Ghosts of Saltmarsh - Fantasy Grounds

I was invited by the DM of the Saltmarsh adventures from a few weekends ago to join the party as the campaign moves online using Fantasy Grounds as the engine to run the adventure. A couple of weeks ago we got our characters imported into the application and this week we managed to get our first gaming session in (more on that in a later post). I think there will still be the occasional face-to-face game (maybe once a quarter?), but the bulk of the campaign should now run most Thursdays for whoever can make it.

I haven't actually gamed online like this before so it has been a new experience for me. Fantasy Grounds is run like a normal face-to-face game using Discord for sound and other player interaction outside of the game. The Ghosts of Saltmarsh adventure has been purchased and imported into Fantasy Grounds by the DM, and we, as players, have imported our 5e characters into that module. This allows for the characters to fully interact with the system whilst we chat about what we are doing over Discord.

The system includes all the appropriate maps for the adventure with a fog of war setting so we only get to see what our characters see. When combat ensues, our characters are all placed on the map with the adversaries we can see and a battle board takes us through the combat in initiative order. The system can cope with anything in 5e and many of the legacy versions and supplements of D&D.

Three weeks ago, most of the players were able to import our characters. It took us the whole session (about 2.5 to 3 hours) to get our characters imported due to our unfamiliarity with the software (we were starting from scratch, so I think we did rather well), but all bar two characters were ready to go. The DM was then able to add our one-off magic items, so we were good for this Thursday's session.

The first part of this Thursday's session was spent importing the remainder of the characters in readiness for the next part of the campaign. This went a lot quicker than the previous session's import.

We were now ready to begin play, so the next post will include a brief write-up of that session.