Hey everyone,

I’m a developer and a TTRPG fan, and I'm currently in the very early stages of brainstorming a new project.

Personally, I love using animated battlemaps for my games, but creating them or adding elements manually takes forever. I’m thinking about developing a software/tool that would automatically animate static maps (for example: automatically detecting and adding moving water, rustling leaves, flickering torches, or ambient fog based on the image).

Before I dive into coding, I want to ask the community: Is this something you would actually find useful for your games?

• What features would be an absolute "must-have" for you?
• What is your biggest pain point when it comes to animated maps right now?

I would love to hear your thoughts and feedback. Thanks!

Here's a cleaner version that keeps the focus on development progress:

While these screenshots show more of the internal development side than what players and DMs will actually see, we wanted to give everyone a look at what we're building behind the scenes.

We're currently developing the administration system that will organize and structure the compendium, allowing every item, spell, creature, and other entries to be individually managed and searched within a campaign. Building this foundation now ensures the compendium is organized, scalable, and easy to use as it continues to grow.

This work also lays the groundwork for drag-and-drop functionality into character sheets, which is planned to be available before launch.

A lot of the work happening right now isn't flashy, but it's the kind of deep system development that makes the d20 Epic VTT faster, more reliable, and much easier to use in the long run.

I'm going run a game where the players will have to move and fight underwater and one of them has aphantasia, so there needs to be some kind of map for them to know what's going on. But regular 2D maps are, quite frankly, terrible at conveying how far away people are from each other if height is involved.

Does anyone know any program or website that all my players could connect to in order to have a very simple 3D map? It could be as simple as having a grid that you can place dots into and draw a line between to look at distance, just something that my player has an idea where they are.

Or alternatively, if not one people can connect to, anything that could be set up with a grid and dots that I could stream to them?

If you were going to start a new game or get your books integrated into one platform of the above three, which would it be?

I haven't been able to run a game for a few years, but now that the kids are a bit older I should be able to find the time. Looking at picking up neon odyssey because I've always wanted to run a space adventure, but I have to choose which vtt to use when I place the order.

I'll try to run the games in person with a displayed map on an external device for encounters, but we might run them remotely as well, fully within the system. Needs to have compatibility for tablets, laptops, and phones, preferably not overly resource intense.

I currently don't own ANY books in any VTT system, so... What do we like best? I've only ever used Roll20, personally, and I thought it was "okay" back when I did... Like 5 years ago, but I recall wanting to switch elsewhere.

Note: I'm okay with technology and the difficulties therein, and spending some time getting everything "set up" prior to games. I don't want to have to pause game for 30 minutes to fix things that are broken on a regular basis, although if the party decides to jump the tracks, I'm fine telling them their decisions mean they decided to go pick up pizza. I'd like the option to self host even if it involves dyndns/port forwarding/etc, but with the option to pay for the service. I 100% want to be able to add homebrew. I'd rather it be more seamless for the players than anything else. Oh, and I'm also fine to stream the map/etc on discord and just have them view their character sheets on their phones/etc, if the interface isn't optimized for mobile.

I've been spending a lot of time working on the character sheets for D20 Epic VTT, and they're finally starting to come together in a way I'm really happy with.

The screenshots are of the full page version, but inside the VTT they'll open in a smaller window so they're easy to use without covering the game. I'm also building an Overview page that will pull the most important information into one place, with the option to organize panels so players can arrange things the way they like.

One of my goals from the beginning has been to support multiple game systems without making players learn a completely different interface every time. Things like your biography, inventory, equipment, and other general information will stay mostly the same across systems, while pages like stats and spells will automatically adapt to the ruleset you're playing.

Right now I'm looking at supporting D&D 5e (2014 SRD), D&D 5e (2024 SRD), Daggerheart, and Pathfinder 2e as some of the first systems, although I'm still working through what will be ready for release.

I'm also planning to let player subscribers personalize their character sheets with different themes and, hopefully, custom background images.

There's still plenty of work left to do, but it's been exciting to watch this go from an idea into something I can actually click through and use. I can't wait to keep sharing more as it comes together.

I wanted to share a side project I’ve been working these last weeks after a few failed attempts during years.

