SCAG Now On FANTASY GROUNDS VTT

Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide is not only out on general release today, but it's also available on the Fantasy Grounds virtual tabletop. It includes the entire contents of SCAG (divided into DM and Player sections), image handouts, maps, and 37 new character portraits. It's $39.99, and requires an appropriate Fantasy Grounds license. "Get everything you need to adventure in the Forgotten Realms on the exciting Sword Coast, home to the cities of Baldur's Gate, Waterdeep, and Neverwinter. Crafted by the scribes at Green Ronin in conjunction with the Dungeons & Dragons team at Wizards of the Coast, the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide provides D&D fans with a wealth of detail on the places, cultures, and deities of northwestern Faerûn." And, of course, if you haven't yet, head to your local game store and grab the actual book!

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Find it here.

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[Wolf118]

You can drag any of our shortcuts (basically anything) to any other image and hold down CTRL when you do. Let go and it will place a pushpin there which links back to the item you dragged. The common thing is to create a story entry that might have further links to other images, npcs, items. etc. and then drag that to the map. We use this within SCAG for things like this. If you click on the pin for the city of Neverwinter on the Sword Coast Map, it opens a story entry with a description of the city and then a blown up regional map and a separate city map. If you decided that you wanted to add details or record notes about what happened in the Sleeping Dragon Inn within Neverwinter, you could create a new story entry with that info and then CTRL+drag that to the Neverwinter city map.

FG is expensive, but as a DM, it's well worth the investment to have all the information at your fingertips. I can create new monsters as needed, or copy existing ones and makes changes based on the DMG guidelines. Maps are easy to import and share, as are tokens. Creating story entries for an adventure is easy and you can add links to encounters, maps, and other story points. Character sheets are pretty decent, and make rolling very easy. The Combat Tracker is easy to use as well, with a lot of information at your fingertips. Fog of war on the maps is easy to control, although still have fingers crossed for dynamic lighting.

Two things, however, are nagging problems. One is the lack of a formal user's guide. The tip above from Smiteworks; I had no idea I could do that. FG is very much a program where you learn-on-your-own by playing around with it. But some of us prefer to RTFM first, and then play around. If there are documented features, I'd like to know about them.

The other problem is the lack of a map editor or even whiteboard feature. You must import a map for every encounter; you can't just use a built-in marker and whiteboard to hand draw a room or situation. And if I have several smaller maps I want to piece together to form a larger one, I have to do that outside of FG.

 

[smiteworks]

The manual is mostly divided up into the Wiki or as Guides on Steam (same basic content). The majority of the user documentation is presented in videos and guides available from the Wiki now. This is constantly being expanded.

http://www.fantasygrounds.com/wiki/index.php/Videos

There are also User Guides:
http://www.fantasygrounds.com/wiki/index.php/User_Guides

and Developer Guides:
http://www.fantasygrounds.com/wiki/index.php/Developer_Guides

For instance, the map functionality is covered in this video:
[video=youtube;HtFgUrLeYu4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtFgUrLeYu4[/video]

You are correct, though, that we don't have any real capabilities for creating maps within FG at the moment. Now that we've hired Carl Pinder from Tabletop Connect, though, we will have that in a future version in both 2D, 2.5D and full 3D -- with dynamic lighting.

 

[darjr]

Can't wait for that! *sigh* why isn't Chris Perkins offering to run a game via this instead of scl? A raffle for charity of a chance to be in his game online would be way cool.

 

[edmud]

I just purchased the HD LED last week. Will start designing the table soon and hope to have it all fabricated by New Years for the full FG experience. Really looking forward to using the VTT for in-person play with minis and 3-D elements.

 

[DocSun]

Ok So I currently use Roll20 For an In person VT. I have one of the players pass around a wireless mouse to move all the characters while one is logged into a free account (so they have to pay nothing; im generous like that) while I have my laptop to control the DM side of things. I also have my own home brew classes that use the DnD5e system for level up and stat points and the like but have their own unique level up and side effects.

Can this be done in fantasy grounds? If so you might be able to convert me!

 

[smiteworks]

Yes, that can be done. With the same license, you can run two instances of Fantasy Grounds so that you have the player view of the map and initiative tracker up for the players to see and manipulate with a shared map on one view and the DM view only on your laptop screen.