ou love tabletop RPGs. So do we. We love the stories, the action, the laughs... the comradery. What we don't love is getting ripped out of the moment with maps hastily scribbled on lined notebook paper or low-quality images downloaded from the internet. A badly-drawn grid doesn't make for an epic battle, nor does a pixelated alleyway when what you really wanted was a mountain pass.

Be prepared for every combat with huge battle maps created from hundreds of hand-drawn tiles. Make character tokens to place on the maps, representing the varied NPCs and Foes your party will meet. Host games for your players to join, whether they’re across the table or across the world.

The Calamus is designed not as a stand-alone game, but as a tool to support your gaming sessions. Instead of leaning across a table to move your character on a dry erase board, just drag it across the beautiful map displayed on your device. Other players will see your action updated in real-time.

Can't get the game off your mind? Already thinking of next week's encounters? Put that idle time to good use. With the Calamus, you can literally build your battle maps and character tokens anywhere you’d feel comfortable using your phone. With in-game chat, you can send your players private or public messages during off-time.

A player out of town during this week's session? They can still join in on the action. Their character movement will be updated on everyone else's device almost instaneously.

You can edit your maps in real-time during a game. Players decide to chop down a tree to extend a makeshift bridge across a river? Add it with one tap. A castle hallway collapses when the green dragon flies overhead on round four? Just a few taps later and now it's full of impassable rubble separating the group. You can literally trap the party between a horde of goblins and a GROWING pool of lava.

Further, any edits made in a game will not affect your original map, so you can start from scratch with another party if you’re running the same campaign concurrently.

Ever feel as if your map size is dictated by your size of paper? Maybe you’ve even taped enough sheets together to cover a table for truly epic battles. We know; we've been there. But we'll never be there again.

Want to add a stables outside your ruined keep? Just scroll over and start tapping. Want to build a whole city? We can't wait to see it. With the Calamus, you can build your map to any size you want. The app automatically adds space. And don't worry about load times on huge maps. The Calamus only loads the tiles you need at any given time, so a large map won't take any more time to load than a small one.

With such big maps, you might think they’d take forever to make as you sort through corner or edge tiles and line everything up perfectly. Not so. The Calamus utilizes an intuitive tap-to-add system. Choose a tileset, say, Castle Wall, and start tapping. The app knows where corners and edges should go, automatically shifting as needed. Tap again, and the tile disappears. Many of our users boast being able to put together massive, detailed maps in under an hour. Simple ones come together in 10-15 minutes.

The Calamus boasts hundreds of hand-drawn tiles, created in the style of illustration on parchment. There's everything from trees to discarded bones to lava, all arranged in easy to navigate categories such as Castle and Outdoors. Further, the app offers six background colors, allowing you to set your battles on grass, ice, water, or at night.



New tiles are being added throughout the lifetime of the app, making logging in to find new goodies a treat.

The Calamus is not only available on your Android and iOS devices, but is also available for Windows and Apple desktop computers. It is also in the process of being widescreen-optimized for the best possible experience on your Android tablets and iPads. You can connect your games to anyone on any platform. With the full subscription, everything is automatically saved to the cloud, so you can download the app on as many devices as you want and continue right where you left off.

Maybe technology has no place at your table or you have another game hosting service you prefer. That's alright too. With the Calamus you can download your map for printing or hosting on another service. The squares are automatically sized to one inch, perfect for your expansive collection of minis.

Stumped on what kind of encounters you want next week? Scroll through the token icons or tiles. Maybe seeing the lion or wooden barricades will spark an idea.

A cleric in the group receives visions from his deity at inopportune times? Keep them completely secret from the rest of the party with private chat messages.

Your in-town play is total chaos? Build your villages and cities in the Calamus and have the players spend movement on their turns. The player who wants to go to the nearby potion shop will get there before the player who wants to trek across town to go to the blacksmith. Plus, since they’re already on a gridded battlemap, an alleyway brawl can break out spontaneously.

An earth elemental is throwing boulders at the party? Add them to the map in real-time to act as obstacles or cover for the party.

You hadn't planned a secret door in the final room of the dungeon, but when the rogue - who's been having a bad night - asks to search for secret passages, you decide to include a new room behind the second bookshelf when he succeeds his roll.

