Gathering around a table with friends, whether in person or with the help of technology, is an occasion worth celebrating. One of the many reasons we’re drawn to Tabletop Roleplaying is the joy that comes from creative collaboration and problem-solving. Working together, losing ourselves in the campaign, and fueling one another’s creativity brings our games to life!
In my position at Roll20, I’m fortunate to work closely with many of the people behind the games we know and love, and sometimes; the people behind our experience of gaming, too. Last week, I had the privilege of chatting with one Roll20’s talented independent partners: Brave New Worlds. This group of designers, writers, and composers create unique and highly immersive content for TTRPG gamers, made available on Roll20 for players and GMs to use in their campaigns. We spoke about starting a business with your friends, creating tools that elevate the play experience for folks of all sort, and the future of TTRPGs.
Read the interview below, and be sure to check out their impressive catalog of offerings. To celebrate the new year and 2 years of selling maps on Roll20, we’re offering a 40% discount on all Brave New Worlds Bundles this week only: from January 15-21!
Thank you so much for agreeing to chat with us: can you introduce the members of the Brave New Worlds team?
Jeff is our lead artist and designer, as well as our resident forever GM. Sean is a composer, our business manager, and handles all of our VTT conversions. He is also an absolutely brutal shredder. Christina is a map designer and our editor.
We all work together on writing and we try to make sure we have enough crossover in our skill sets to be able to support each other when needed.
What inspired the creation of your team? What were each of your journeys in the world of tabletop gaming?
Jeff’s first foray into tabletop gaming was the Star Wars: Invasion of Theed Adventure Game which he played with his grandmother and uncles when he was 12. Sean’s introduction to tabletop gaming came in high school when he attempted to gather his then-bandmates to play D&D 3.5, but no one really knew what they were doing. Christina’s introduction was with a Star Wars: Edge of the Empire campaign run by Jeff during her 2nd year of college. In 2018 the three of us began playing a 5e campaign with our friends for which Jeff was the GM. He created original maps for the campaign and eventually began releasing those online for others to use. In 2020, Sean began writing and releasing fantasy music on Patreon as a creative outlet during lockdown. With Christina’s help, we all began working together collectively at the end of 2021 under the name Brave New Worlds.
…embracing Roll20 during lockdowns allowed us to fall in love with tabletop gaming together and form the best friends we’ve ever had.
Such a great origin story; I love that you came together with your various backgrounds like an adventuring party in a campaign. As a group possessing such unique talents, how do you collaborate to bring your creative visions to life in your TTRPG content?
We’re fortunate to have been best friends long before working together. We routinely play tabletop games together online and in person and collaboration has always happened naturally between us. When we officially started working together, we started calling discord calls ‘team meetings’. As part of our regular team meetings, we brainstorm and throw out ideas for new maps and other projects. Those that require less work usually get prioritized along with whichever thing most captures our interest at the time, while projects with a larger scope get added to a running list of ideas and are slowly worked on behind the scenes until we have the resources to pursue them fully.
How do you balance creativity and practicality when developing content?
Our maps are designed with a focus on providing an engaging combat space for GMs and PCs to play in. We take into consideration things like average movement speeds per turn and effective ranges for ranged attacks across a variety of popular systems. We put these considerations into practice when designing our layouts and they inform where we place walls, chokepoints, cover, etc. We design them to be played with our friends in the games we run, so we always try to blow them away with an atmospheric and visually impressive map that allows for memorable and meaningful combat experiences.
The amount of care you put in really helps set the tone for a range of scenarios… you presently have over 200 titles for sale on the Roll20 Market, ranging from map tiles, to packs of battlemaps, to Addons pre-loaded with Dynamic Lighting. What’s it like selling on the platform?
Our experience has been great. As a creator, the submission and approval process is very simple and we get great feedback from the Roll20 team as part of that process. As a user, Roll20’s bundles and frequent sales provide an incredible value that allows us to be able to experience a huge range of games. We enjoy curating bundles of our content that are useful to all sorts of GMs.
