1920s Arkham: lighting, sound and maps for Roll20

Gas lamps on River Street, fog off the Miskatonic, and a farmhouse up Hollow Road where something keeps knocking in the attic.

⬇ Download How to set it up

Maps, tokens, sound and a lighting script · 84 MB zip, via itch.io

Lighting script

Type one line and the page lights itself

Put the light-marker on a page and type !mood arkham. The street lamps come on, the windows glow and the daylight drops to dusk. In the farmhouse the script lights the fire and the oil lamps and adds walls where the walls are, so Dynamic Lighting works straight away. Investigators carry their own flashlight, lantern or candle, and !mood menu puts every cue on a button in chat.

Hollow Road at night: a touring car's headlights and three investigators' lights, a flashlight, a lantern and a blue electric torch, picking out the farm lane and the farmhouse. — Hollow Road after dark, headlights on

The farmhouse at night: a flashlight beam through the parlour doorway, a lantern on the porch and a candle in the kitchen, with light spilling out of the windows. — The farmhouse: the walls block the light, the windows let it out

The cellar in the dark: a lantern at the foot of the stairs and a blue electric torch beam aimed at the black corner. — The cellar, by lantern and electric torch

The university library at night: reading lamps on the long tables, a lantern in the reading room, a torch beam down the stacks and a flashlight on the ritual circle. — The library: reading lamps, eldritch glows, and a torch down the stacks

The script needs Roll20 Pro and Updated Dynamic Lighting. The maps, tokens and sound work on any Roll20 account.

Tokens

The Many-Mouthed Horror

Eight squares of eyes, teeth and tentacles from above, with a round portrait for its handout. Put it on the map, kill the lights, and let the torches find it.

There's also a touring car whose headlights the script can switch on, and fifteen loose cellar props: chairs, a ladder, lumber, a trunk, tools and a tarpaulin.

The Many-Mouthed Horror token from above: a dark purple mass covered in eyes and toothed mouths, with tentacles and bony clawed limbs reaching out on every side.

Its round portrait: a purple, many-eyed face with several mouths full of jagged teeth.

Sound

Every room sounds like itself

25 tracks for the Jukebox: three music backgrounds, an ambience loop for each place, random room noises, and horror cues for when you need the table to jump. The ambience changes by itself when you move the players to a new page.

Run it from the command line or from a soundboard of macros. The cues include a shriek, a death cry, zombie groans, and a zombie loop that pounds on the doors and walls until you make it stop.

The maps

Eleven maps, from the town plan down to the cellar

Each one is sized in Roll20's 70px squares and drawn at double resolution. The interiors are proper 5 ft battle maps.

Arkham, the whole town plan: the university, the cemetery, the newspaper, the police station and the hospital
Miskatonic University, the whole campus
The university library: the stacks, the reading room, the Egyptian collection, and the room with a circle on the floor
The Miskatonic Valley, Innsmouth to Kingsport
Hollow Road, from the village out to the farm
The woods track: left at the burnt tree, to the cabin nobody uses
The farmhouse, ground floor and yard, plus its cellar, attic and tool shed

A hand-drawn town plan of Arkham, Massachusetts: brown-roofed blocks either side of the Miskatonic River, with the university, a cemetery, a hospital, the town hall and the newspaper office labelled. — Arkham, the town plan

A plan of Miskatonic University: halls, a library, a medical school, an observatory and a chapel around a quadrangle with a fountain, and an athletic field in one corner. — Miskatonic University, the whole campus

A map of the Miskatonic Valley: the river running from Ashby Corners past Arkham to the Atlantic, with Innsmouth and Kingsport on the coast, three hills, and an inset of the crossroads village. — The Miskatonic Valley, Innsmouth to Kingsport

A dense wood split by a stream, a track leading from a burnt tree to an abandoned cabin in a clearing, a family plot and a dark pond. — The woods track: left at the burnt tree, to the cabin nobody uses

An attic battle map: bare floorboards, old trunks, loose papers, a chimney stack, chalked star symbols near the walls, and a scatter of bones by one window. — The attic. Mind the bones.

The pack also has seven mood overlays (damp, rust, dust, dread and a general gloom) and five swirling eldritch glows to drop on anything.

Setting up

From zip to first session

Maps. Make a Roll20 page at the size the README lists, drop the map on the Map & Background layer, and use Advanced → Set Dimensions to fit it. The README has a picture of every map and a table of sizes.
Script. In your game's settings, open Mod (API) Scripts, make a new script, paste in ArkhamMoods.js and save.
Light each page. Put the light-marker on it, select the marker and type the page's mood, like !mood farmhouse. Select the investigators and type !mood vision.
Sound. Upload the MP3s to your Jukebox with their names unchanged, type !sound check and then !sound setup on each page.

The pack has a one-page cheat sheet for the table, ready-made sound macros, and !mood help in game when you forget.

The itch.io page also has the pack in three parts: maps and tokens (52 MB), sound (32 MB) and the script on its own.

⬇ Download

Licence

Use it in your games

Use the maps, tokens and sound in your own games, online or at the table, and show them on a stream or in a recording. Please don't sell them or re-upload them as your own pack. Link people here instead. The script is MIT-licensed.

I designed the pack: the maps, the sound and the lighting. AI wrote the code.

The town names come from H. P. Lovecraft's stories, which are public domain. Everything else is invented.
Map lettering is IM Fell English by Igino Marini, under the SIL Open Font License.

An unofficial fan creation. It isn't affiliated with or endorsed by Roll20 or any game publisher. Roll20 is a trademark of Roll20, Inc.