You have been in this position before. A fight breaks out at a location you had not prepared for. Maybe the players unexpectedly started a tavern brawl (are you truly surprised?) or started brawling with the groom at a wedding ceremony. Suddenly all of your preparation flies out of the window. You are confronted with only a couple of options, none of them truly optimal.

1. Theatre of the mind. You are relying on your descriptions to portray the packed tavern or wedding venue. This might work well in a more narrative game, but if we are talking about D&D, positioning can quickly become important and hard to remember.
2. Scribbly drawing. You draw what you envision on a dry-erase-map or digitally on the VTT of your choice. This works for a variety of scenarios and is quite flexible. The only issue is with complex locations taking a long time to draw (and potentially with your drawings feeling a little inadequate).
3. Scrambling for a fitting battle map. You call in a quick break, while you are scrambling your library for a battle map befitting for this situation. This might work in more generic locations (like being in a non-descript forest or desert), but is less immersive if you have already described significant landmarks and details not reflected in your stock-art battle map.

Modular Terrain

Now, the wargamers between you might already be screaming from the top of your lungs. I see you in that dingy outhouse, sprinkling static grass on XPS foam! Indeed, there is a fourth option for those of you lucky enough to play games in real life. If you are among these nerds, you have probably dipped your toes into this style of play. You create an amount of modular hills, trees, grasslands, ruins and buildings that can be arranged in any kind of constellation. This way, you can build up your terrain in any way you want, similar to building with LEGO bricks.

The benefits are huge. You can have detailed, beautiful terrain that you can arrange quickly and in many different ways. Granted, how beautiful it is depends on your artistic merit or budget for Dwarven Forge. But nevertheless, it is no surprise that this style of using terrain is very popular in wargaming. But in the TTRPG space, it is much less ubiquitous. Sure, you do see it popping up on some streaming shows like Critical Role, but besides the big ones, it is not the norm.

Dwarven Forge terrain is known to be modular and pretty, but expensive and storage intensive. This is the option for people who have paid off their mortgage, not the average player in my demographic.

Massive Scope

One reason for this might be the different requirements TTRPGs have for their terrain. Wargaming often takes place on wide, grassy planes, inspired by the Napoleonic campaigns they have emerged from. Even if the terrain gets more adventurous, like with the different planets of Warhammer 40k, you can usually choose what kind of terrain you want to play on before the game starts.

In TTRPGs, the situation is much less static. The players can move into houses, delve into caves, run through the open grasslands and fly into the sky within a single game session. To truly be able to provide the modular terrain experience, you would just need a lot more modular terrain then in wargaming. This increases the costs and effort required, which makes it less attractive to many folks. It can also drive a particular style of play, where the game master tries to steer the game into situations they have terrain prepared for, instead of advocating for truly free choice.

Digital Salvation?

Through the rise of online play on Virtual Table Tops, new possibilities have arisen. Digital terrain is A LOT cheaper then physical terrain (we are not talking the difference between a book and a PDF, we are talking orders of magnitude). There is more choice and less of a logistical hassle to store the terrain. Digital terrain is also a lot more flexible in terms of size and proportions, you can copy it infinitely, the possibilities are endless.

In theory, the massive increase in possible scope should have coincided with digital games embracing modular terrain. But in my experience, that has not been the case. Sure, people use digital maps a lot, but not in a modular fashion. I do see people having 20 variants on the same map with a hill and a tree on top, but no one is moving around modular digital hills and placing modular trees next to the modular river segment. But why? You can have all the benefits of physical modular terrain with almost none of the downsides. So what are we doing here? This is my theory:

• Software requirements. Not every VTT can handle a lot of assets being placed in the same scene. While platforms like Owlbear have created special rendering software to allow an almost infinite amount of assets without performance issues, many other popular platforms can struggle with hundreds of assets being placed.
• Missing products. Do not get me wrong, we easily have tens of thousands of art assets related to top-down battle maps on the internet. But rarely are they created in a way that would actually allow you to easily use them as modular terrain. They are definitively made for map making before the session, when you have a lot of time. They are often small, fiddly and not created with the GM quickly dropping them on the VTT in mind. You definitely do not want to build your digital "LEGO set" brick by brick each time, but have some prebuilt modules instead.
• No culture. The wargaming community has developed and refined their techniques for modular terrain for decades. There are magazines, YouTube channels, Warhammer shops with painting stations and a whole industry of small to mid-sized companies offering materials. We do not have anything comparable in the digital space.

How I built my Digital Modular Terrain

With my new campaign, I wanted to challenge myself to create a library of digital modular terrain for my virtual table. It takes place in a fantasy realm called "The Valley of Rain", inspired by Studio Ghibli films and Edo-period Japan. You can follow the game here if you are interested in joining, to get notified once a spot opens again.

