Fantasy Grounds II: Adventure Module Creation Tutorial (v1.0)by Xorne (Jason Hibdon)

IntroductionDuring my time spent on the Fantasy Grounds II forums, I spent the first few months mostly asking questions, and getting a lot ofgreat advice and feedback from the community. During the last few months, I’ve found I’m able to start answering a lot of questions,and I thought I’d take a few minutes to share my methods for a common activity for GM’s: creating adventure modules. The way Iconstruct my modules is not necessarily innovative or the only correct method—but those who have used the adventure modules Icreate have said they liked the format, so I’m more than happy to share the techniques I use, which incidentally are pretty fast, too.Note that I’ll be building a module with the 4E_JPG ruleset for 4th Edition D&D fan-created ruleset, but nothing I’ll be explaining isrestricted to any one ruleset.

Before going further, let me explain why you might want to use an adventure module. I’m going to make the assumption that thereader understands how to host a game on Fantasy Grounds II, and they are familiar with using the Story, Maps/Images, andPersonalities, Items, and Tokens sections of their campaign. I will also assume that the reader knows how to enter Story entries,though if I do something unusual I’ll try to list a good example. So back to the why I just mentioned; you’ve got your campaign thatall the player’s characters are in, and you kick off their first adventure (let’s say you put in Kobold Hall, from the 4th Edition DMG)and you all have a great time.

Next you’re going to run them through Keep on the Shadowfell, so you enter in that adventure! You do it in chunks as you progressthrough the adventure, and the players have a great time. As Keep on the Shadowfell completes you start entering in the material fromThunderspire Labyrinth, and you’re really detecting a problem—you have too much stuff in your campaign! The Story window isgigantic, with hundreds of entries, your Images/Maps window is bursting at the seams with maps you’ll probably never use again, youhave so many Personalities listed now that you have to use the search tool to find anything, and the Items window (okay, the itemswindow is probably doing alright), then the Token box is beyond saving, with so many tokens in it you can’t find the one you want.

If only there was a way to only see the Kobold Hall adventure material while you were in it, then be able to remove the Story,Maps/Images, Personalities, Items, and Tokens with a mouse click! You can: that’s what making an adventure module achieves. It’svery simple; you just create a campaign that contains all of the adventure material, then you export it! From then on, in your maincampaign (which I’ll call the host campaign) you can load the adventure up when you need it, and close it when you don’t! So turnthe page and I’ll start to show you how to streamline your campaigns (and also make sharing your creations easy)!

Tip for the Dungeon MasterThis is a brief section I want to introduce, just to make a quickrecommendation to any Fantasy Grounds II GMs: the secondmonitor.

In no way, shape, or form am I suggesting that you have to havea second monitor to host a game—I’m just suggesting that it canreally make things a lot easier on you. It’s just a matter of realestate; let me show an example: I have a 22” widescreen LCDmonitor, set to 1680x1050 resolution. Here is a screen of themodule we’re going to create in this tutorial:

At right is a screenshot of my widescreen monitor; I have thecombat tracker open (with 5 PCs and 5 NPCs, pretty basic for 4th

Edition D&D), a map window open, a smaller DM-keyed mapunder it (needed for setup primarily) and the story entry for this encounter. Tucked under the chat window is what I call the“Adventure Index” which makes navigating the adventure easier. As you can see, I’ve pretty much used up all my space at this point.

By setting an old 19” CRT monitor next to my widescreen (set to1280x1024), I can make my window this wide. Now I have thecombat tracker all the way open, my player map as well as myDM map, another little map to keep marching order on, a bunchof minimized maps, and on the right I’ve got four story entriesopen, three personalities (the ones for this encounter) and thetoken box is beneath on of them. It’s just a lot more room towork with on your screen!

So my point is, if you have another monitor lying around, you might find it pretty handy to help you host games on Fantasy GroundsII; you have a lot more to look at on your screen than they do!

Okay, so on to creating an adventure module!

Create a New CampaignI’m going to break this up into sections, for the step by step process that I use myself to create a new adventure module. For thistutorial, I’m going to make an adventure module based on the adventure in Dungeon magazine #155, called, “Heathen”. The reason Ihave chosen this one is twofold—it’s not a huge adventure, but has everything I need to show all the steps, and Dungeon #155 is a freedownload, so I’m not worried about my screenshots showing material that you have to purchase. (Do not ask me to send you a copyof the module we create—this is a tutorial, so you can make it yourself, and we can all respect copyright.)

