RISE OF TIAMAT Now Available For Fantasy Grounds

Hot on the heels of the recent officially licensed release of Hoard of the Dragon Queen for the Fantasy Grounds virtual tabletop comes The Rise of Tiamat. You get the full adventure, image handouts, tactical maps, tokens, and more. The package costs $19.99, and requires that you already have one of Fantasy Grounds' official 5E ruleset modules. (Thanks to Matchstick for the scoop!)

Find it here!

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Avert the Cataclysmic Return of Tiamat in this Adventure for the World’s Greatest Roleplaying Game.

The Cult of the Dragon leads the charge in an unholy crusade to bring Tiamat back to the Realms, and the situation grows more perilous for good people with each passing moment. The battle becomes increasingly political as opportunities to gather allies and gain advantage present themselves. From Waterdeep to the Sea of Moving Ice to Thay, it is a race against Evil. Succeed or succumb to the oppression of draconic tyranny. Win or lose, things will never be the same again.

Dungeon Masters purchasing this module can use it to run the adventure with very little prep, other than reading through the adventure in advance. The contents of the story are indexed and linked, where appropriate. Combat encounters and boxed text are preloaded and ready to drop onto maps and into the chat window with a few clicks. Nearly everything has been optimized and streamlined for ease of play online.

This Module Includes

• the entire contents of The Rise of Tiamat adventure
• image handouts that can be shared with players collectively or individually
• maps containing information for the Dungeon Master (DM) only and with all locations pre-linked to story entries which may contain additional DM notes, boxed text, encounters, images and treasure parcels
• maps with all hidden information removed and resized for use as tactical combat maps
• tokens for many of the monsters in the module. When no token is available, a letter token is used to represent the NPC
• XP for encounters that can be dragged to the party sheet and awarded to the players as they complete them
• Searchable monster indexes by CR, type and in alphabetical order

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[GuardianLurker]

It depends on the rule, and how tightly you want to integrate it into the game.

Creating/modifying monsters, for instance, is incredibly easy, since the NPC form is free-text entry anyways (and if you follow the wording used in the MM, it'll even parse things out for you). Likewise, adding items like guns.

Customized classes are probably the worst, as you might very well have to muck around with the underlying code, which uses XML (for data) and LUA for events/actions/methods. Having said that, I've cracked it open to take a look myself, and the code is clear and straightforward. If you already know XML and LUA, I don't expect you'll have many problems.

 

[jimmifett]

Your lunch money and what I spend and eat for lunch are two different things. Maybe if I skipped lunch for month, I could afford some of this stuff but I'd rather not lose the weight.

Call it a wendy's spicy chicken combo, large, or a footlong sub combo, or some delicious chi-fil-a. averaging lunch for me when not packing is just under $10.

Reminds me of Back-in-The-Day when I saved school lunch money and KSC field trip lunch money to buy Zelda 3 before christmas. Only wish I was still that skinny...

It's really all in the budgeting, which I quite wisely leave to the waifu.

If distance to groups is an issue, the product is well worth the investment (depending on gm or player) and can be used to play in / run multiple games.

Myself, it's a good distance to my players, so we meet every other week in person, then alternating weeks online. This works pretty well for us.

 

[jimmifett]

These comments have been very helpful to me. Thanks especially to GuardianLurker and jimmifett. An additional question if I may; how easy (or hard / impossible) is it to add / create custom, homebrew rules. For example, let's say I wanted to use the guns and hero points from the DMG? Or for a more extreme example, a customized class or class option with unique features (as an example, gunslinger with grit points, taking cues from the Pathfinder class.)

Really goes into how deep you want to dive into the rabbit hole. I haven't done any custom classes, but I've watched base classes get manually created on youtube before the official stuff came out.

Guns would just be a ranged weapon, right? The system is loose enough for one to type in whatever they want, nothing is really hard set to the rules, allowing great customization flexibility.

Just this last session, I got tired of rolling a d4 to see which PC to target, so I made a random roll table to do it for me in about 2 minutes. Now it's a button click to decide who to attack.

 

[vandaexpress]

There's two basic modes for using FG. One where it's essentially a GM aid for a live game, and the other where its actually being used as a virtual tabletop. The latter is more expensive, primarily because of the licensing requirements for the GM/players.