VTT. I am using Owlbear as the VTT, which can handle an almost infinite amount of assets without major performance issues. This is crucial for this style of play, since some VTTs can have serious issues handling the amount of assets you will be placing.

Textures. In order to generate the grasslands, rivers and mountains of the vale, I first needed some textures, so I went on 2minutetabletop and got myself some textures for free. There are a lot of pay what you want options on the website. I would highly recommend sourcing all the art from similar or even the same artist, so that you have a coherent style at the end.

Now the problem with these textures is that they are rectangular. This makes them fairly inflexible in terms of map-size and shifting terrain within the map. I would recommend using a free editor like GIMP in order to give the textures a rugged and rounded edge, so that they more easily flow into others.

Here you can see the power of a well crafted modular river asset. The texture is cut alongside the water ripples, so that it is impossible to make out where one river asset starts and another ends. This way, long stretches of rivers and even lakes can be created with a singular asset. The texture is from 2minutetabletop, edited with GIMP.

Assets. The heart of your modular terrain will consist of elements you place onto your textures. These will be your scatter terrain, like grassy hills, trees, buildings and rooms. You will find a lot of those in digital asset packs, like on 2minutetabletop, but you will have to modify quite a few of them with GIMP. The reason is that you will not have a lot of time placing the assets, since you might be doing it in the middle of the session. Therefore you will want some big and chunky assets to fill some space quickly. Combining assets in GIMP, like bundling up trees or creating prepacked rooms will be crucial for your library. It is okay to have smaller terrain for the finer details as well, but the bigger assets will be the work horses you have to rely on.

Quickly thrown together maps do not have to look bad! This map only uses 11 distinct assets: Grass texture, water texture, hill asset, tree asset, fire asset, smoke asset, campfire asset, tent asset, tall grass asset, stone asset and water ripple asset. This combination already allows for most meadow & forest related scenarios.

What to pick? Choosing my assets, I quickly ran into a problem. There are A TON of digital assets floating around the internet. I started gobbling them up like a mad collector, but I quickly realized that a large collection is not necessarily a good thing. If you have 20 variations of a tree asset, you might need to scroll a few extra seconds to get to your bush asset. This can quickly add up, creating an unwieldy and confusing library. You really need to choose the assets you need for this campaign carefully, not just packing up assets "just in case". Now you can store all of these assets on your hard drive, but do not upload them into your VTT library, if you want to keep your sanity. Here are my favorites:

• Trees. You really only need one of them, and you can use them on most maps. They provide cover, you can climb on them, they are great!
• Fire. It is surprising how often my players set things on fire. But even if they do not, you can use the same fire asset for torches, campfires, forest fires and furnaces.
• High grass. I was surprised by how often I used this asset already. It is an easy way to create difficult terrain that works in most biomes.
• Roof. Just with a roof you can display many buildings on a map. Just make sure to have some ready made rooms to place on top of them if the players decide to enter.
• Cliffs. These things are quite universal and quickly give your battlefield some elevation.
• Rivers. Most battle maps are improved by the addition of a river. You can even craft the asset in a way that you do not imply in which direction it flows. This has the benefit of letting you place many river assets next to each other to create a lake.

Multi purpose assets. Something digital assets are really good at is using them for multiple purposes, since you can easily resize them. A brown circle could be anything from a table to a chair to a part of a fence or stilt, depending on the size and context. These assets are often a strong choice, since they are so flexible while still taking up little space in your library. I use the same rectangular and round table assets for building bridges. My animated fire asset is technically only fire, but it is on torches, campfires, forest fires, furnaces and more.

The same asset can be used in different circumstances to portray different things. Here, the same fire asset signifies a bush fire, a camp fire and candlelight.

Where to source Assets from?

While I have mostly used 2minutetabletop assets for my campaign, there are many artists out there who will offer similar things. While I recommend going with the free options for your first steps, there are also paid asset packs that may contain things you need later down the line. With a bit of skill, you can even digitally cut out assets from ready made maps. Whatever you do, just stay consistent and disciplined in what assets you get. They need to be of a similar art style, color scheme and perspective in order to look great combined.

Conclusion

Taking the wargamers homework to the digital space is a great idea, though it is not easy to do. There are not a lot of ready-made products available, and there is little communal knowledge or culture about techniques and best practices. But with a lot of work and a (compared to real modular terrain) small investment you can start to build up your digital library for your campaign. Your players will still surprise you with where they choose to fight - but it will be a pleasant surprise you are quite prepared for. If you are interested in reading more think pieces about TTRPGs and want to be kept up to date, you can subscribe to my newsletter for free. There, I send you one mail a month (or less), showing you the highlights of what the community has to offer in terms of advice for game masters and players alike.