A magic carpet mass battle

fellow DM's. really keen for your suggestions on 1. I'm keen for the opening of a campaign to involve a magic carpet chase scene, the story begins with the pc's being dear friends who also know the villain and his/her henchmen/women well. The villain and co. are flying a magical ship towards a temple (or perhaps the Aeromancer's city from Southlands setting), within which is a portal to another world- they are seeking to release a malignant being from that world (I am adapting the Legacy of Fire plot slightly for my campaign opening). The PC's are seeking to chase the villain down on magic carpets. Just wondering how others would map that battle, as there will be a lot of forward movement, how would you portray this on roll20? Any good sky temple maps by the way? 2. I'm pondering inviting some roll20 players to create the villain and henchmen from vague concepts suggested by my players, and then play them against the pc's in this opening battle. The battle would be 5 level 5 pc's vs. 1 level 7 and 3 level 4 villains (played by guest players) Numerous magical traps and summons affecting both parties. Ideas on how this might work? love to hear any gameplay, story, level balancing tips. Cheers! ps. fine if the pc's 'die' as I'll just make them majorly wounded as we continue the campaign- I'm actually hoping everyone 'survives the battle' for extra story tension later on

2 suggestions: Option 1: Rather than move the tokens, I'd only worry about their relative position to each other. Move the background map instead. You could either load a map that is larger than the page size and move it every round, or have multiple maps, and at the end of every round, go to the map layer and send the top one to the back, "shuffling" them, so to speak. This would give fresh cityscape (or whatever) below them for every round of the chase. Unfortunately, most RPGs are not good at handling synchronous movement, breaking things up into turns and rounds. By changing the background every round, you are giving the illusion of rapid movement across the landscape, but not making token movement unweildy. For this to work, you would need to drastically limit the speed of the carpet on the map, ruling that most of the speed is being used in the chase. I would suggest maybe allowing 3 inches of movement, allowing a slight tactical positioning ability. Start them on the left edge of the map. Every round, shuffle the map behind them. When they get to the right hand edge, that's when you move them to the air temple map. Option 2: Use a split map. One section (the Tactical Map) shows the PCs on their carpet (assuming you want the potential for hand to hand combat). The background of this part of the map is either blue sky or a really blurry landscape. This would be used for regular combat. The second section of the map (the Strategic Map) is an overview of the city (any fantasy city map will do, you're welcome to use  mine for a private game, but not if it will be streamed). On this one, each grid is ten or twenty times the scale of the first section (you are using the same grid, just ruling that each one arbitrarily represents 50 to 100 feet, or whatever). Use this one to track the carpets. The closeup section is only used if character position is important. Any time the carpets are within 1 or 2 hexes on the city map, they are considered to both be on the tactical map. You might have to do some experimentation to find the right juxtaposition of scales, but this would require less fiddling than method 1 above, and gives a true sense of the distance covered and actual features passed.

If you don't need the characters to interact with the map (like flying through a narrow canyon or around a tree) I wouldn't even bother with one, other than a generic background of terrain if you want it for eye-candy. Keithcurtis has some good ideas with layering. You can also flip the map horizontally to give the illusion of movement (so that rock or tree on the far right of the map zaps over to the far left). If the map is made of tiles you make them the width of the speed of the carpets. Then you can select them all and flip them horizontally. You can also have a terrain feature as a token for a character sheet so you can drag it to the map when and where you need it and then just move it instead of the PC and NPC tokens. Even if the tokens are moved on individual turns and end up migrating to the other end of the map, you can select all the tokens (including the terrain feature if it is on the token layer) using Ctrl-A or whatever it is on a Mac, and drag them all at once back to the start point. This is a lot of fiddling and I don't recommend it, but it is an option. You could handle the chase itself via Theatre of the Mind, with you keeping track of relative positions. You can then cut to a combat scale map when needed. The split map idea is a good one. You really need to ask yourself how long will the chase be? You can set the scale on a map based on that. As for guest players, just post on the LFG forum that you are looking for one-shot guests to run NPCs for whatever game (Pathfinder, 5E or ?) and when.

I would consider doing a really long narrow side-scroller, like a side-scrolling video game! The page size might be something like 120 units wide x 40 tall. With this you could have tokens of the magic carpets showing distance and height on-screen. You would just lose the dimension of depth in relative position.

3 very helpful suggestions :)