Undermountain

I'm using roll20 to run a D&D forgotten Realms game at the moment and the question of taking the campaign into Undermountain came up. Now I've got the box set, a scan of the maps and I've run it before at a traditional tabletop. But the scale of transfering even a level of it into roll20 is a bit intimidating. The system warns I might see slowdowns when I stretch a map to even a 1/6th of the full map size.  Has anyone ever run Undermountain here on roll20 and if so what did you do for the maps? 

I made my own maps.

How'd you do that? In a mapping program or in toll20? Black map and then white rectangles for halls?

You could do a smaller pop-out map of a large section of Undermountain (NOT to 5-foot scale), and just use bright yellow Freehand drawing tool to mark the path of the party's progress, or use a "Party token" to indicate their position. Then have more zoomed / detailed maps at 5-foot scale for certain encounters or sections of the caverns. You could even have both on the same Page in Roll20.  Put the overall location map at the top, and then below some margin space, put several of the encounter / room-and-hall maps.

Maptools my friend, great program for creating maps. When roll20 hit back in 2013 I made all the maps Keep on the Shadowfell using it and now continue to use it for my own random maps.

I use Inkscape and Gimp to create my maps, here's one of my sample maps:

I was in the process of mapping the first two levels of the Undermountain in CC3+, but frankly, got sick and tired of it. I have made maps for the first two Lost Levels though which is where my party are currently. If you'd like copies, let me know.

B Simon Smith said: I use Inkscape and Gimp to create my maps, here's one of my sample maps: That's a rockin' map you got there! I like the blend of old pen and paper with cgi, really distinctive!

Those are some great resources. Thanks. Though I've got full scans of the original maps. My concern is matching the grids up to that on the map, and then just the sheer size of even a 1/6th of a level.  I like the idea of creating smaller popout maps of the more complex rooms though. 

Lewis F. said: I was in the process of mapping the first two levels of the Undermountain in CC3+, but frankly, got sick and tired of it. I have made maps for the first two Lost Levels though which is where my party are currently. If you'd like copies, let me know. I would really appreciate it. Thanks.  I think I'm going to try to use GIMP to make a really simple monochrome grid map of level 1. See how that goes. If it works well I'll post it. 

I've been recreating each map in 80x80 5' increments using gimp. I'm very behind on what I want to be done.

We just had our 22nd session of Undermountain. The huge maps are too much. I am using the 3rd edition book "Expedition to Undermountain". The maps used in that are highlights of certain areas. I recommend doing that.  You could do the large map but make the scale the same as a city/region map. Don't use it for combats, but just a location map. You could use fog of war to block out sections the PCs have not explored yet. Use that to allow them to choose which passages they will travel down. When they enter an area where there is an encounter, move them to another map scaled for combat that just shows the area needed. I am the creator of the Versa Tiles on the Roll20 Marketplace and those are what I use since I designed them specifically to recreate maps you will find in the books. Most of it is made just with the Dungeon Versa Tiles and Cavern Versa Tiles sets. I also used the Magma Versa Tiles to recreate the bottom of Belkram's Fall. I have maps all the way from the Dungeon Level (1) down to the Maze Level (5) and will be creating part of the Rune Level before we finish the campaign. If you want to check out the tiles, just search for "Versa" in the Marketplace search.  Just doing one encounter location per map will make things load faster. You could do multiple on one page if they are smaller locations. I hope that helps. Very cool to see that there are others running this old classic. I am a HUGE Ed Greenwood fan!