Fantasy Grounds Is Going Free To Play

Effective immediately, Fantasy Grounds is free to use.
Screenshot 2024-08-22 140135 copy.webp


Fantasy Grounds, the Virtual Tabletop (VTT) which launched over 20 years ago in 2004, has always been a premium option for VTT users. That is--until today! Because, effective immediately, Fantasy Grounds is free to use.

Previously an FG license cost $50, and then you had to buy the games and other modules you wanted to use with it. As of today, all users can host and join unlimited games with no purchase or subscription.

The software itself is free, although of course the marketplace contains a massive quantity of official licensed content, and add-ons like art, maps, tokens, and digital dice. Officially licensed material includes Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition, Traveller, Call of Cthulhu, and more, with over 50 game systems and more than 3,000 products.

There's also a new 'Online Reader'--a web-based compendium which enables you to access your Fantasy Grounds library from your browser.

Screenshot 2025-11-08 at 22.50.40.png
 

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I normally hook it up to a 2nd display (TV) that I use to send pictures of handouts, NPCs, etc. In a few cases, I used it to display the map with the grid set to 1" and put the minis on there, or used digital minis.

The main thing I use it for is campaign prep and to run the combats, track party loot & inventory, XP tracking, etc. I create a campaign book with whatever I think of for my campaign and then before the session, I save important elements to the hotkey bar so I can pull them up quickly whenever I need them. I keep other stuff there such as list of names, professions, generators, etc. There is a mad-lib style system called Story Templates that lets you build story text with table driven content. I used to use this for quickly creating tavern names, NPC names, etc. Now-a-days, I mostly use chatGPT on the side for this. Running the combat in the combat tracker is super nice though.

The party loot and inventory tracking is nice. For IRL games without FG, someone always ends up being the note-taker/party mule. If they don't make it to a game you have to hope that they left the list behind. I still let players write down their belongings, but because I am handing it out as the GM, I keep it in FG as well and then I can quickly verify who owns what. Yes, you guys had 12 axes, 4 shorbows, 6 leather armors, and blah blah blah that you got from the goblin camp. You can sell that back in town. Make a diplomacy roll to see how well you barter... okay, you rolled well so I set the buy back rate at 60% instead of 50% and click a button. Okay, you all get X gold, Y silver, and Z Copper each.

Who is holding that contract signed by the arch-devil? Let me look... okay, it is blah.

Hidden rolls of enemies against passive perception. NPC on NPC violence. Looking up stats and abilities, spells, items, etc. I find it faster than flipping through multiple books.
 

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This is something I long to do. I make a pitch for this to Wizards of the Coast at least once or twice a year. They are probably sick of hearing it from me. We include a ruleset for 3.5E and 4E with the app. It just doesn't have any real data. To be fair, community members could create and share all the game data only for anything and everything in 3.5E (and even 4E to some degree) today on the FG Forge if they wanted. I still want official content support though, and I will continue to push for it regularly.
Thanks for fighting a good fight. I will cross my fingers.
 

As for the availability on mobile devices, which someone mentioned, please note that no VTT has a mobile implementation atm.
I would disagree here, at least to some extent. Owlbear Rodeo works fairly well on mobile, and my impression is that the devs also prioritized this (including fighting with obscure bugs in Safari). And while the fun of running anything map-based on a smartphone is limited, I find it solid on tablets.
Now Owlbear Rodeo doesn't have a lot of automation, so it doesn't offer many things that Fantasy Grounds or Foundry do. And I'm not sure if all (or even most) extension developers also test regularly on mobile.
 

I'm a player in a game at the moment, but this is the last game I ran. It was for 2d20 Fallout from Modiphius.

View attachment 421824
Just had to add on top of my astonished reaction the xplodhead
🤯


I had an IRL game where we used to use minis on the table; but then a pandemic happened (some of you oldsters from back in 2020 may remember it) and we moved to strictly online. When we came back out of our bunkers and back to our dining room tables, I kept using R20 on my laptop to run the game, and the host (a player) would project his player-side R20 to his TV screen. Having the initiative tracker and all the tokens etc on the VTT on the TV for all players to see was actually better in some ways than having it analog. Everyone else would show up at the house with their laptops too; and if on occasion someone wasn't able to be there physically, but could join zoom-fully, we were already set up VTT-wise; just had to figure out the zoom audio. Acknowledge that we all had the privilege of owning laptops to make this happen.

I wonder if in this same situation, wherein I am at someone else's home, they could have the FG set up and be the server-side host? Or is it that the GM always should be the server-host? (I guess I could go look it up in the documentation...)
 

I normally hook it up to a 2nd display (TV) that I use to send pictures of handouts, NPCs, etc. In a few cases, I used it to display the map with the grid set to 1" and put the minis on there, or used digital minis.

The main thing I use it for is campaign prep and to run the combats, track party loot & inventory, XP tracking, etc. I create a campaign book with whatever I think of for my campaign and then before the session, I save important elements to the hotkey bar so I can pull them up quickly whenever I need them. I keep other stuff there such as list of names, professions, generators, etc. There is a mad-lib style system called Story Templates that lets you build story text with table driven content. I used to use this for quickly creating tavern names, NPC names, etc. Now-a-days, I mostly use chatGPT on the side for this. Running the combat in the combat tracker is super nice though.

The party loot and inventory tracking is nice. For IRL games without FG, someone always ends up being the note-taker/party mule. If they don't make it to a game you have to hope that they left the list behind. I still let players write down their belongings, but because I am handing it out as the GM, I keep it in FG as well and then I can quickly verify who owns what. Yes, you guys had 12 axes, 4 shorbows, 6 leather armors, and blah blah blah that you got from the goblin camp. You can sell that back in town. Make a diplomacy roll to see how well you barter... okay, you rolled well so I set the buy back rate at 60% instead of 50% and click a button. Okay, you all get X gold, Y silver, and Z Copper each.

Who is holding that contract signed by the arch-devil? Let me look... okay, it is blah.

Hidden rolls of enemies against passive perception. NPC on NPC violence. Looking up stats and abilities, spells, items, etc. I find it faster than flipping through multiple books.
You lost me at using chatgp. Seriously.
 



I am not sure that it is useful or appropriate to leverage moral judgements over something so ultimately trivial, especially on this board where arguing about sensitive topics is largely verboten.

But, you know, you do you.

I am not sure that it is useful or appropriate to leverage moral judgements over something so ultimately trivial, especially on this board where arguing about sensitive topics is largely verboten.

But, you know, you do you.
We disagree on how trivial this is, I guess. Plenty of people post here saying they won't buy products that use AI.
 


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