Well.. in my case... one of the long term goals is to see the state of the top side as well as return if possible. The humans, elves, a few dragonborn and a few halflings were forced into hiding in this underground city at least as a monster hoard ravaged the surface over 1000 years ago... The eladrin(high elf) in the party has a HUGE racial itch to get out and return his people to the forests, the sun, moon, and stars... At this point, they are just getting wind of a possible invasion of the underground city and will learn "soon" that they need to recruit allies from other cities or face decimation. Some such potential allies lie overa large distance and they will have to make a choice: a) travel underground where travel will be difficult and perhaps take a very long time(no established "roads" to many places) due to elevation changes as well as very dangerous(known dangerous creatures in the underwild) or b) the totally unknown surface route... might be more dangerous, but could potentially broaden the number of allies and will likely be much faster route if proper precautions are taken....


As for tiles... I actually mean more along the lines of VERY individual sections.... so, a 4 square long "wall", a 4x4 square "corner piece", etc. I am currently using someone else's tiles, but will be making my own soon so that I can also create some pre-made room configurations. The main reason I am doing it this way is that MapTool has some efficiencies built in so that if you use the same tile (even if rotated or resized!) multiple times, the memory footprint remains very low(ie, just taking up the size, location and orientation instead of the entire image contents).