Date Night

Do you know what the problem is for most calendars? They become useless over time. Not so fast, says Loke Battle Mats! Let’s see why!

Gamers don’t want dull calendars on their walls. They want something with a little flair that reminds them that their next sesh is happening sooner rather than later! Right?!

Enter Loke Battle Mats and their Calendar of Many Adventures. It’s been a favorite in our annual Holiday Gift Guide for two years running. The 2025 calendar includes 12 maps and 12 5e adventures for levels 3-9, with plenty of great artwork.

Loke Battle Mats was kind enough to send us a 2025 Calendar so we could kick the tires and see if this one is as good as 2024 (which was excellent btw). We kept our initial Investigation Check simple and flipped to January for its monthly adventure!

Each setting has everything you need: the map, the adventure hook, detailed encounters, monster stats, item stats, and what might be next after the mini-adventure is played.

The adventure, called “An Unquiet Night”, is an eleven-page PDF that you download via a QR code right on the calendar. All 12 adventures are also in a zip file with a PDF for each month of the year. Even better, you can sync it all up on DriveThruRPG.com. We might even laminate a few of our favs.

Each adventure is well-written and organized, with DMs having zero problems running a one-game for the evening. Check out our setup below.

With the adventure in hand, the next step was to set it up for actual gameplay. You certainly don’t have to place down specific miniatures and scatter terrain, but come on, this is 3DRPG. The setting here is simple enough – a campsite within some ruins.

We set our map down and started pondering what DnD pieces we’d pull from our joyous TTRPG collection to make the map look even cooler and more engaging for the players. Here, we determine we need to find some outdoor-ish 3D prints like tents, a campfire, some wall ruins, etc.

This setting was right up our alley! We pulled some slick tents, a cooking campfire, a few bedrolls, some accent logs, and even a fresh grave (maybe from a recently fallen comrade), which fit on the Loke Battle Mats map perfectly. Looks pretty great, right?!

For the monsters, ghosts were an easy miniature to grab. We purchased some really cool metal miniatures out of a value box at Gen Con many moons ago. Pretty darn cool, right?!

And just like that, you can be done with all your Dungeon Master prep and put on an engaging, quick game after a weekend dinner with some game buds. All this from a handy DnD calendar, twelve different times for $20 (now $9.99) – count us in!

Lastly, we’re all about value and reusability here at 3DRPG Studios, so we’ll take this excellent premade adventure and turn it into one of our Kinda Sorta Portal table entries. Loke Battle Mats already helped us last time with their Coast of Dread Adventure Box, so we’ll happily add another from their 2025 Calendar.

Our players will inadvertently teleport to this mysterious campsite only to learn it’s not actually ghosts attacking some snoozing adventurers. Instead, the Spirits themselves are the ones doing the camping! Our three doomed ghosts are none too happy with the uninvited guests and will demand that everyone roll for initiative.

Now, all that’s left to do is update our Kinda Sorta Portal table, which is a mix of dangerous and potentially more passive encounters.

Until next time!