Dungeon Scrawl Rolls Out Dynamic Lighting in Early Access For Pro Subscribers
Dungeon Scrawl, one of Roll20s recent acquisitions, is rolling out dynamic lighting—so you can draw your map and then light them.
This week, Roll20 and Dungeon Scrawl are rolling out, in early access, dynamic lighting for the maps you draw. It’s a pretty striking effect, and an amazing tool for DMs who want to actually play with the light rules.
Being able to draw a map in Dungeon Scrawl is already pretty user-friendly. It’s a fairly straightforward program that lets you draw dungeon, decorate, and export. But now, Roll20 and Dungeon Scrawl are testing out a new lighting feature. You can light your maps and even move the lighting around them with relative ease.
Of course all of this is still in development. And you have to be a pro subscriber to test it out. But even still, early looks are pretty amazing.
Dungeon Scrawl’s New Lighting Feature – Test It Now
Roll20 announced the new feature both on its Blog and via its Bluesky account, showing off a quick video of the lighting system in action.
“So… did you know Dungeon Scrawl has lighting? The feature is still in develpment, but Pro subscribers can test it now! Log in to Dungeon Scrawl, click the light bulb button on the left sidebar and turn lighting ‘on.'”
– Roll20 via BlueSky
And it really is as easy as clicking a button. Of course, there are several caveats to keep in mind. For one, this is very much still in development. Even the Dungeon Scrawl webpage says that Exports don’t work yet, and that many lights will slow down the program.
But all you have to do is turn on lighting by clicking the light bulb button. Then you can add lights and even set the ambient background lighting color. On Roll20’s Bluesky account, a video showed a map featuring four lights of different colors.
You can see the user moving the yellow light around and the lighting adjusting on the fly, so to speak. It’s a cool feature and one that can add a bit of flash to an otherwise humdrum map. But I don’t now how often people actually use this sort of thing. My games these days tend to be more theater of the mind—even when doing dungeon crawls. But if you’re the kind of person who loves having very brilliant maps, this seems like a very cool tool to have in your arsenal.
Or if not in your arsenal, perhaps in your west ham.
