Return of "Show Us Your Game"/"Show Us Your Home Page"

Didn't see a recent thread on this. Of course, I have to show off what I just made for my new campaign and want to see what you've got!

I like the old school D&D books on your simulated tabletop! 

It was hard to choose just one pic to post for this. Mine is an adventure on-map. They were fighting Ettercaps and Giant Spiders in a cave, trying to get to the other side in search of "The Silver Key" (AD&D 2E adventure where the party temporarily polymorphs into orks).

I used a 3D background mountain-pass map by Encartrus on the forum and his blog;

Incredible colorful Netstone webbing from Daniel Rosenblatt in the Marketplace;

and Paul Ooshun's incomparable Dungeon Buddies monster pack for the Orcish PC tokens!

Turn Tracker and colorful Macro Quick Bar are default Roll20; the GroupInitiative roller is from the API.

Hope to see some more awesome screenshots.  On a PC you can hit "Print Screen" key. On a Mac try Control-Shift-4 to take a picture of your Roll20 in-action.

Happy adventuring!

P.S. Players & Dungeon Masters, interested in AD&D 2nd Edition?
Feel free to contact me for possible slots opening to join this campaign.

I don't have anything as fancy as you all but this is the main page for my play by post group "To the Stars". It is Mars with various images needed to impart the feel (can't post the sounds but I am using the jukebox for soundeffects). Most of the images are from the image search in game but a few of them had to be grabbed and uploaded as they did not show up in the image search.

When I started my game nearly 2 years ago now (yikes, how time flies!) I set up a quick 'test dungeon' as a splash page, complete with TEST DUNGEON written in dripping blood on the floor... spooky right?!

The aim was to allow my group of entirely new players to play around with their tokens, learn how to move and interact with the map. I set up some basic macros to allow them to get the feel for how they would attack and respond to my every whim and occasionally logged in to throw down a huge token of a dragon... just to scare them. It was a lot of fun. Sadly I no longer have that image, cleared it out long ago... looked nice though (I used the wiki tutorial on creating maps in GIMP to produce it and was very happy with the result for one of my first ever custom maps).

Once the main story got underway I quickly evolved to a more traditional splash page which helped keep track of pertinent information:

• The players had tokens available for any rolls or testing they wanted to do.
• There was a place to record the plot based information the party had uncovered so far.
• A world region map to track where they were in the realms (this could be easily replaced with other regions as needed).
• A larger 'local' map which tracked where they were in the immediate area (again, easily changed depending on their location).
• To the right was an area that began to map out the hierarchy of the foes they were facing, leading up to the elusive and mysterious 'Master' who remains to this day an unknown quantity.
• Finally the 'valorous deeds' of the party was recorded here, effectively this tracked their reputation in the immediate area, and potentially the wider world and was used for various things such as bonuses to rolls and discount in shops.

But eventually the story became too rich and complex to be summarised in a single page, or at least one that could be made sense of with any normal level of zoom. As the players had become stewards of an island by that point I decided to make the splash page a large overview of their island, complete with the various building projects they were undertaking to populate and defend the island, this is backed up by a formula heavy island management google sheet which determines the monthly profit derived from the island which they can then reinvest in development via regular sending spells thanks to a very trustworthy series of NPC's they drafted in while they were off adventuring and saving the world:

• Giant's Tear is a large island that sits in the mouth of a huge river that effectively feeds the rest of the kingdom's trade routes and the wider world beyond their borders.
• Having been seized by Pirates a few years back and the current owner of the only keep on the island, a lazy and embarrassed Baron, failing to recover it the party eventually freed it from the pirates and were awarded stewardship of the island by the King.
• Given a small boon with which to trigger some development of the island they have now begun building a number of civil and military projects which have swelled the islands populated to nearly 400 at present with many more to come.
• This map allows them to log in and see how things are going as well as plan for the next phase of the development.
• As the bard has been going out of his way to goad the goddess of storms and sea travel the island recently came under attack by crabs from the depths as well as some particularly nasty aquatic outsiders... what a shame the very powerful party was off in the Feywild at the time and were unable to come and help defend the various ports... lives were lost, lessons were learned.
• My overall hope is that this island will eventually become developed enough that the party will wonder why they need to be under the control of a lesser King and strike out on their own, probably with a large, well trained, army at their backs ;)

Of course no summary of my game would be complete with the money shot of an action scene, I make HEAVY use of the marketplace maps available which I then scene dress however I need to for the situation they find themselves in, after assisting in leading an army of goodly folk against a marauding horde of savage mountain orcs the party found themselves confronting the orc boss and his entourage who had courageously fled into the woods:


They won...

