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Building the Hogwarts Castle, need help! Map makers needed.

Hello everyone, I am new to Roll20 and have never played any D&D based games before, but my fiance and I are listening to a podcast of players in their campaign and I got the idea that maybe we should try out a HP themed D&D version. So I set out on this monumental tasks of building the Hogwarts castle. I haven't found anyone else's version of the said castle on the internet but I have found some great blueprints to work with as the overlay. However, using this site's map builder has been hectic at best. I am also only using free to download assets so I'm very limited in what I can do. Any help from anyone would be greatly appreciated. Plus once this is done I will let the internet have it so others like me can just find this and load it up immediately.
1600963821
keithcurtis
Forum Champion
Marketplace Creator
API Scripter
I'd be very cautious on the offer to share. You'd be dealing with at least three possible licensing issues: The creator(s) of any assets you use, the creator of the "version of the castle", and Rowling/WB. You couldn't share it here , in any case. It would violate the CoC. May I suggest a simpler solution? Find a pack of building tiles you like. There are many on the Marketplace, very reasonably priced. You might be able to build what you want with very few of them. Second, building the entire castle is ambitious and probably unnecessary, since it has been established (depending on your sources), that pieces of it move around from time to time. You are also very unlikely to have a token going from the Astronomy Tower to Herbology follow every step of the route. Roll20 is not a video game, and such movement would likely become tedious, particularly with multiple players. Use your sets to build specific locations on different pages. The site will operate much more efficiently with a large series of small maps than one gigantic map for each level of the castle. When your players want to go from the Great Hall to Griffindor Tower, just move the player flag from one page to the other. This will preserve a sense of mystery to the layout and (like JK Rowling herself) disguise the fact that the population of the castle just doesn't match the size and layout.
1600980976
Gold
Forum Champion
Given what you said here, I would use the Roll20 Drawing Tools for something like this. Just sketch out the rooms with boxes / lines. Use description verbally, and player's imagination, to turn those colorful lines into high stone walls. This would be a good free way, in my experience, to efficiently create a huge castle/school, without buying $5 packs of pre-made Roll20 Marketplace graphics assets. Artorian said:  I have found some great blueprints to work with as the overlay. However, using this site's map builder has been hectic at best. I am also only using free to download assets so I'm very limited in what I can do. Any help from anyone would be greatly apppreciated. Plus once this is done I will let the internet have it so others like me can just find this and load it up immediately.
On top of previous tips: the amount of assets and/or drawing needed to create large maps is huge and the roll20 editor is meant to support VTT play, not to be a fully fledged drawing program.  Start using free drawing programs. Export the sections you need and upload those as jpg and just add the doors/secrets. There are two programs that i use for this, and both are free and best in class. 1) Inkscape is perfect for compositing, it supports layers and you can use an example for layout and export any parts you like. If you link images, changes to tiles are reflected straight away. 2) GIMP is perfect to create tiles and assets to use im Inkscape and perform any after effects to exports (like creating small jpg’s). Finally if you want to share, read up on copyright. It’s a can of worms.
1601023119
Tiffany M.
Plus
Marketplace Creator
Try using a tool like Dungeon Scrawl, which is a free dungeon making online tool, and then bring that into Roll20 instead of drawing everything in Roll20. You really don't need all of Hogwarts castle. It reminds me of someone who asked me if I could make a very large section of a city... the reality is, it's not a video game, they're never going to need it ALL, just select pieces to move between and where major battles will occur. It would take you SO long to make it at 5 ft = one square. Better to just make the common room, the dining room, a classroom, the astronomy tower, the garden, the game field, the library, maybe Hagred's cottage and some of the forest... etc... a few major locations where you're sure to go.
1601072838
Andreas J.
Forum Champion
Sheet Author
Translator
I remembered that MrValor created a "Magic University" pack, so I looked it up, and his other sets that seems fitting or useful, to have a palette of art assets from the same art-style that fits together: Wild Interiors V8: BYO Fantasy University Interior Wilds V7: Fantasy University (prebuilt maps based on the above set) Wild Interiors Volume 2 furniture, floors, similar stuff Wild Interiors V5: Build Your Own Towers Wilds Interiors V3: Noble and Dungeon Towers - bunch of prebuilt towers, looks to been in the right direction Wild Interiors V4: Mage and Ruined Towers - bunch of prebuilt towers, fewer that seems to fit a Hogwarts vibe than the other list (Meh) Wild Dungeons Volume 2: Modular Sewer - if you really want a tileset for Chamber of Secrets, this seems okay, but might not get much mileage from it, don't think Hogwarts had much sewers at all.
1601101300
The MapHatter
Pro
Marketplace Creator
Meanders: Arcane Augurum: Might also be useful <a href="https://marketplace.roll20.net/browse/set/4510/meanders-map-pack-arcane-augurum" rel="nofollow">https://marketplace.roll20.net/browse/set/4510/meanders-map-pack-arcane-augurum</a>