How to Use Fantasy Grounds for Battle Maps: A Dungeon Master's Setup Guide

The party is finally in position, the DM shares the map, and instead of a moment of tension there's a fifteen minute pause while the grid doesn't line up, the players can see straight through a wall into the next room, and half the table is squinting at a pitch black screen because nobody added a light. None of that is a Fantasy Grounds problem. It's a setup problem, and it happens to almost every DM the first few times they bring a real battle map into the program instead of a flat reference image.

Fantasy Grounds Unity has genuinely strong map tools, dynamic lighting, line of sight, fog of war, once you know where they live and what order to touch them in. This guide walks through the setup from licensing through the first light source, in the order that actually avoids the mid-session scramble.

What Do You Need Before You Import a Map Into Fantasy Grounds?

Licensing trips up more new DMs than the map tools do. To host a game and have other people connect, the GM needs an Ultimate subscription. That's the only license in the tier structure that lets other players join on a free Demo client with no purchase required on their end. If the GM is only running a Standard license, every player needs their own non-Demo license or subscription to connect, which is a conversation worth having with your table before session zero, not after.

Once licensing is sorted, the only real prep on the map itself is resolution. Ignore any advice that leads with PPI, that number is a print-era holdover and doesn't affect how a map looks on a screen. What matters is raw pixel dimensions: 2048x2048 as a floor, 4096x4096 as the target, so the image stays sharp when players zoom in during a fight. A pre-gridded map and a grid-free map both work fine in Fantasy Grounds; the grid step below handles either one.

How Do You Import and Grid a Map in Fantasy Grounds Unity?

Open the Images tab from the side menu (enable it under Settings if it isn't showing), click the import images button, and select your map file from your computer. You can rename the file or assign an ID at this point, which matters more than it sounds like once you've got a dozen maps loaded for a single dungeon.

Grid setup happens inside the opened image: select the grid option in the top right, then use the manual setting, the mouse icon, to drag across one known square. On a pre-gridded map, outline a single existing square corner to corner. On a grid-free map, drag across a known reference instead, a 10-foot-wide hallway or doorway works well. Fantasy Grounds calculates the rest of the grid and distance values automatically from that one reference. In our map design work, every pack ships at a fixed 4096x4096 resolution on a 30x30 grid, which works out to a consistent 136 pixels per 5-foot square, so that one drag calibrates the whole map correctly the first time instead of needing trial and error.

How Do You Set Up Fog of War in Fantasy Grounds?

Fog of war keeps players from seeing the whole map the second it loads, and it's a one-step setup most new DMs forget until players are already staring at a fully revealed dungeon. Open the mask menu at the top of the image window and select add global mask to cover the entire map in fog. From there, the reveal tool lets you open up sections as the party actually explores them, room by room, corridor by corridor, instead of the whole layout being visible from the first click.

Do this before you share the map with players, not after. A mask applied while players are already looking at the image still works, but it's a visibly awkward moment at the table that's easy to avoid by masking during prep instead of live.

How Do You Set Up Line of Sight and Walls?

With the map unlocked, select the LOS layer from the toolbar. You get three drawing tools: Add Line for individual wall segments, Add Rectangle, and Add Ellipse for rounded obstacles. Left-click to place a point and double-click to end a wall section; hovering near an existing point snaps to it, and hovering near the grid snaps to grid lines, which keeps walls clean and aligned instead of drifting off at odd angles.

Doors need to sit exactly flush against the walls they interrupt. A gap between a door and the surrounding wall, even a small one, lets line of sight leak through the doorway before it's actually opened, which is the single most common line of sight bug DMs run into. Terrain elements work differently from walls: they're conditional blockers, so a player standing outside a terrain zone only sees as much of it as their vision line actually reaches, rather than being fully blocked or fully visible.

How Do You Light a Battle Map in Fantasy Grounds?

Lighting has to be turned on before anything else works: unlock the map, open the Play section of Image Control, and toggle Enable/Disable Lighting. From there, Ambient Lighting handles the overall scene mood, presets for Dawn, Dusk, Sunlight, and Moonlight, with color adjustment for both light and shadow. If part of the map is indoors, use Add Mask to keep ambient light from washing out interior rooms that should be dark.

Regular lights, torches, candles, lanterns, get added through the same Lighting mode with Add Lights. Each one has a Bright and Dim radius, a Falloff percentage that controls how sharply the light edge fades, and optional Flicker, Pulse, or Flash animation. Multiple light sources in the same area stack and add together, so two torches near each other genuinely brighten the space more than one. Token lights work the same way through Image Control, or faster through a custom effect using this syntax:

LIGHT: 10 torch
LIGHT: 20 FFFF0000 pulse 25

The first line drops a standard torch-radius light on a token. The second sets a custom 20-unit radius, a specific ARGB color, and a pulsing animation at a set frequency. Supported presets are candle, lamp, torch, lantern, light, and darkness, which covers most of what a party actually carries into a dungeon.

Why Do Most Fantasy Grounds Maps Feel Clunky at the Table?

The most common problem is a bad grid reference. Dragging across an approximate square instead of an exact one throws off distance calculations for the entire map, which then makes every ranged spell and movement measurement slightly wrong for the rest of the session. Always calibrate against a precise, known reference, one full grid square on a pre-gridded map, or an exact measurement like a 10-foot doorway on a grid-free one.

The second problem is skipping the mask until it's already awkward to add. The third, and the one that generates the most confused messages mid-combat, is a door that isn't flush against its wall, which lets vision leak through a supposedly closed doorway. All three are two-minute fixes done during prep and genuine session disruptions when they're caught live instead.

How Do You Know Your Map Setup Is Session-Ready?

Run through the map yourself before players ever see it. Drag a token across the grid and confirm the distance matches what your ruleset expects for a normal move. Trigger the reveal tool along a hallway and confirm fog opens the way you'd want it to during actual exploration. Walk a test token past every door and confirm nothing is visible through it that shouldn't be, then toggle lighting on and confirm at least one light source is active before anyone logs in.

Assume roughly 10 to 15 minutes of manual grid and reference work for a hand-scanned or ungridded map without a known scale, versus under two minutes for a map that ships pre-gridded at a fixed pixel-per-square ratio you can drag against once and trust. That gap compounds fast across a dungeon with a dozen rooms, which is the real cost of starting from an inconsistent map source.

A map that's just an image with tokens on it is a picture. A map that's gridded, masked, and lit is a room your players actually walk into.

Frequently Asked Questions

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