Sorry, I don't get to talk about my game to outsiders often!

I've enjoyed seeing what everyone else has done and come up with, so here's mine. While my game has been going on for two years as well, we are not anywhere near as advanced as Ziechael story wise. I'm running a game based off the Pathfinder AP Iron Gods.

This is the game's war table/splash page:

As with Ziechael's, the party has their tokens available for testing macros and what not. I also have been known to take advantage of the varying zoom levels to "hide" information relevant to the upcoming session on the table. Most recently, one of my player's characters was about to permanently turn on the party (due to some nasty robotic deity mind control of the android ... but that's another story). I put a small piece of parchment, about half the size of the one in the image, and wrote a "journal" entry from the character about the disturbing dreams he was having and his growing certainty that they were actually memories of his true life. My players of course zoomed in and read it, but since it was listed as the journal of someone that they hadn't met, they didn't put it together until the Android switched to Evil-Android and scampered off to rejoin some unknown (at least to the party) force. The player had a new character ready to go, and was in fact already playing that new character as she had wanted to try something different.

It doesn't translate well in a static image, but I'm using Aaron's Torch script to make the candle light on the table flicker and move. The pair of inferno pistols (one sized for a halfling and inscribed with arcane runes) have light sources in their glowing barrels as well. The chat menu is from my Page Navigator script so that I can easily move the party to whatever map I need them on (and have their tokens auto-generate in an area of my choosing to boot).

Image wise, the table and most of the table dressings are from Gabriel Pickard's Vile Tiles: Table Tops set. The access cards are from a set of Iron Gods accessories made by someone on the Paizo forums. Everything else is from google search, or extracted from the AP sourcebooks.

And since none of my players visit the forums, here's the tactical map they will be enjoying next game (they've just arrived here and have seen it):

This (as far as they know) is a manticore's lair. This particular lair though has springs of Numerian Fluids (think pools of radioactive liquid/mutagenic compounds) that run over exposed veins of hot siccatite causing them to boil and release clouds of volatile (and potentially mutagenic) steam. They are here looking for a valuable technological artifact that one of their allies needs to fend off a group of Technic League bounty hunters. The manticore is not currently at home, but will probably make an appearance once they have retrieved the artifact from inside the cave at the back of the lair where it is resting inside a pool of boiling numerian fluids. The manticore is of course a mutated version of a standard manticore, making it even more deadly.

As Ziechael said, it's nice to be able to talk about your campaign and a lot of its secrets.

I can honestly say that I hadn't considered a landing page like these. I now have a new project! In the meantime, here is what I currently use. This is a map of the campaign city, which I built in Adobe CS6. The party is down in the lower right, near their house, which is circled in red.

keithcurtis said:

Wow, if that original work, you should consider the Marketplace...

I've been considering it. I do considerable freelance in the RPG industry, so it's mostly a matter of time. :)

shameless plug.

I also am using Vile Tile: Table Tops from the marketplace, which is a really great set. My group has now gone through Lost Mine of Phandelver, which they have wrapped up, and are now in the middle of the Tyranny of Dragons storyline.

I've used the maps from these adventures for the main tabletop content. It started with just the first map of Phandalin, then slowly added new maps as they experienced them in session. The dagger sticking into the table moves around every session to pinpoint where the group currently is in the world. You can see right now they are in the Mere of Dead Men.

The black area below the table has their character tokens, and has shifted a bit over time for the rest of it's functionality. At first I kept a running tab of important plot points/summary of the previous session, but that got to be a bit overwhelming and hard to keep track of. Now, I use it either for a message of the day, or to keep track of stats they might want to know before the start of a game. For instance, right now it is tracking the troops that one of the characters has under his control, as he managed to subdue and then command a large group of bugbears and goblins during the Phandalin campaign.

