Flight of the Red Sword

[BigGrump]

In honor of FLIGHT OF THE RED SWORD and the WORLD MAPS // no screen transitions on Roll20 concept – > I put together the images from the on-line assets to create a single usable map for the Red Sword in VTT. You will still need to make your own doors OR use the ones available in the file that comes with core. It is in the ‘bases’ folder of the online assets of the core book from Drive Thru. which also has the solar flare art.

The ship is slightly tweaked from the images to create a single map using the background image from the PDF adventure and the OG images from one of the first on-line sessions of ICRPG ever ran , and then a star map and red “sun” I made in photoshop. I am including an image of what it can look like on Roll20 as combined assets. The docking bay is all set for you to roll in with your WARPSHELL KIT! Also available on DriveThruRPG for $3 I believe.

Oh – > and I got the “thumbs up” from the boss first to share it with the community so we are good on that front.

![star_map|500x500]

[Chuck_Lemons]

This looks awesome. Makes me want to run a game using it.

[Shadymutha]

This is awesome. Thanks for stitching it together.

As far as using a single map, no transitions, how would you say it compares? Do you find it makes a different VTT experience?

[BigGrump]

I’ve only ran one game as the GM so far on Roll20. I found all the map transitioning and token swapping to be the biggest distraction to the ‘story’ as we played. I had one player drop connection both times when we switched maps. Then the one page didn’t render for a player and they had to reconnect but not before the ‘did you try this’ swarm took its toll.

I personally felt like without the transitions, you have more ‘up time’ and possibly less prep because your just throwing it all down on the same screen and using either fog of war (something I didn’t think to use on my first session) or token art to hide stuff from the players (roofs, clouds, tokens in the background – reveal by dropping your main map BACK).

I kinda wish Roll20 was like Photoshop in terms of the layers being visible on a side bar you can manipulate. To me that would be the perfect addition to make it golden.

[rpgerminator]

There may be a way to cover sections of the map with a blank box. It has been a while since I have experimented with Roll20 as a GM. If you could put everything up on a single map and just cover sections with boxes you can easily move around it may make transitions quicker. I will pop on to Roll20 and do some fiddling to see what I can come up with.

[inorganicstream]

Something to keep in mind: when I’ve tried running larger maps in roll20, it tends to slow down the whole thing, especially when you add fog of war and dynamic lighting on top of that. You might be trading one slow down for another by trying to keep it on one page. I think the ship map by itself is okay to run, but I don’t think you’re going to get a lot of benefit of having the starfield there as a background, so I would just have that as an intro page or an image to drop down that you could enlarge for the players. I love how the ship looks all put together though!

[rpgerminator]

I did get on to Roll20 this morning and did some experimenting with covering portion of a drawn map with opaque boxes. Where the covering boxes worked I wasn’t very happy with the results because it was clunky/fiddly and seemed to have the potential for frustration during an actual game. I did play with different setups using the three layers (map, token, and GM overlay) and put the covering boxes on the GM overlay layer where you could delete the boxes as the players entered certain areas of the map. There may be potential for making it more efficient but I think it will take me some more time to figure it out. Perhaps having different pages for each section is the way to go. In any case I can see how the Roll20 could be fiddly enough to detract from game flow on the GM’s side of things, at least for someone less experienced with it.

[Nicolas_Bohnenberger]

I have made my own version of this (much worse and only using Paint, obviously) ‘full’ ship including the front part of the corridor - needed to wrangle the bridge a bit to make them click, but after a bunch of redimensioning it all worked out.

Going to run the adventure tomorrow with Tiny Frontiers (event one-shot, going to go as simple as I can without d20s, gotta rest them a bit). Any pointers?