The first thing you have to do is create a new campaign. Makesure this new campaign uses the same ruleset as your hostcampaign. (Note that the alias listed is not the alias I use.) Afteryou create your campaign, it’s time to start filling it out with youadventure material!

PlanningEach person has their own method for creating new adventures,but I like to start out by making list of everything I’m going toneed, so that when it’s time to start assembling it all, I don’t haveto stop to go back and get missing things. Basically, I like tohave everything ready before I start making Story entries, whichis when I’m going to tie it all together! So there’s a list to bemade, which is easily done by skimming the adventure for:

Images/MapsPersonalities (and corresponding Tokens)Items

So I’ve made my list on the next page:

Images/Maps

A Timely Rescue (Battlemat) Adakimi (artwork) Black Cells (Battlemat) Blades in the Night (Battlemat) Fire on the Water (Battlemat) Hall of Warriors (Battlemat) Hunter and Hunter (Battlemat) Jaryn (portrait) Last Stand (Battlemat) Moonboat (artwork) Temple of Naarash (Battlemat) The Friend of My Enemy (Battlemat) The Pillars of Night (artwork) Village Showdown (Battlemat)

The I will make two maps for each battlemat, one playerversion, and a smaller, keyed DM version.

Personalities (plus Tokens)

Advanced Hobgoblin Warcaster Advanced Human Berserker Blazing Skeleton Bugbear Strangler Bugbear Warrior Dajani, Tiefling Darkblade Death Cultist Mage Doppelganger Assassin Dragonborn Soldier Glyph of Warding (Trap, no token needed) Hobgoblin Archer

Hobgoblin Commander Hobgoblin Warcaster Human Bandit Human Guard Human Mage Jaryn, Human Paladin Naarash, Barlgura Shadow Hound Steel Keeper Zombie Hulk

Items

+2 Magic Rod +2 Vicious Greatsword Boots of Striding Diadem of Alacrity Potion of Healing

Looks like I’ve got some prep to do! Now how you createyour maps is beyond the scope of this tutorial. For thisadventure, since we’re working from a freely downloadedPDF, I cut and paste the maps and images into an imageprogram, then save them into my \images directory in thiscampaign. Now I have all my art, portraits and DM battlemats.I open up each battlemat and resize them so that the squares areas close to 50 pixels across as I can get them, and use imageediting to remove the DM’s information, and save them againas a Player version.

Entering in Personalities is probably the most time consumingpart of making a new adventure, but there are some tricks you

can use to speed this part up. The best thing that works for me is to keep acampaign that I called “Monster Manual” and export just the personalitiesfrom it (you’ll see how to export later). Then I load that module(temporarily) and drag the personalities I want into this campaign. Savesa lot of data entry for monsters you use a lot. In fact, for this adventure itonly leaves the “advanced” creatures, the named creatures, and the SteelKeepers. I already have all the others I my Monster Manual.

Next is the Items window—which is kind of optional, but I like to just beable to share the item stats and the players can copy them down after that,without me having to be involved. Around a physical table, I put magicitems on index cards and hand them to my players, too.

The last part of the planning stage is getting Tokens ready! Now not onlydo I keep a list of personalities ready to go in my Monster Manual, I keepcorrespondingly named tokens in the \tokens\host folder for thatcampaign. So all I have to do for those is copy those tokens over to thiscampaign’s (I’ll call it the adventure campaign from now on) \tokens\hostdirectory. Do not assign tokens to your Personalities yet, as there is anextra step we need to do so that your module exports correctly. Just makesure you have the tokens in the directory. So just like my personalities, Ionly have to find a couple tokens for the stuff unique to this adventure.

Now at right you can see that all of our prep work is done. I have everyImage/Map, Personality, and Item that I’m going to need. (You canactually save tokens till the end, but I’ve already gotten all the tokens Iwant to use.)

Remember: Do not link your tokens to the Personalities yet. We’ll do thatlater, for a reason I’ll explain then.

new campaign.