Your GM Bundles and Starter Kits in particular make it so easy to pick up everything you need packed beautifully into one title. You do an exceptional job offering everything from traditional fantasy themes to sci-fi, haunted, even nautical content. How do you prioritize what to create next, considering the diverse interests of gamers?
We’ve been gamers long before being content creators so the maps we make are dictated by the games we play ourselves. All three of us regularly run games in several different systems so the themes of our maps naturally follow with releases of adventures, systems, and settings we’re personally interested in and excited for. For example, you can likely expect a larger focus on sci-fi and cyberpunk-themed maps as we kicked 2024 off with a new Cyberpunk RED campaign within our friend group.
We’re often inspired by real-world wilderness environments we have visited, or by structures and ruins from our own history. We’re also inspired by our love of video games and will occasionally create maps as homages to the beautiful worlds that talented developers create for us to explore. Whatever the source of the inspiration for any given map is, we always start by blocking out a solid layout where we establish cover, walls, lines of sight, elevation and other fundamentals to ensure we have a map that is fun to play on. Then we focus on the artistic design elements where we try to bring that initial inspiration to life through many hours in Photoshop. We try to maintain a unique artistic style that is often fairly subdued and drab which allows for the maps featuring more fantastic elements to vividly stand out.
What sets your maps apart and makes them particularly valuable for Roll20 users?
We take pride in the functionality of our maps. They are easy to drop into a game and they look great while offering clear layouts that are easily read by players and GMs.
We also always release quite a few different maps in any given theme, to allow for multiple encounters in the same general environments without needing to reuse the same maps multiple times.
You funded a really interesting Kickstarter campaign and are still taking late pledges for those who missed it. Could you elaborate on the goals and vision behind TOMB, and let us know what the Roll20 integration offers?
TOMB was inspired by our love of old-school dungeon crawling adventures and an upbringing in which the artwork from the earliest editions of D&D still bears some forbidden esoteric quality to it fueled by run-of-the-mill ‘satanic panic’ fears. We wanted to create something that hopefully carries some of that feeling while providing a fun dungeon delve. We’ll be wrapping up production in Q1 and getting both digital and physical rewards in the hands of backers.
The Roll20-compatible version of TOMB will include a compendium expansion with all of the new monsters, items, and spells alongside massive battlemaps depicting the town of Fenbury and the four dungeon levels below it, each utilizing Roll20’s Dynamic Lighting features.
Dungeon crawling never goes out of style; I particularly love the nod to a previous, almost taboo, era of Roleplaying. I can’t wait to see it in action on the virtual tabletop.
Can you describe any challenges you’ve faced developing and maintaining the brand?
We have had our share of growing pains. TOMB was a much bigger undertaking than we initially realized and we have had to navigate the tricky act of building and growing a business with our friends. The key to continuing to grow has been open and honest communication with one another and continuing to make time to hang out as friends outside of working on Brave New Worlds projects.
Prioritizing play is a great way to stay strong in business! I’ve had such a great time learning about the team, and have one final question for you: how do you see the future of immersive experiences and storytelling within tabletop gaming evolving?
In our own personal experiences, embracing Roll20 during lockdowns allowed us to fall in love with tabletop gaming together and form the best friends we’ve ever had. More recently, we’ve enjoyed returning to in-person sessions where we have laptops or tablets that still allow us to take advantage of the benefits offered by VTT play and combine them with face-to-face interaction and roleplay.
We hope the future is one where even more tabletop game designers and VTT developers work together in ways that allow for immersive VTT experiences whether running fully online or with a hybrid approach gathered around the table.
We couldn’t have said it better ourselves. As we transition some of our personal games back to in person, we’ve been ensuring that our tools work just as well around a kitchen table as a virtual one! Thank you so much for taking the time to share your story with us, and for marking down your bundles for a limited time to make them more accessible to Roll20 users!