In our weekly Empire of the Petal Throne campaign, we have engaged in some light tomb raiding in order to find out more information about the history of a problem we are having. These tombs are associated with the followers of the last avatar of the Azure Queen in Glory… and we are trying to figure out how to deal with her next avatar, who we worry is going to be the Lady Seruna, daughter of the previous governor of our little colony.

The problem of course is that the current governor of the colony is one of the PCs (and my character’s nephew), and is currently the avatar of her arch-nemesis.

Since we play online using Google Hangouts, I pulled up Photoshop on one of my monitors, set it up with screen sharing to the rest of the group, and drew this player map as we explored based on the GM’s descriptions of the tombs.

A lot of people (especially on-line groups) pooh-pooh the role of party mapper (and party caller), but I find they really help things out. The party caller is great. Instead of everyone talking over each other to explain how we deal with a situation of where we are exploring next and what order we are going in and who is doing what, we have one voice that explains the sequence that we’ve negotiated as a group to the GM and we go ahead with it. It really works well for exploration-based play.