So here's the breakdown.
In common between both use cases, the GM needs to acquire the 5e MM (get the pack) [$50], the 5e PHB (get the pack) [$50], HotDQ [$20], and RoT [$20]. Total cost $140. Basically, you're buying the adventures (again probably), but that's fair, because that's *exactly* what you're doing, and they're in a *much* more usable form. Note that the common stuff the GM buys can be shared to the clients, so the players don't need to buy the PHB, or anything else in this set.

For tabletop aid:
1 Full and 1 Demo License of the Fantasy Grounds software [$40], available on site or through Steam. Your players don't need to buy anything, as one of them will probably be running the Demo copy as a client, while you're using the Full License. You'll probably also want something where you can display the client desktop on a bigger screen (either streamed to a large TV, or by a digital projector), but that's not really in scope here. I'm also assuming your group already has at least two computers (desktop and/or laptop) available at the gaming table.

For online use, there are two variants, one that's more GM-focused, and one that distributes the cost more evenly:
For the focused version, the GM needs to acquire the Ultimate License from Fantasy Grounds directly (either $150, or a $115 upgrade). The players need no additional investment.

For the distributed version, the players need to acquire the full license ($40, as above). Or there's also a subscription rate ($4/month). They'll need one or the other, not both. The GM needs no additional investment.

The total costs add up, I know, but it's not that bad when you distribute the total across the gaming group, and it's easy to expand slowly as you need to; you don't need to buy it all at once.

Minimum start up cost: 1 full copy of the FG software, 1 demo client, 1 5e PHB, 1 HotDQ = $110. That has everything the GM and the players need to get started, using the software in the GM aid mode.

I fall into the first use-case here, I currently use Roll20 to facilitate a hybrid game, linking my iMac to a splitter that runs the player view to a projector table and a big screen TV. In addition to Roll20, I actually already own a lifetime ultimate license and all the D&D goodies for Fantasy Grounds (largely because I want to support Wizards and I was curious to see how Fantasy Grounds evolves). My question is this: Is it possible to run two instances of FG on the same mac? Or do I need to have a second computer for the player view?

I want to use FG. I really do. In fact, I bought two 27" apple cinema displays to accomodate the interface better than my laptop screen. I just find it extremely cumbersome to use compared to Roll20 - maybe its a learning curve type of thing. I actually have 3 weeks before my next session where we start Rise of Tiamat, and if I can figure out how to use FG half as well as I use Roll20, I might feel less bad about all the money I spent on it.

 

[jimmifett]

My question is this: Is it possible to run two instances of FG on the same mac? Or do I need to have a second computer for the player view?

Yes. I'm getting around to setting up a player view for streaming purposes.

One thing you may want to consider, I find that I prefer running at either a large resolution as DM or having 2 screens. There can be an awful lot going on as the DM.

 

[Banesfinger]

Yes. I'm getting around to setting up a player view for streaming purposes.

Can you elaborate on how you set-up a 2nd instance (view) for the player, on a single PC?

 

[vandaexpress]

Yes. I'm getting around to setting up a player view for streaming purposes.

One thing you may want to consider, I find that I prefer running at either a large resolution as DM or having 2 screens. There can be an awful lot going on as the DM.

Yeah, that was what I first noticed when I bought and ran it on my laptop, and, as I mentioned, it prompted my decision to purchase a pair of super high-res 27" monitors. A new spin on DM screens, I suppose (heyo!).

And I'll second Banesfinger's request for elaborating on how to set up the 2nd instance on the same computer. I can probably grab a second computer if I absolutely need to, but I much prefer to control everything from one station.

 

[jimmifett]

Can you elaborate on how you set-up a 2nd instance (view) for the player, on a single PC?

Quite simple. Load the program, Load the Campaign (putting you into GM Mode).

Load the program again, this time selecting "join game", and using localhost/127.0.0.1/etc to connect. This puts the 2nd instance into a player mode.

 

[EthanSental]

I've seen FG for 5E on twitch and was impressed with it, looks and ran great for a VTT.

 

[Jan van Leyden]

When complaining about the amount of money you have to remember that most of the cost is for the life-long license of FG itself and the equally life-long (though you might want to change your preferred game later on) of the basic 5e stuff.

You plunk down this money once. As it stands now, an FG version of any further adventure is 19.99$.