In addition, I have a playlist of adventuring music that I make sure is playing before every game while they are prepping on this screen. Here are the tracks I use:
http://soundcloud.com/drdiss/adventure-awaits
http://soundcloud.com/ryan-stunkel/adventure-fade
http://soundcloud.com/colossaltrailermusic/rasa
http://soundcloud.com/eloviris/tempesta-c
http://soundcloud.com/underfire10/traversing-the-l...

My players get really excited every week to check to see if I've added anything new, or easter eggs, or whatever - they are very observant. If you don't have some kind of landing page, I highly recommend it.

Ha, I think you're the one I got the idea from Loren, when I troubleshot a script for you.

Haha, that's right!

My campaign landing page has evolved quite a bit over the last year, but it currently looks like this - main area is a map of the continent showing cities, towns, roads, and points of interest, and a marker showing the current location of the party. On the right side is a calendar showing the current month and assorted information like weather and location as well as bits of campaign-specific information.

Well why not...
These have been shrunk by 50% just to make it a bit nicer on the forum storage, but I have the higher resolution originals.
Here's the Large Region Map for my Party. A hand drawn job using GIMP and a crappy Wacom Tablet.


The 'nation' they will spend a lot of time Adventuring Around... There's a whole chapter centered around Rithelwold, another centered Arthadun, then they do some long-distance wandering... then they end up out in Ipos' Great Desert...

keithcurtis said:

I can honestly say that I hadn't considered a landing page like these. I now have a new project! In the meantime, here is what I currently use. This is a map of the campaign city, which I built in Adobe CS6. The party is down in the lower right, near their house, which is circled in red.

I think someone spent time on the Cartographer's Guild Pages... :P

Andrew said:

keithcurtis said:

I can honestly say that I hadn't considered a landing page like these. I now have a new project! In the meantime, here is what I currently use. This is a map of the campaign city, which I built in Adobe CS6. The party is down in the lower right, near their house, which is circled in red.

I think someone spent time on the Cartographer's Guild Pages... :P

I used to be a member, back when it was first starting up, but I couldn't keep up, time-wise. Cartography is my freelance niche. Lemme dig up the detail section of the world map that accompanies this...

My Stars Without Number crew's first ship, stolen fair and square.


The name is "Freedom" Sbovoda)

Here it is. This was created in Photoshop, and lettered in Illustrator. I've been inspired by this thread, so I'm working them both into a home screen.

OK, here's a home screen. Not quite satisfied with it, but it's a lot cooler than "the last fight you had".

Nice, where did you get those dice images? Nevermind, I imagine you made those.

Very nice!!

Why do I feel like my game *may* be sillier than most?

He he he he

That looks like a fun group. I like the roper especially.

Hi there,

hopefully more people show what they did for their games. I am interested in "best practice" and tricks to make the game more visually appealing.

Here are 2 games I did the game pages for. It is kind of hard to  ake screenshots as I designed both game pages as a long pages (60x200), tomhave players be able to scroll up and down to reach different portions without them switching pages.

I make use of the excelent stuff form game-icons.net. As tokens the icons are enhanced with tints and auras. In the oneshot The Avalon Trail, which I wrote for an 8 hour session on labor day, I used the icons to indicate the caravans status - morale, wares, troops.

I use little boxes for flavor textes and try - especially in oneshots - to add all relevant background information on the page itself. That makes it obvious for the players that they should read through it and helps me in keeping it short, because I am a stickler for having it look nice and large texts just do not fly with that.

I wished Roll20 would allow more layers, but I know the limitations of javascript and weaker pcs. :/ 
I also would like to be able to embed videos, but that is even more taxing on older machines, many of our fellow games use.

From The Avalon Trail and some Call of Cthulu stuff I am working on at the moment for a fellow DM.

Robert,
One idea I am doing to help ease my complications is to preload descriptions and "cutscene" dialog into character sheets as Abilities set to Token Actions.  That way I can just click the information token, click the "Describe" and it will do the needed wall of typing to the party and remind me of things like "Where is the trap?", "The bad guys are next door and might hear them", "The doors here need serious effort to move", etc.

Hi Andrew,

that sounds good. I need 2 minutes to fully understand what you are saying, but the result sounds great.

