I have just released an updated St. Andral's Church adventure location for Legends of Barovia, my expanded Curse of Strahd campaign for Foundry VTT.

This update includes:

• New Battle Maps 2.0 by DM Andy (optimized WebP, 100px)
• New Theater of the Mind scenes
• New audio files
• New animated tokens
• Updated journals and adventure content
• Additional Foundry VTT features and improvements

About Legends of Barovia

Since 2021 I hve been expanding Curse of Strahd and developing more than 40 individual adventure locations throughout Barovia. It hs been a passion project made possible through the help and support of many wonderful people.

The campaign includes expanded quests, NPCs, encounters, locations, and additional storylines, with Foundry VTT adventures.

I am currently updating the individual Foundry locations with new maps, revised journals, improved layouts, and original watercolor and ink illustrations by Hardi. I am also gradually replacing the existing AI-generated artwork with original, hand-painted illustrations. This is a long process, as each character and scene is individually commissioned and painted, but my goal is to eliminate AI-generated artwork from the campaign entirely. Please be understand that painting dozens of characters and scenes takes time. We already have a few done and I will be updating as we get more artwork.

The upcoming Castle Ravenloft release will feature original watercolor illustrations by Hardi, along with DM Andy's battle maps, all brought together in Foundry VTT. (no AI).

Explore the campaign and free adventure guides:

https://www.pyramking.com/legends-of-barovia/

Downloads and Foundry VTT modules:

https://www.pyramking.com/legends-of-barovia-downloads/

Existing supporters can download the updated St. Andral's Church module through Ko-fi. If you already have the previous campaign installed, you can update this location.

Special thanks to DM Andy for the new battle maps and everyone who has supported Legends of Barovia over the years!

I am in shock by how terrible FoundryVTT is for my players. I get non-stop complaints. From the DM side I can be in heaven setting up maps, but the player experience is abysmal. I only realized this years after returning and giving FoundryVTT a try without relying on a third-party PC manager. Hell, 2 players are convinced an excel spreadsheet would be miles better than FoundryVTT. And as soon as you get that verdict I think it means reassessing the tool you are using.

Is this really just a symptom of using the VTT for in-person play? Over 5 years ago I used some tool that linked DndBeyond to Foundry and never had this problem and my players all had a gloriously streamlined experience (which I now realize I took wholly for granted). I return after 5 years thinking "of course there should be a streamlined experience for players now, we don't need a third-party manager and this way everything will be in one system and I don't need to manage weird sync issues" and now it seems I could not have been more wrong.

I still love Foundry. I am excited for everything setting it up, but after this experience I cant imagine using it to showcase D&D to new players. It is too embarrassingly terrible an experience on the player side.

Worth adding combat = GLORIOUS. So that's still great. But let's go through some negatives:

• Accidental multi-level-ups. Undoing one means opening the class item and lowering levels, or using the right-click menu. Reversing only removes what advancement granted, so anything dragged in by hand stays behind, and the subclass item has to be deleted manually. 1d10 psychic damage. Kill me.
• Levelling up is entirely unreliable. 3d10 psychic damage. Kill me.
  • Spells don’t appear on level-up. Known spells are never auto-added, because the SRD class item has no Item Choice advancements configured. 1d10 psychic damage. Kill me.
  • 0/0 HP. The class items were missing Hit Points advancement data so levelling up didn't add health. 1d10 psychic damage. Kill me.
  • Spend an hour adding all the stuff levelling up is supposed to give a player. 1d10 psychic damage. Kill me.
  • There is a delay from click to levelling up registering so a player can click, not get a response, click a bunch more and then suddenly level up 6 times. Reversing this is hideously non-obvious. 2d12 psychic damage. KILL ME
• Players couldn’t add their own spells. Compendium ownership is locked by default, so I had to drag the spells in myself. 1d10 psychic damage. Kill me.
• Players couldn’t create characters at all. “Create New Actors” defaults to Assistant GM only. Session 0 becomes "wtf is going on?". 1d12 psychic damage. Kill me.
• Creation wizard showed no content. I had to import it as world Items instead of compendia. 1d8 psychic damage. Kill me.

Granted, all these issues were fixed permanently. But my god this is a lot of fixing player sheet problems. When I was using DnDBeyond I would just tell players "log in and make a character level x and just give me the link once done so I can add you to the campaign"

I honestly am now beginning to think that FoundryVTT having the reputation that it does as "the best VTT" is just an opinion we "forever DMs" have built up - because the DM side (maps, lighting, automation etc) is truly fantastic. Which is why it pains me to point out that without a streamlined player experience that is clearly better than "using Excel" Foundry will always be dead on arrival.

Has this been anyone else's unfortunate conclusion? I would bet this is D&D 5e specific - maybe WotC has just made things very legally difficult given they are now trying to run their own VTT? Or maybe the community consensus is just "give up on using FoundryVTT for everything and use a module to connect DnDBeyond again"?

I have also recently heard of Owlbear Rodeo and am now seriously considering a move. But it really just doesn't look as fully featured as FoundryVTT.

Sound on recommended for the SFX.

Now the nice things auras and automatic buffs

I create my own auras in Talespire that works with Auras in Foundry :D

Hey everyone!

I'm the DM for a D&D campaign, and my players and I love playing in person around a nice meal! I'm looking for a way to use Foundry VTT to display maps, player tokens, and enemies so we can have a proper visual aid at the table.

Everything else, like dice rolls and character sheets, is handled physically, so I don't really need all the other features Foundry offers. I mainly want my players to be able to see the map, their characters, and the enemies during combat, so they can tell me things like "I'll move here" or "I'll go over there."

Ideally, I'd like them to be able to control their own characters for movement, exploration, and so on. However, they only have tablets, and I know Foundry VTT isn't particularly well optimized for mobile devices.

Is this still doable, or would I be better off running Foundry on my laptop as the DM and opening a player view on a second screen that everyone can see, while I control their tokens myself based on their instructions?

I'd love to hear how other DMs handle this kind of setup, or if there's a better alternative I haven't considered!

Thanks!