This is the special way I've found to Theater-of-the-mind on Roll20! Populate your big page with illustrations, photographs, portraits. Hide it all behind Fog Of War. Give each player their own section for portraiture. Keep only HP's, name, and marching order on Tokens (not movement or position or grid squares). Reveal the illustrative pictures from Fog Of War at the right time & shift-ping to force the view of everyone to focus on that picture when you describe it in the gameplay. Step by Step First go into your Page Settings and make your "big page" even bigger. A nice background of 100x200 squares, will do nicely. For this kind of game there is no reason to limit your page size to 25x25. Give yourself more room to work with for 'sections' of your playing surface or splash page. As DM, pre-fill a section of the "big page" with pictures (portraits of NPC's, pictures of each monster if you want, a nice picture of an inn or tavern, or a fireplace, or a village square, a swamp, a mountain trail). You can find the pictures easily in the Art tab (change the dropdown menu to search EVERYTHING not just the Tokens search). Put lots of pictures, resized to the same (maybe 5x10 squares or so), all lined up in rows. Perhaps a row of monsters, a row of village scenes, a row of castle rooms pictured with furnishings. Not top-down maps, but actual photographs or illustrations from an elf's eye view. Then turn on "FOG OF WAR" setting. Make the whole page black to the players' sight. Keep all those DM's Pictures hidden for now. Now use the Reveal tool to open up certain sections of the page. Open up a blank section for "Marching order" and let the players have tokens there to shuffle around. They can also put their PC's hit points on the token. But otherwise, tell them the tokens do not represent movement around a map. Just relative marching order, and HP's, for the tokens section of the "big page". In another section of the page, make a small section for EACH PC. Here you will put that PC's portrait, when they give you a picture of what their character looks like. They can find their picture on Google or put it on Photobucket. You the DM will ask them for a link to their character picture. When they post the link, you will Download the pic to your computer & Upload it to your Roll20 account, and place their portrait in their section of the "big page". If you can find their same picture in the Art search, it's faster, but if you can't find it under Art, you can still download it & upload it yourself. As you only ask for the PC portraits on the 1st game day, after uploading once it won't trouble you again. When the Players arrive on Day 1. You tell the introduction of the campaign. Then you get the Players participating. "Let's go around the room and everyone tell us about your character." When Bob starts to tell about his PC, you Shift-Ping to "force the view" to focus on Bob's character portrait. DM WILL HOLD SHIFT BUTTON AND MOUSE BUTTON to shift-ping and "force the view" and Ping the map with a colorful circle. This will move everyone's view and attention to the section of the "big page" that you want to show. So you go around the table. Each Player talks about their character. "You see an elf. He looks like this." The DM shift-pings everyone to look at the portrait of the elf, on that player's Section of the big page. Later, let's say Bob The Elf kills a Green Dragon. You can move a picture of a dead green dragon, onto Bob The Elf's section of the big page. Let's say Bob The Elf buys a castle. You can put the picture of the castle in Bob's section of the big page. Now the party says "We go down the road. We go up the mountain trail." The DM goes to REVEAL tool, and UNHIDE your DM's picture of the Mountain Trail. Shift-Ping to force everyone's view to that picture. DM says "Here is what the mountain trail looks like that you see ahead." They find a bugbear. DM will REVEAL the picture of the Bugbear, from the Fog Of War, and Shift-Ping everyone to look at the bugbear picture. SUMMARY: Use Fog Of War, make Sections of the big page, Reveal new pictures when appropriate, and Shift-Ping as DM to force everyone's view to the picture you are describing and scenario you are talking about. Hope this helps. Have fun