He is probably meaning to use the ability fields where you put your macros in (attribute and ability tab) for static or initial scene descriptions and notes to the gm. You could name the sheet the map name and have a token linked to it that sits to the side of the map so that you can click on it to bring up token buttons. Each one could be for each room or whatever you need it to be.

Example of static descriptions of a dungeon:
room 1
/desc Upon entering the chamber that is about 30 paces wide and stretches 40 paces deep, you see off to your left a large cauldron sitting over a fire with a foul looking substance bubbling and smoldering inside it. Farther back in the chamber there is what appears to be a small empty cage hanging from the ceiling on a thick chain. That cage looks to be the right size to hold a small child or a halfing. On the right side of the chamber is a large pile of straw with a ratty, molded blanket strewn over it and what appears to be an old hag asleep with a distended belly that indicates she has recently fed.
/w gm The witch has recently eaten and is sluggish so all rolls are -2.

I use these method in many of my games as the initial static description.

Yep, it's a great way to make sure you don't miss that important bit of hidden information in the room, or the fact that there's another group of enemies on the other side of the wall that might hear any loud noises in the room. All sorts of great possibilities. A great idea for the token is to use a totally transparent png and give it a gm only aura. Then you can have it in the middle of the room where you can access it easily, but it won't be visible to players.

I'm so inspired. From the flavour text tokens to the splash page with more going on than just a poster. I will share what I do, though it probably has already been mentioned. I use the jukebox to play background music to set the atmosphere. Have it automatically play in the page setting. Every page has it's own music or background sounds so when the scene changes visually, so does the sound. 

Wow, some really inspired and incredible stuff here. Feel like I need to take mine to the next level!

Here's the start page for my DCC RPG game - after some planes hopping and "space" travel they're in Red & Pleasant Land.

Really great ideas here!

Robert, I love your scrolling info pages. Good way to make the campaign background accessible and interesting.

Andrew and Pat S., I like that idea of token action on invisible tokens. We generally play with video, so the chat text isn't that important, but it would be very useful for putting explanatory text on tiny icons on my city map. To identify businesses, temples, etc.

Is there an API script that the players can trigger with a macro button that will move them to a specific page? I think it would be really cool for them to be able to click on the compass on my home page for instance and be given a token action that takes them to the world map page, for instance.

Check out my script: PageNavigator. It allows player controlled page movement as well as "teleporting" tokens to the new page.

Robert said:

Hi Andrew,

that sounds good. I need 2 minutes to fully understand what you are saying, but the result sounds great.

Robert (& Pat),
So the idea would be that Room 1 gets a character sheet, and then on Attributes and Abilities Room 1 might get

Describe
/desc The log cabin seems to have been ransacked. Possessions are flung all around the room.
/w Gm The party should find the keys to the iron gate in the cavern. Try keep them here until they find it.
Search10
/w @{target|player_name} You find some nasty gash marks in the wood bed frame.
Search15
/w @{target|player_name} You find some nasty gash marks in the wood bed frame. A piece of plaster seems to have edges that are too straight for it to be breaking away.

I do something similar, but with numbered tokens that I put either out of sight lines or on the GM layer. The "bars" on the numbered tokens will take text, so I add a room description on bar1, a gm whisper with room information on bar2 and any treasure the room has on bar3. I've got macros set up that put the information from each bar into the chat window so everything is right at my fingertips. 

The following images are from my Lost Mines module. In the first image, the output in the chat window has been loaded from token #6. You can see the "Description", "Info" and "Treasure" macros on the bar at the bottom of the screen.



For traps, I use a "T" token, as you can see in the second image. Those are attached to a character sheet, which has macros for the special effects for the trap (in this case, a flood). The macros for the special effects are set as token action macros (You can see the "Flood" macro in the upper left corner). The description in the chat window was loaded in using the "Description" macro from the "T" token.

It can be a lot of work to input, but it makes my games run really smoothly and quickly. Roll20 FTW!

Scott C. said:

Check out my script: PageNavigator. It allows player controlled page movement as well as "teleporting" tokens to the new page.

Nice! I think it solves a lot of problems, including a way to do multiple floors of a building.

Andrew said:

/w @{target|player_name} You find some nasty gash marks in the wood bed frame.
Search15
/w @{target|player_name} You find some nasty gash marks in the wood bed frame. A piece of plaster seems to have edges that are too straight for it to be breaking away.

