Sometimes my mouth costs me money but in a good way this time, I swear. It all started back in January while I was out to dinner with an out-of-town friend, one of gamers (Scott) in fact. We were chatting about playing D&D and how he was getting back into it after an almost 30-year hiatus. So I tossed the idea out there that I wanted to run the Tomb of Annihilation and the planning began in earnest.

Since then I have assembled five players and we’ll begin with session 0 on March 6th. Here’s where the money comes in. I normally use Roll20 for all of my games, but when investigating the character sheets available for D&D 5e, I was not impressed with the functionality of them. This caused me to explore getting the Tomb of Annihilation module for Roll20, but the problem was still there; character creation was far too time-consuming and Roll20 lacks full integration with the D&D ruleset. More importantly, if I wanted to run ToA on Roll20 without buying the official module through them, it would have taken countless hours of work to get everything prepared. Then I began looking at Fantasy Grounds. I had stayed away from it for years because of costs, but when I actually took the time to investigate how the D&D ruleset was fully integrated and how the integration of the adventures reduced prep time to nearly nothing, I was sold.

Having done my research I decided to commit to using Fantasy Grounds for my upcoming game. I will admit that the price of entry was a little steep, but I decide to bite the bullet and bought the one-time Ultimate license and the rulebooks I needed and the ToA module. As I begin learning more and more about Fantasy Grounds the more impressed I am with the interface, the work that goes into coding the rules and modules to work seamlessly, and how the overall package works and what it offers my players and I.

If you have not looked at Fantasy Grounds before, you owe it to yourself to see what it’s all about.

Goodby Roll20 and hello Fantasy Grounds! Here’s to many years of gaming using a superior interface! Now, where did I leave my wallet? I think I need some Call of Cthulhu products for Fantasy Ground as well.

~ Modoc

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