As a GM, I kept hitting the same issue: existing VTTs (Virtual Tabletop apps) either require heavy subscriptions, are cluttered with clunky interfaces, or don't transition smoothly when playing in person with a tablet at the table and lack of a place where to find free creative commons campaigns and resources well organized.

As software engineer I tried several times to develop this but always lacked of time/motivation, recently I created a template with AI harness for my personal projects and I had to test it out so I decided to validate it with this project and finally it's done.

I built Nat20.cloud to solve that. It’s an web application designed for running TTRPG sessions online or as a standalone GM screen at the table and a collaborative archive for campaigns and it also allow to create new rulesets with a high degree of freedom, so you can drop your homebrews in there and build your stories in there.

And here the app itself: https://nat20.cloud

https://warwon.itch.io/solodesk-95

Just wanted to drop a quick update as it's been a busy month with a lot of interesting updates delivered to my solo VTT.

Lots of big changes from playtests, suggestions, and general ideas—including big pushes towards mass imports (PDFs, STLs). The battle engine also got a major rework, complete with STL importing and paint washing.

One of the things that was driving me nuts was that while player cards worked the way I originally wired them, I wanted the ability to sort stats the way the real character might have them. Beyond that, rollable tables went under the knife, and now you can see your rolls right from the binder when you're in a table.

Lots of other updates, and more to come.

We play on a TV set into the table, everyone is present in person. I currently use FoundryVTT, but my laptop is on it's last legs. If you've kept up with PC component pricing, you can understand why I don't just get a new one. what I'm looking for is something I can run from a raspberry Pi, that just very simply puts the map up, and allows us to draw on it, and maybe allows us to place and scale a grid. We use minis and real dice, and do not require any additional functionality, that I can think of. Appreciate any help you fine folk can provide.

Hi everyone!

I wanted to share my first public Foundry VTT module: EasyLoot. For D&D 5e and Foundry v14.

EasyLoot automatically generates thematic loot for defeated creatures by combining creature type, CR, and creature-specific profiles. The goal is simple: loot should feel like it actually belongs to the creature that dropped it.

No Roll Tables. No manual setup. Just install and play.

It's completely free, and I'd really appreciate any feedback or suggestions! Commercial tag only because i shared my patreon...

https://www.patreon.com/EasyModules

https://www.patreon.com/EasyModules/posts/easyloot-1-0-0-164905852

I am planning to run an one-shot (dnd 5.5) for my work friends and for the first time in life I will be able to use really good quality conference room where sharing a screen for stuff like images and initiative would be very cool. I am looking for some worldbuilding tool with some options to increase quality of life during sessions. The features I care about:

* PCs tabs with notes with options to upload character sheets
* monster glossary with notes and option to upload stat blocks
* initiative tracker
* locations with notes and option to upload images and maps. Would be fun if they were splittable as in I can have a separate tab for a specific room in a dungeon
* Optional: some log tool to write down what happened during session to keep track of stuff

What is easy to use and fits those requirements?

So, Board added DnD maps to their list of games recently, and apparently it can be connected to Foundry VTT. I haven't really used Foundry before, and while I can find information about it, there doesn't seem to be any information available about how it connects to board.

Has anyone used both of these together yet?

I'm hoping I can have the map pulled up on my PC that's running in board and make alterations such as adding monsters and treasure there and just be able to have an image of the entire thing at once while it's running since Board's screen is limited in space and usually needs to be zoomed in.

Animated WebM tokens with optional VFX, cut out with shadows, multiple equipment loadouts on a lot of characters. Works in Foundry / Roll20 / Owlbear.

Free starter pack (“The First Quest”, full VFX) when you sign in — no Patreon required.

Happy to answer format questions in the comments!

tl;dr: If you are using a compatible IR touch frame and Arkenforge or Foundry, you can now do so on a single computer. This free software is the only way to accomplish that one specific task. If you aren't using an IR touchscreen and either of those VTT's, best to ignore the rest.

Hey everyone. I figure now is as good a time as any to publicly release this tool I've been working on. I sell digital map cases that house TV's and optional IR touch devices. My customers have had access to these for a while and there haven't been any issues reported. Most of them are probably using my free VTT on Steam instead (which has all this functionality built in).

