If you’re willing to put some effort and pre-session work into them, maps in virtual tabletops can do some pretty amazing stuff. You can have several prepared ahead of time, with detailed descriptions, NPC tokens, and interactive widgets all ready to go, and flip between them effortlessly. You don't have to wipe off the whiteboard or swap out the paper on the table to change maps in a VTT, there’s no need to swap out the minis for what lurks on the new map, and it's easy to jump back and forth as players move between them, without losing anything or wasting any time.

I’ve found that having a few forest, cave, and roadside encounter maps on hand while running an adventure involving lots of overland travel is a good idea. While running playtests of The Rescue of Doniert Ironvale, I’d roll random encounters as the party made their way from hex to hex on an overland map. If something interesting came up, I could quickly pull everyone to a smaller encounter map with a band of brigands, a pack of wolves, or a wandering cyclops. When the party discovers the kobold cave, it’s only a few clicks for me to get their character tokens there and have them start exploring its depths. The kobolds are all there, waiting. The dynamic lighting is set up, and the cave reveals itself as the party moves through it with their torches.

These features and functions are also useful for dungeons, especially those with multiple ways to move between the levels. You can line up the different levels so that the stairways are in the proper place on different maps, and so that they maintain a faithful representation of what room is over another. I’ve used this to great effect while running Rappan Athuk sessions during the early alpha tests. Rappan Athuk features a dungeon with a ton of different levels and ways to move between them, and I had entire floors of the dungeon precanned and ready to go with all the enemies in their little rooms waiting to encounter the party. I even had wandering monster tables set up as macros that work with a single click.

VTTs also allow you to have more dynamic maps with interesting effects. Secret doors can be revealed with the click of a button, removing the vision-blocking properties of a wall and allowing players to see what lies beyond. An arch can collapse and swap out its art on the fly, showing the party exactly what happened while maintaining the integrity of the art. An earthquake could split a room in two by allowing the GM to actually reposition the floor tiles to reveal the resulting chasm with a simple drag-drop, growing wider in successive rounds. The rooms of a haunted house could rotate in systematic ways as the party moves between them, using a simple macro script to form a complex puzzle for the party to solve.

These ideas are only a taste, there are lots of things that you can do with maps in VTTs that are hard or impossible to do while sitting around a physical table. When the tools get out of the way and it becomes a single button click to trigger dynamic effects on a professionally drawn map, why wouldn’t you use them?

Expect loads of dynamic maps in adventure modules from The Mirror Realms of the Tempest!

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