Back in May 2025, Jacob Harris was half-asleep in bed at his East Vancouver home when a big idea hit him.
Earlier in the week, his partner Karoline Moore had brought home lino printing supplies from a craft club night she attended with friends. Moore and Harris used the supplies for an at-home date night doing the same: carving designs into linoleum blocks that were then used to stamp those designs onto paper with ink. As Harris drifted off, he thought about something Moore said about linocut being used in propaganda to “get messages out quickly.” Amid that hazy space between dream and waking, he was also worried about running his next Dungeons & Dragons game.
“Get dungeons out quickly,” he muttered to himself before nudging Moore to tell her the idea: What if they developed linocut stamps to quickly create dungeon maps on paper or cardboard?
She murmured a sleepy “yeah, sure,” rolled over, and that was it for the night.
A seasoned Dungeon Master, Moore has spent countless hours building 3D models for use in D&D games he plays and runs. He prefers a truly immersive game table and has tried everything from drawing on dry-erase grids to cutting out various printed elements. But it’s all so cumbersome and inefficient.
The next morning, Harris grabbed a lino tile and carved the very first prototype for Tabletop Stamps: a basic weathered stone tile you’d see in most dungeons. Tabletop Stamps officially launched on Kickstarter Nov. 26 and smashed through its $10,000 goal in only 35 minutes. By Dec. 3, broke the $250,000 mark.
In a video call with Polygon, Harris and Moore told their story of how Tabletop Stamps began and what it’s meant to kickstart their new venture.
For anyone who’s ever run a tabletop RPG, you can immediately see the appeal of something like Tabletop Stamps. Most DMs will either use preconstructed tiles for maps or a large roll of paper with a grid on it, where they’ll hastily scribble out a battlemap on the fly. Jacob himself was DM’ing two campaigns and drowning in prep when he came up with the idea for Tabletop Stamps. He was spending hours 3D-printing, drawing rooms and corridors with a fading dry-erase marker, and printing out maps that refused to scale properly — no matter how many times he swore he clicked “actual size.” He wanted immersive terrain, but the friction kept getting worse.
That first hand-carved stamp, a simple dungeon floor tile, wasn’t pretty, but it worked. He quickly stamped a tiny map onto scrap paper and realized he could build rooms faster this way than drawing, printing, or any other method.
Over the next few months, he and Moore designed a 25-piece starter set that includes everything a new DM needs to build a dungeon. It includes staircases, rope bridges, textured floors, coffins, and wells. It includes all the classic modular bits you’d expect from a pre-made map pack, only as physical stamps. And crucially, they were small enough to leave space for GMs to draw details by hand.
Normally, premade map packs leave little to the imagination. Tabletop Stamps gives the DM an interesting opportunity to lay out the dungeon in real-time according to what players can actually see. In the ideal use case, the DM has the whole dungeon sketched out in a notebook and then lays out each square on the map as needed.
“People are really excited that the barrier to entry is so low,” Moore said. “Everybody knows how to use stamps. Kids and even older people too. Anyone can buy a set and then use random paper that you have sitting around at home or an Amazon box or cereal box.”
The approachability of the concept was huge, and so was the analog joy. “You can get rid of the technology,” Jacob said. “Just put on some fantasy music, have your books out. You’re not getting email notifications while you design your worlds.”
What tipped the project from clever idea to something of a phenomenon, though, was Jacob’s series of short-form videos that mainly consisted of simple clips featuring him stamping out rooms, hallways, and connecting tiles. The TikToks and Reels hit fast. “That’s where it picked up,” he said. The Kickstarter pre-launch email signups climbed past 6,000, then 8,000, then 11,000 by the time they hit “go.”
Using digital map-making software is a dense and time-consuming process, so a lot of DMs use premade maps. But that forces you into using features you might not want. While DM-ing digitally recently, I had to quickly pull up a map I’d used for a previous encounter for a battle I hadn’t planned for. As players moved around the battlefield, all of us, including myself as the DM, had to navigate around various rocks and cliffs. It’s not sexy D&D at all when a player asks, “How big is this rock right here? Do I have to go around it?”
Tabletop Stamps lets you lock in the exact dimensions — and faster than any other method. Want a 17×7 antechamber lined with coffins? Stamp it. Want a long winding hallway that reveals section by section as players move? Stamp it in real time.
The first batch of Tabletop Stamps orders will go into manufacturing as soon as the Kickstarter funds clear, with shipping planned for summer 2026. The slow timeline is intentional: it’s their first Kickstarter, and they didn’t want to over-promise. “We kept it simple,” Moore said. No stretch goals or complicated tiers, just the wood set and the acrylic set.
Still, they’re already thinking ahead to what might be next. Fans are already requesting entire new biomes: Wilderness. Cities. Swamps. Sewers. Caves. A trap pack. A set of oversized tiles for rapid layout. Even a Gloomhaven-inspired hex-tile kit. Jacob is experimenting with roller stamps (a stamp that rolls out ink almost like a pizza cutter) that could let you roll out walls in a single pass.
They’re also preparing for the next phase of getting Tabletop Stamps into retail spaces. Jacob has already started visiting game stores around Vancouver, and the pair hopes to tour L.A., Salt Lake City, and the Northeast next year. But beneath the product roadmap and the business plans, they’re still just two creators thrilled to be swept up in a wave of tabletop enthusiasm.
“We feel so lucky to have created something for the D&D community,” said Moore. “It’s so special and loving and supportive and creative.”
“We can’t wait to see the maps people make,” Harris said.
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