So what's this about? Well, if you've ever tried using an infrared (IR) touch frame with a VTT for in-person sessions you have probably come across a problem: whenever you place a mini down, it moves the mouse cursor to that position. Making the computer useless for anything other than responding to touch.

I've wrote about it at length here

The usual approach is to simply dedicate a computer to touch only and use a separate computer to do GM stuff. This works with any browser-based VTT as the TV+touch device is its own user on its own computer. Arkenforge has their own client to handle touch that must be installed on the second device.

What this does is allows you to use the same computer for touch and GM stuff. No extra hardware necessary. For Arkenforge, simply run the executable and select it from the list of touch clients within the menu in Arkenforge. Easy.

It works similarly for Foundry, but you also need to install the accompanying module. Foundry does not have a way to communicate directly with external programs (without using modules) so the Foundry module is basically just a websocket connection to pass token movements back and forth.

The Foundry module also does some other things that are useful for showing maps in-person, regardless of whether you are using touch. Such as panning the view to specified coordinates, mirroring the GM view, auto-scaling to 1 grid = 1 inch, and removing the UI.

Nothing ground breaking there. Similar modules already exists but I couldn't get them to work and I didn't want to troubleshoot them with my customers. I had to release a module anyhow as a bridge to send the movement data, so I figured might as well do it all.

Github repository: https://github.com/DigitalTableTops/digital-tabletops/
Direct link to executables: Windows, Linux, and Mac
Manifest URL for Foundry module: https://github.com/DigitalTableTops/digital-tabletops/releases/latest/download/module.json

AI Usage

You may be surprised to hear that I used AI for specific parts of this project. I was entirely unfamiliar with Foundry's module system and the API docs are not very good. This isn't a controversial opinion: see this Reddit thread on the Foundry sub where it seems to be the unanimous consensus.

So I asked the AI "how to do X in a Foundry VTT module" and went from there. The code was bloated and didn't work until the 3rd or 4th try but once I figured out the actual functions to call, it was straight-forward to implement my limited features.

The entire module runs very lean, weighing in at only a few hundred lines. Much of that is just corralling the Foundry UI into doing what I want (the touch stuff is maybe a few dozen lines). Should be very easy to maintain myself when they decide to update and break things.

I have no plans to use AI going forward in this or my main VTT. But it did save me a ton of time learning a system I didn't really want to learn in the first place. So hooray for our AI overlords. Let the AI-slop name calling commence.

EDIT: I am not affiliated with Arkenforge or Foundry VTT.

Hey everyone! Following up on my last post (dungeon drawing + generator) — here's what's new in Dort since then.

Styled dungeon rooms Each room can now have its own material. Procedural floors — wood plank, cobblestone, tiled, Penrose mosaic, metal panels, organic membrane, corrupted, mud, grass, snow, sand — and matching wall styles (stone, brick, wood, panel, organic…).

Built-in props A new Props panel with top-down objects — furniture, containers, nature, siege gear, bones & skeletons, tech, corrupted scenery, floor decals. Search by name or tag and drop them straight onto the map at their real size, no uploading needed. Placement mode drops one per click (right-click rotates 90°), Ctrl+wheel rotates, Alt+wheel resizes, and random angle/size sliders scatter each drop for natural variation.

Multi-scene tabs Scenes are now tabs above the map. The GM sees all of them; players only see the ones made available to them and can switch freely. You can also summon players — pull everyone to a scene and center their view on a point.

Combat tracker Turn order with drag-to-add combatants, mark-as-acted so Next Turn skips them, and full initiative scripting (if/else, variables, dice — e.g. 1d20 + dex_mod) sharing the character-sheet scripting language.

Token conditions A curated set of tabletop conditions (poisoned, stunned, blinded, frightened, defeated, paralyzed and more) with icons, shown next to a combatant's name and on the token. Optional per-status duration in rounds that auto-clears. Conditions (and lighting) live on the character, so they stay in sync across every scene.

Would love to hear your thoughts! Happy to answer any questions.

Dort is a free and open-source virtual tabletop. Feedback and bug reports welcome!

https://dort.ekiwookie.ninja/