Fantasy Grounds is an application acting as a virtual online gaming table primarily intended for pen and paper style narrative role playing games.

Fantasy Grounds is designed to perform many of the things you can do while playing at a conventional gaming table and move it online.

Run games as the gamemaster or take part as a player, the application provides all the necessary tools to communicate, manage information and perform tasks such as rolling the dice or creating drawings.

Visit the Fantasy Grounds website here.

FG Con

FG Con is a community driven (unofficial) long weekend of Virtual Gaming using the Fantasy Grounds virtual table top. It is completely free to join events in this convention. You can sign up to multiple games and experience new rule-sets, new games masters and experience the power and flexibility of the Fantasy Grounds table top. Please browse the Event Calendar and make sure that you convert the game times to your local time – this event will be attended by players all over the globe so checking your games time in your time-zone is critical. All games should include a link to the Time And Date website so you can easily check the time for your location.

Games run from Friday evening New Zealand time to Sunday night Hawaiian time for around 70 hours of gaming goodness. You must set your TimeZone in your profile to ensure that sessions display correctly for you. Register for games here.

Please note that while Fantasy Grounds is a commercial product this is an unofficial community driven event. All games are completely free to play. If this is your first time using Fantasy Grounds and you dont have a license please download and install the client and run in demo mode. If you are interested you can find license pricing here.

Fantasy Grounds – Feature List

A list of the main features of Fantasy Grounds:

• A user interface specifically designed to capture the spirit of pen & paper roleplaying.
• The Gamemaster can hand out sheets, maps, and notes for any or all players to interact with.
• Role playing is easy with dedicated chat features.
• Access all traditional paraphernalia available at the gaming table. These include dice, drawings, character sheets, portraits, tokens, and rulebook reference material.
• Visualize tactical scenes using maps rich with features or create them on the fly. Draw on the virtual paper or reveal parts of maps prepared beforehand and place tokens to indicate player characters and NPCs.
• The Gamemaster can create and keep track of all in-game information. She can also customize game assets and user interface elements to accommodate house rules.
• Interactive fully realistic 3D dice.
• Preloading images for fast display controlled by the Gamemaster
• Maps and images with additional layers for drawing and grids. The Gamemaster can reveal images gradually to the players by unmasking areas using a paint tool.
• A pointer and indicator usable by all users to create lines, cones, circles or squares in any orientation on maps. These are useful for easy targeting of attacks and spells or just hilighting portions for other purposes. When grids are enabled on maps, the area indicators hilight the squares affected and numeric indicators indicate the dimensions.
• Images can be zoomed in and out by a roll of the mouse wheel or using the zoom tool. The display scale of tokens can be locked to allow them to zoom together with the underlaying image.
• The minimap navigator makes makes focusing on a particular area on a large map a breeze.
• The Gamemaster can add links to maps and images for easy access to other resources, such as connecting maps, story entries, NPCs and items.
• Creating and activating adventure or supplement modules is easy and gives more options to manage campaigns and share data between users.
• Dice can be rolled using any stack size and with optional adjustable modifiers
• Gamemaster die rolls have hidden results but are shown to players using a hidden value
• The modifier stack control is useful for collecting all modifiers applicable to a roll together before rolling. Drag GM assigned modifiers directly from the chat window to the stack.
• Die roll results, modifiers, and other numeric values convenienly transferable using drag and drop from the chat window to the character sheet and vice versa.
• All modifiers assigned to a roll are shown as a textual description of the result in the chat window. All commonly used character sheet modifier fields have a built-in default description.
• Portraits customize the way your character is shown to other players. Select from the images included in the software package or make your own in any of the supported formats (JPG, GIF, BMP and PNG).
• At a glance status indicators informing of users away from the keyboard or currently entering a chat message.
• Automatic linked calculation of fields in the character sheet. E.g. strength score to strength bonus, strength bonus plus base attack bonus to calculate the melee attack bonus, and strength bonus automatically applied to all relevant skill bonuses.
• Running total fields that sum all numbers dropped on them, to easily keep track of wounds and experience.
• Minisheets provide compact means to reference and modify the most essential character stats. Separate minisheets useful to characters with special abilities such as spell casting.
• The Gamemaster can use the combat tracker to keep track of initiative, wounds and active effects on the PCs and NPCs.
• Special chat elements indicating separate players’ turns. Gamemaster controls to prompt players for silence or response.
• A list of identities the Gamemaster can chat as. Drag and drop insertion of new entries from the NPC list and chat frames.
• Votes can be called by the Gamemaster or any player to propel the game forward when necessary.
• Quick access to important sheets and documents using hot keys and window bookmarks.
• Flexible text formatting functions including bookmarks to any data sheet and pre-entered NPC and narrator chat messages; usable by the Gamemaster to create adventure, encounter and background information, NPC descriptions and item descriptions.
• Connect to the hosting player’s computer either directly using an IP-address or via the Fantasy Grounds server using a gamemaster’s unique host alias. Very handy if your IP-address is dynamically assigned by your ISP and you want to schedule a game ahead of time.
• Password protected game sessions.
• Screen tinting controllable by the Gamemaster for atmosphere, special modes available include night, firelight and forest shades.
• A 3.5E fantasy ruleset accompanies the product but the appearance and function can be fully customized to accommodate almost every RPG system. A Full license is needed to create customizations; the host computer automatically distributes the custom ruleset to the player clients. Community created rulesets are available for 4E and many other commonly used rules systems.
• Support for pressure sensitive drawing tablets on drawing controls.