Phystus

As I mentioned in one of my early posts I got Fantasy Grounds in order to restart my old AD&D campaign from 1990. Happily, I was able to recruit enough previous players and old friends to get started. We did a bit of testing, got VOIP chat working, and I got some tokens and maps made up. The characters were converted to D&D 3.5, and enough NPC’s were converted to get us started. I had written up some handouts about the campaign setting, and the basics of combat in 3.5, ...

Now that I had workable maps, it was time to get some tokens. Back in the day, when my group used to play face-to-face we were using 1st edition AD&D rules, and minis and battle maps weren’t terribly necessary. Back in those days I was a poor college student (and then a poor University employee) and I couldn’t afford to purchase minis. I had a few, but I also lacked the talent to paint them well, so I never used them, and none of my friends used minis either. I did have some cardboard figures ...

In my previous post I wrote about the difficulties I had with scanning my old campaign area maps from paper into a digital form so I could use them in FG. As you’ll recall, it didn’t go very well. But of course, campaign maps aren’t the only maps we have to deal with as a GM. We have to make dungeon maps as well. And while I was scanning maps, I scanned some dungeon maps along with the campaign maps to see how that would go.

I’m sorry to report it went even more poorly than had ...

When I ran our early demos to kick the tires on Fantasy Grounds the structure of the demo version was different than it is today. Back then it was actually a different version than the paid software. With the demo you could only have 2 connections to the GM, and you could only run D&D 3.5. Since my wife was the only person in the group besides myself who had any experience with 3.5, she signed on each time to help the other player deal with the new rules, and as she gained experience with ...

My initial email blast to my old players and select friends generated quite a bit of response. One person declined (and one never replied), but everyone else seemed enthused. Most of them had been getting even less gaming than my wife and I, and they were pretty excited to have a chance to game and socialize with old friends in faraway places.

But the next question was invariably “When do you want to play?” And that’s where the trouble started.

One guy lived on ...