The Calamus is made by TrapStreet Studios. That's a fancy way of saying that two guys who are really freaking passionate about tabletop RPGs devoted the greater part of their time over the last few years bleeding and sweating over this thing. We weren't lying when we say we love tabletop RPGs, and we aren't lying when we say we love the Calamus. The thing's our baby, but that said, we know it can be improved. Just ask our volunteer beta testers. When they have an idea or suggestion, we do everything in our power to see it makes its way into the app quickly, or at least on our lengthy to-do list.

“You guys are offering something Roll20 isn't. As a consumer I'm more interested in your product right now than any other digital D&D product on the market.”
- Derek Farman, Founder of D&D/RPG Maps group on Facebook

“Your ■■■■ is ■■■■ing fantastic! I don't know what I did with myself before finding the Calamus. My life must have been so drab and boring. Thank you! You guys ■■■■ing rock!”
- Jennifer Landry, Zeemz Creative Designer and Co-Founder

“The best dungeon map maker I've found so far, by a long shot.”
- Roger Court

“The smart tile system, the fancy layout and great artstyle make me want to use it more. You have so much potential with the app and I wish you the best of luck building it out to the invaluable tool that it can be.”
- Northgaming

“I have fallen in love with this app. Personally I believe given time, it will replace roll20.”
- Scott Shumway, via Facebook

“I love the software so far that's for sure. Y'all are doing heavens work over there.”
- Jason Eiserman, via Facebook


“I absolutely love this app. It gives our DM everything he needs to play an encounter. I have also had a hard time finding anything even close to what this app can do.”
- Natashia Maldanado, via Play Store


“The map components look amazing and feel like a real map not a cluster of busy renderings like other map making software.”
- Robert Klinzman, via Play Store


“I can't rave enough. Absolutely love this app.”
- Kahlia Foster, via Play Store


“Best mobile role-playing app out there!”
- Robin van Dyk, via Play Store


“This is GREAT!”
- Aeres Tharn, via Apple App Store

Underrated Role Playing Apps on iOS
- Gamekeys.net


Send us your feedback.

The Calamus map-maker is free to use and has various premium options to further enhance your experience. The full version of the app - including the full map-maker and game hosting - requires a subscription. The full version app is cloud-based, which allows it to be used from multiple devices and connect to your players’ devices. The subscription model helps us offset monthly server storage and traffic fees.

To get full access to the app costs $2.99/month or $30/year (that's two free months!)

You can cancel your subscription at any point. If you do, you’ll have access to the full app until your current subscription expires and access to all the free features and your content after expiration. This is perfect for players and DMs who only play once every few months or are going to take a lengthy break from the game.

Click here to learn more about the different feature levels. What would a tabletop RPG companion app be without a ways to customize your experience? Here are some ways the Calamus lets you make your games unique.

TAP TO ADD
No hunting for corner or edge tiles. Instead, you select a tileset and tap a square to add it. The app figures out what configuration you need and adjusts any nearby tiles to automatically link up.

ROOMBUILDER TOOL
Want a throneroom or inn commons, but just don't know where to start? Or maybe you need to throw together a map fast? The room builder tool lets you select a room type, drag an area, and in seconds the map is populated with a app-generated room of your choice.



GAME HOSTING
With the full version of the Calamus, you can host your map for others to connect to. They can add and move their tokens on your map and everyone connected sees the updates in real-time. Inviting players to a game also enters them in a corresponding chat.

FOG OF WAR
This was the most requested feature we had and, frankly, it's the feature we most wanted to implement. If you turn fog of war on in a game, your players will only be able to see and move to the areas of the map that they’ve “discovered”. It's a sight better than moving pieces of paper out of the way when the party slowly progresses into your ruined keep.

EDIT MAPS IN-GAME
Not only can you move characters in real time, but as the map owner, you can also edit the map. Players will immediately see if you add tiles, allowing you to cave-in tunnels or add obstacles or secret rooms on the fly.

PC, NPC, & FOES
Create unique character tokens, choosing from hundreds of icons and combinations of colors. The Calamus divides your character tokens into PC, NPC, and FOE categories so you can easily find the hero or bad guy you need at any given time.

EPIC CHARACTER TOKEN RINGS
Sometimes the goblin chieftain or skeleton king needs more than just a regular token to define it as a BBEG. Enter the epic character token rings, in various delightful flavors.

