is invented; everything said here about how the software behaves was read out of the checkout6 passes · 603 of 1200 squares painted
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