TableLair

Your TV is the battle map. Lay a TV flat on the table, plug it into your laptop, and TableLair turns it into the map your players gather around: minis on the glass, fog over what they haven't found, torchlight in the dark. You run it all from the laptop; they see only what you show them.

At the table

• Fog of war that drifts like smoke: brush it away, or click a room to reveal all of it. Opening a door reveals the room behind it.
• 1-inch squares on the TV, measured to your screen, so real minis fit the grid.
• Light and darkness: torches flicker, walls and closed doors stop the light, and with player vision on, the TV shows only what the party can see.
• Fights in one click: creatures from the map, initiative rolled for the monsters, players roll on their phones. Hit points, bloodied, conditions that run out on their own, and whose turn it is glowing on the map with the squares they can reach.
• Portraits of the people they meet, sweeping in over the map with their name in a brush stroke.
• Triggers for traps and ambushes: you get a nudge when a player steps on one; it can reveal a room, put out the lights, play a sound or start the music.
• Weather and life: rain, snow, mist, blight spores and ash, birds and clouds passing over, fish in the rivers you draw.
• Music moods with the Spotify app or your own sounds: Tavern, Combat, Victory, a button each.
• Supports images, pdfs, vtt files

Draw your own dungeons

No map for tonight? Drag out rooms on the grid and paint the passages between them: the walls, the cross-hatched rock and a little rubble draw themselves, in the hand-drawn style of Dyson Logos's maps. Add doors, secret doors and stairs. The walls are real, so they stop light and sight like any other. You can also draw on any map during play: chalk, fire, a river, rubble when the fireball goes off.

On the players' phones

No app: they scan the code on the TV. Each gets a pointer on the TV, their own spell templates, the turn order with their conditions, a buzz when it's their turn, and private whispers with you.

Preparing

Drop in maps: images, animated MP4 and WebM, Dungeondraft / Universal VTT files with their walls, doors and lights, whole ZIP packs. Keep several campaigns, each with folders of scenes; export a campaign as one file to move it or share an adventure. Ready for tonight? checks everything before the players arrive.

What you need

• A laptop with macOS 13 or newer (Apple Silicon), Windows 10 or 11, or Linux. TableLair is made and tested on a Mac; the Windows and Linux builds are newer and less tried.
• A TV or monitor over HDMI, ideally lying flat. 43″ is a good size for a table of four to six.
• Phones on the same Wi-Fi as the laptop, for players who want them (optional).

The builds aren't signed yet. On a Mac, the first time: right-click TableLair and choose Open. On Windows, SmartScreen may say "unknown publisher": More info → Run anyway.

Credits

• Maps in the screenshots: Cartography by Dyson Logos (dysonlogos.blog), used under Dyson's free commercial licence. Scene names are our own.
• Portrait in the screenshots: Rembrandt, Portrait of an Old Man in Red (c. 1652–54), public domain.
• Everything else in the screenshots and GIFs (the battle mat, the hand-drawn dungeon, drawings, fire, river, fog, weather and tokens) is drawn by TableLair.
• TableLair is built on open-source software; the licences are in the app under Settings → About.