Hey guys!
I'm pretty excited to announce the arrival of our first Interactive Map - the town of Phandalin.
Before I get too much into the details, here's a screenshot of what that looks like when you first arrive on the page:
As you can see, we have a view of the map of Phandalin, where you can zoom, pan and scroll around the town, investigating points of interest, as well as just looking around at the details of the village/town at your leisure.
My initial thought for the interactive maps was twofold:
You could use it as a supplement for your VTT, having this up in tandem with Foundry or Roll20 or something similar, where you switch to the screen to get a one-stop-shop of maps, points of interest, scenes, NPC portraits and maps of those points of interest.
You could use it as a high-level way to run the campaign, if you didn't want to use VTT or tabletop maps, utilizing the combination of maps and scenes to mostly handle gameplay with theater of the mind, but combined with visual scenes and maps to give people some spatial information.
Points of Interest
When you click on a point of interest, like Harbin Wester's Home, you get a side panel that extends with 3 pods of information -- map, scene and tokens.
The images in these pods can be clicked on, as well, which expand the visual more toward the center of the screen, so that if you wanted to visit Harbin Wester, but had no need for combat movement or maps, you could simply click on the scene and use that as a visual while you handled your social encounter or theater of the mind session:
In addition to the maps and scenes, you can also click on a token to get a better view of the person with whom you may be speaking:
Interactive maps will also have some music available, that can be played from the web page to help automatically give your session some added ambiance. In this case, we have one of our own very talented Patrons, Josh Barron (www.joshbarroncomposer.com), providing his Phandalin theme for this interactive map!
How do I access this?
Once this is officially released, it will be available via the Morvold Press website for free (likely just requiring a Free Patron membership) to anyone to access and use. In order to download any of the maps, scenes or tokens from the site, you would need to have a Tier 1+ membership, but the website would be available for everyone to use.
When will it be available?
I hope to roll out the mostly finished version of this by the middle of next week, but I wanted to at least share the concept with you guys!
If you have any ideas, requests or comments, please let me know!
Jeff @ Morvold