Future ... I am in you ...

We are beginning a couple of new campaigns here.  My cousin is running a horror based campaign, Carrion Crown, and his daughter is going to run Serpant's Skull, a jungle crawl.  A few things came together at the last minute prior to the horror of Carrion Crown starting that allowed us to try digital maps with interactive lighting.

This allows us to display the professionally rendered maps found in the modules.  It's always sad that the game master gets to see the professional maps, but the players just get to see the DM's chicken scratch reproductions.  While you can create awesome 3D representations such as in our Everflame game these take an extreme amount of time. While I intend to still make models like from our Everflame game, projecting the provided maps is quick and easy.  Paizo even provides PDF interactive maps that allow you to turn off the room labeling as well as activate a "player view" that conceals secret doors and the like.

Using the provided maps you can now easily project them, but you need to be able to cover what the players can't see.  There are many virtual table top programs that allow this "fog of war" behavior but what I really wanted was "dynamic lighting".  Dynamic lighting allows you to place a token on the map as a light source, and then that light source will reveal only the parts of the map that you could see based off of how far you defined the light to shine, and what walls are in the way.  With a little bit of work on a map including the adding of walls and doors you've got a whole new layer to the game.

A few of the existing virtual table tops have this functionality, but I settled on Roll20 because one, it was the easiest to figure out, and two I had an account already, with full privileges because I contributed to the Kickstarter for TableTop Forge which later merged with Roll20.

Now, we can display high quaility maps and show exactly what our characters can see at any given time.  The group can see where shadows are (and thus where maybe you could hide), and instead of wasting time drawing maps that look horrible, we just display them.  Like I said, it's a whole new layer to the game.  Currently we are projecting from above, but we are also considering embedding a 42" LED in a table, or doing rear projections.

Basically, at this point, it's all gravy.