Not sure if those macros would work but you could try it.

Inspired by this thread - I do like an adventurers' table. 

Pat,
They weren't copies of the ones I use, but I would probably use something similar especially for things like Traps, Secret Doors etc.

Kirsty said:

Why do I feel like my game *may* be sillier than most?

Excuse me, but why are you missing Ann B. Davis in the center square!?

Tim said:

Inspired by this thread - I do like an adventurers' table. 

I like! I considered putting the books on my table, and still might. I notice that you have a cusome "pages" tab at the top. Did you use something like Stylish? Or something more programmer-fu?

keithcurtis said:

Tim said:

Inspired by this thread - I do like an adventurers' table. 

I like! I considered putting the books on my table, and still might. I notice that you have a cusome "pages" tabe at the top. Did you use something like Stylish? Or something more programmer-fu?

Hey thanks. The custom pages tab is part of my simple D&D stylish style for use with the 5e Shaped Sheet - but that button styling is actually borrowed from Michael Heilemann's excellent One Ring stylish style.

I must say, some very clever and inspirational table tops. I will certainly be tweaking mine a bit to show case some of the really neat ideas here.

My methods have certainly changed over my time DMing on roll20, and currently I typically will have the map of the area, with a red box that I move around to show the area the party is currently in.  I'll the use some graphical pins to mark where the party currently is, and some areas of interest.

This thread is reassuring me immensly to put in effort. :) I have seen so many a game in Roll20 where DMs have just thrown things on the table. You don't have to be an artist to make it look fancy - though looking at your work Keith it doesn't hurt either. :D

Would like Roll20 to put the fancier looking pages into a more visible area, to show DMs what could be done and motivate players to "motivate" their DMs to up their game!

I'm surprised that an artist or two hasn't created an art package of generic splash pages for generic genres yet.

That's pretty much what the vile tiles table top set that Loren and I use are for. That and theater of the mind type games.

This is my splash screen of one of my recently "rebooted" games. I am using the same map as "plain" map for the game itself. After every round, I update the map graphic and create a new rendering for the splash screen as well. I'm even thinking about reflecting the party's wealth in the amount of coins on the map.

And yes, the ring will have an important role later in the adventure, but so far I only gave some first hints to the group... O:)

… and the player map.

Here's mine. 
I am using Richard Tran's Sceneficant Maps: Theatre of the Mind for my base because I thought it was gorgeous!

The sides hold the current date in both formats used by the players (elvish-kind, human/halfing, and dwarves have different calenders but there are no dwarves in the group currently), and character tokens. The center contains a variety of hints, reminders of things that they are working on (right now they are retrieving the 3 books on the right) and potential future missions, complications, and distractions. I change those out as they get new information, as they finish stuff up, as they miss the opportunity to do something, or as I wish to hint at what might be up-coming. I haven't told my players that that is what is there, though they did notice that the (now gone) wagon that had been on the table was very similar to the one owned/inhabited by the traveling charlatan they finished tracking down and retrieving some information/items from for their employer.

Here's their local area map.

They are based in Kvo'Hura and currently far to the east near #23 retrieving those aforementioned books in an area that looks suspiciously like AD&D's Keep on the Borderlands/Caves of Chaos.  :D   

I wish i could play in one of thoses very invested games you all seems to host, i keep getting very bare minimum games... mYself however i host fully detailed one, I am a sucker for Sci-Fi, here is my Sci-Fi survival horror game i created from scratch... here some screens.

My Title screen ( player view, mine is full of hidden token for safekeeping ) I also edit it for every campains, to make it more relevent

A typical battle / exploration map , no grid fully made from Roll20 tools and bought / made / found tokens ( i draw characters myself )

The first major campain boss room,A fully self aware evil AI lady made form their ship that crashed on a jungle planet that in fact was a fake one to hide a complex...(nothing weird herre) control room full of holographic screens and a throne on top or somekind of giant computer.

I do everything in vector graphics, with a cartoonish shaded style, the sci-fi / mythos fit really well with this! (here is a ''Concord Investigation Service'' agent, grumpy on the job)

Nice! I like the mini. Very distinct style.