CHARACTERS OF UNUSUAL SIZE
Prepping a game where the players will pit spell and steel against a huge bear or dire boar? No worries, the Calamus can make large 2x2 tokens.

ROBUST CHAT
Send messages to the group - as yourself or any character you control in that game. They can be visible by all or private to a single person or subset of people.

EXPANSIVE DICE ROLLER
Attach a full set of dice to any character, easily changing the value, amount, and bonus for any set. You can assign 1d20+5 for initiative rolls, then an 8d6+0 for your fireball.

FULLY CROSS-PLATFORM
With the full version of the Calamus, you can log into your account on any device - Android, iOS, or desktop. You can also join games from any type of device to any type of device.

CUSTOM TILE GROUPS
Map tiles are arranged in groups such as castle or outdoors to reduce the number of tiles you need to look through. You can also set your own favourite tiles into a custom group.

MAP SORTING
You can sort your library of maps alphabetically or by creation date. You can also filter them by a category you assign to each. Perhaps you’re running two campaigns and want to separate the maps out. You can assign each to a different category. Or maybe you want to sort your forest maps from your town maps. Easily done.

BATTLEMAP ARCHIVE
It’s only 6:00 and the party’s blown through all the fights you have planned. You find yourself in need of a dungeon for them to delve. Sure, you could call a 15-minute break and whip one up, but instead of losing momentum, you opt to peruse the Battlemap Archive, allowing you to download and print or plug right into the app to edit, populate with baddies, and host a game. Want to share your own map with a friend or toss it up on social media for others to use? It's as easy as clicking a button to generating a map ID and passing it out to whoever you choose.

Free BattleMaps Examples
Click to view.


The Calamus is a map-maker, a place to connect your players, an instrument to send messages, secret and otherwise. What it will become is a full Tabletop Companion, including character stats, dice rolls, and more. Here's what you can expect to see in the coming months.

FURTHER WIDESCREEN SUPPORT
It's true. We designed the Calamus for hand-held devices first. But scaling up was always our intention. We're constantly working on optimizing the visuals of the app for desktop computers and tablets in landscape mode.

MORE ARTWORK
While the Calamus has quite a bit of tile and character token artwork in it already, we plan on adding more. A lot more. Look for thrones, rowboats, suspension bridges, and... well... a lot more.

MAP LINKING
There's a deep dark stair tile. In fact, it comes in stone, wood, and spiral staircase varieties. With map linking, when your players step on that tile (or any tile you designate, really) they could choose to travel to an adjacent map - say, an inn's basement or dungeon's torture chamber.

With linked maps, you could literally tie together your entire map roster, letting your players explore an entire world. (Don't forget, each map can be of near-limitless size.)

WAYPOINTS
Currently, you can automatically move to the center of the map, or if you’re a player to your character token. What we'd like to add are waypoints that - once discovered - let you immediately bounce around to key parts of the battle landscape. This is particularly key if you take advantage of the "massive" part of the massive maps you can create.

PLAY ORDER TRACKING
Turn on play order and players can roll initiative up front and only move on their turns. With a few taps and swipes you can change the order of play if someone wants to hold an action or other game rules call for it. When a player's turn comes up, the app will notify them.

EQUIPMENT
How cool would it be to see a sword on the map, lain across the feet of the crypt of the forgotten king, and be able to actually pick it up and add it to your inventory after the fight - stats and all? Find fatter lewt later on? Drop that dusty sword in your next encounter to give it to the rogue.



STAT TRACKING
Full character tracking will include health, ability, attack, spell, and damage rolls, spell effects, and status effects... and probably more. The app will be designed to be system agnostic, so no matter if you’re running the most popular ruleset or a rare published game, you should be able to track the numbers in the Calamus.

PRINTABLE MAPS
Wait, wasn't this one up above, you ask, always the astute observer. It was! However, the feature to download printable maps is currently only available in low-resolution. We'd like to let you order high-resolution maps, in case you want to... I don't know... get them framed?

AND MORE...
That's a little vague, right? Truth is, the Calamus will continue to grow and evolve. When we get new ideas we either log them on our ever-growing list or stay up until all hours in the morning implementing them right away. And you know what? Many of our features and tweaks have come from users. So if yoursquo;ve got something you wish the Calamus could do, please don't hesistate to reach out and let us know.