Update: As of February 19, 2025, the Dungeon Scrawl Connection with Roll20 is live! Learn more here.
As 2024 comes to a close, we’re in a reflective mood at Roll20, celebrating the stories we’ve told together and barreling headfirst toward a new year and fresh adventures.
At Roll20Con this fall, we shared a plan to integrate Dungeon Scrawl, our free mapmaking software, into the virtual tabletop. Today, we’re providing an update on how it’s going so far, and looking back on some other notable achievements worth celebrating.
Building Bastions
When Roll20 acquired Dungeon Scrawl last year, we couldn’t get over how easy and fun it was to whip up maps on the fly. We hosted an internal contest to see which employees could make the best-themed creations based on thematic briefs (have you ever imagined your CEO’s basement? 👀). We had such a good time that we ended up hosting a few contests with the public: from open-ended prompts to daily themes. The results have given us life, and the most recent, our “Build a Bastion” contest, had the most entries of any event to date!
The 2024 D&D Dungeon Master’s Guide includes new rules for designing Bastions, personal strongholds that allow players to reflect their character’s personality and ambitions through a uniquely created home base. To celebrate the community’s creativity, we asked that you show us your character’s ultimate hideaway by using Dungeon Scrawl to design a Bastion floor plan.
We received some AMAZING submissions: here are a few of our favorites, including the winning submission from Mr Aust1n: the Flaxen Tavern. This Bastion for six characters at 5th level was gifted by the Golden Vault organization and serves as a key meeting place for the party.
Connection Updates
Since we originally shared our vision for the Dungeon Scrawl + Roll20 Connection, we’ve:
- Designed the joint User Interface to provide seamless access to Dungeon Scrawl maps with just a couple of clicks within the virtual tabletop.
- Built a new Page type that allows users to create a new Dungeon Scrawl map or link an existing one. As you update your map in Dungeon Scrawl, changes will be reflected in near-real time within your campaign.
To see the latest updates in action, check out this video preview:
While we’d originally hoped that the connection would be launched before the end of 2024, feedback from the Dungeon Scrawl and Roll20 community members helped us identify areas that need additional time and attention. As of year-end, over a million people have visited the Dungeon Scrawl app, and as the user base has grown, limitations have been identified in its supporting systems.
Most issues, including loading maps in-library, arise when the number of concurrent users reaches high numbers during peak usage times. Because we expect an influx of new Dungeon Scrawl users with this connection, we decided to delay the launch until we can solve the newly identified problem so that this issue won’t detract from the benefits of the project. We’re committed to providing updates along the way and to delivering tools equipped to meet growing demand without sacrificing performance.
As always, thank you for your engagement and feedback, since it continues to guide our development. We look forward to continuing to build, support, and improve the tools you use in-game for many years to come!