As a (self-proclaimed) connoisseur of RPGs, I’ve spent a long time scouring for ways to enhance immersion in my virtual adventures. Playing Skyrim in VR continues to amaze me to this day, and developer Praydog’s Unreal Engine VR Injector mod was a sight for sore eyes (pun intended) after years of stagnation in the PC VR landscape. Unfortunately, full-fledged D&D titles often get the short end of the stick, as there aren’t that many cool ways you can enjoy them.

Or so I thought until I decided to turn my Cooler Master MasterHUB into a gaming accessory. Since the MasterHUB ships with a 15-key IPS display, I figured I could map certain in-game actions from my favorite role-playing games and turn it into a customizable keyboard of sorts. While there were a few hiccups along the way, I’d say the MasterHUB worked really well as a makeshift interactive control board for RPGs, especially considering that it’s a tool meant for productivity and creativity-oriented apps.

Mapping the essential keybindings on Baldur’s Gate 3

I never ran out of slots when using a low-leveled character

With Baldur’s Gate 3 being my favorite RPG of all time, I wanted to center this wacky project around Larian Studio’s magnum opus. By default, Baldur’s Gate 3 doesn’t provide button mappings for the usual character actions besides the Jump, Shove, Throw, and Hide toggles. Sure, I could assign these actions alongside the inventory, map, and a couple of other functions to the 15-key IPS display, but a Throw-only playthrough wasn’t something I was particularly interested in.

Thankfully, the game has a custom hotbar that lets users add multiple actions, though only the first ten can be assigned to the 0-9 numeral keys. To avoid accidentally adding spoilers in the screenshots, I used a save file from the early parts of Act 1, where every character was low-leveled and none of the party members feasted on creatures of dubious origin to unlock certain upgrades (you'll know exactly what I mean if you've played the game for a few hours). As such, the 15-keys on the MasterHUB display module were more than enough to accommodate the oft-used actions of my (Berserker) Barbarian OC.

For the central slot, I cropped a picture of my custom character and mapped it to the I key. This way, I could pull up the inventory every time I tapped on the portrait. With that, I was done with the first character and decided to map the actions for the remaining three companions. Unfortunately, this is where things started getting dicey…

Switching between companions was a tad difficult

However, the 2-roller module served as a workaround

Since the MasterHUB app supports up to five pages worth of button mappings for its 15-key IPS display, I had 75 buttons to map all the essential actions for my characters. Since I had to reserve a grand switch between the pages, the effective mappable keys were reduced to 67.

Before I started working on this article, I thought I could map the character-switching shortcut keys (F1, F2, F3, and F4) to the Next Page/Previous Page navigation buttons on the MasterHUB. This way, tapping the Next Page button on the MasterHUB would switch the character in-game and force the 15-key IPS display to show the actions for the new character.

Unfortunately, the MasterHUB app doesn’t let you map any inputs to the Page Navigation buttons. After a couple of failed attempts with AutoHotKey scripts, I slotted the 2-roller component into the MasterHUB and mapped the function keys to the scroll wheels module. The only caveat with this workaround was that I had to rotate the scroll wheels in the correct orientation and press the appropriate Next/Previous Page buttons at the same time. Otherwise, I'd end up switching to a new character, while the MasterHUB would display the moves for a different party member.

While it was impossible to cram the entire arsenal of the Cleric and Mage classes onto the 13 keys, I managed to include the essential spells and cantrips on the programmable display.

Other RPGs worked just as well with the MasterHUB

The control pad nearly replaced my keyboard for Pillars of Eternity II: Dreadfire

With Baldur’s Gate 3 working well with the MasterHUB, I tried to push my luck by repeating this project in other RPG titles. In Divinity: Original Sin 2, the setup process was a lot simpler, as the game has ten actions mapped to the 0-9 keys by default. Besides repeating the same procedure to switch between characters as earlier, I didn’t have any issues with mapping most of the essential actions to the MasterHUB’s 15-key display.

Having only covered Larian’s titles, I wanted to run another RPG for the final round of the experiment, and Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire served as a nice test subject. Thanks to the fact that it’s not as reliant on a keyboard as BG3 or DOS2, I was able to map pretty much all the key mappings besides camera control onto the programmable display. And with that, I was satisfied with my self-programmed (or rather, self-mapped) RPG control panel.

The MasterHUB turned out to be a solid accessory for gaming

Although my nerd brain was satisfied by this weird project, I have to admit that there are a couple of flaws with using the MasterHUB as an interactive display for gaming. For example, my party members in Baldur’s Gate 3 and Divinity: Original Sin 2 were fairly low-level and didn’t possess too many actions, so I was able to map all the essential combat moves on the display. For high-level characters possessing multiple abilities, I might have encountered some trouble mapping the keybinds for late-game encounters, where I'd need every last move to emerge victorious. Another drawback was the fact that I’d have to remap most of the keys every time I changed companions or modified their moveset.

Plus, the overall process was extremely tedious, to the point where adding the icons and mapping all the controls took more than an hour for the three games. But for someone who’d happily spend entire weekends coming up with the most insane challenges as a DM, I look forward to using the MasterHUB as a control panel for my RPG hijinks.