Monster Manual

Library Module

Drag entries into

Building the Adventure (Story Entries)Now for what probably looks like the hard part, but in reality is the easiertask—we’re going to put all that prep work to use, and make our adventuremodule! The very first thing I like to do is make my main Story entry, which Icall the “adventure index”. This is like the home page for the adventure. Itmakes reading the adventure if you’re not familiar with it very logical, andmakes jumping to a certain part very quick, too.

I put the name of the adventure in parenthesis for this story entry, so no matterhow many entries I put in this will be the top one. My goal is to make sure thelinks I place in this Story entry lead to every section of the adventure in logicalprogression, so it’s easy for the DM to navigate the material. I also want tolink every Image/Map, Personality, and Item that is needed for thatarea/encounter to be right there, waiting to be clicked. Ideally, I don’t want theDM to ever have to open anything directly from the side windows, except forthe Adventure Index.

At right, I’ve filled out my index. I’ve got the title and credits as well as theadventure introduction, then links to the background and synopsis. Then Istarted a new category which has three links to the three main sections of theadventure. First is the Frontier, where the characters explore the wilderness,the Black March, when they journey to the temple, and the Temple itself,where the final showdown occurs. Each of those entries will have subsectionsthat break down the individual areas and some of those areas will have asubsection entailing any tactical encounters that take place.

Finally I’ve included a list of all the sidebars in the adventure. Each sidebarwill be linked in any area that refers to them, but I list them here too, as the DMmight want to pull one of them up quickly. So let’s start filling all this stuffout!

Here’s a quick example ofhow it all comes together:

I link “The Frontier” entryto the Adventure Index,then I link “F1. A TimelyRescue” to that entry, then Ilink “Tactical Encounter: ATimely Rescue” to thatentry. Ultimately, I wantonly the information you’regoing to need at the time tobe on a story entry. Duringthe tactical encounter youreally don’t need thecanned text that the paladinEmesha will spout outwhen questioned.

In the Tactical Encounterentry, note that I’ve linkedboth maps I’ll need to see,and all the personalities thatbelong in the CombatTracker for the battle. Inthe F1 entry I’ve linked asidebar and an item that theparty might find. I’ve alsoturned all the descriptionsand dialogue into boxedtext, so the DM can drag and drop that information into the chat window easily. If you didn’t know this, you can push Tab (or use theradial menu) to type in a speakers name for text boxes; doing so will prefix the dialogue with the speakers name, so it looks likeyou’re using a separate speaker ID.

Master Maps (& Map Pins)

Thus far, this adventure is pretty linear; most of the progression is from one area to the next, though it’s possible to skip one of theencounters. As it’s an event based adventure, this is pretty normal. However once the characters get to the temple, they might hit theencounters in a differentorder than they arelisted. Now that’sokay; you have a mastermap specifically so youcan see where the areasin the story entries arelocated. But using MapPins, you can make itvery easy to jump rightto the story entry fromthe map itself! Aftercreating a story entry, ifyou would like to link itto a map, just drag thestory link onto the mapwhile holding Controldown. Drop the linkwhere you want it and amap pin will stick in themap (it’s clickable).The pins normally don’tshow if you’re notholding Control down(or you toggle them onin the radial menu).

The end result lookslike this:

So that’s almost every story entry (I don’t have the tactical encounters showing), which should give a pretty good idea of how I breakdown the adventure. The DM can easily open up the (Heathen) story entry, and have everything right in front of him as the adventureprogresses. We’re almost finished building our module now, all that’s left to do is properly link the tokens, and export the adventurecampaign to a single module file that can be opened in your host campaign!

Because properly linking the tokens involves exporting thecampaign, I’m going to talk about that first. Remember that“adventure campaign” means this campaign, that we’ve beenworking on. I’m also going to refer to “exported tokens” and “hosttokens”. Host tokens are the ones that you place in \tokens\host,while exported tokens are the tokens that show up in the top levelof the token box when you load a module that has tokens in it. I’vegot a picture on each side here to demonstrate the difference.

Loaded Loaded

Host

Module Not

This is a very important distinction, because in order to link tokensto personalities correctly in a module, you have to link the exportedtokens. Let me explain the reasons real quickly:

Tokens

Module

Exported

Tokens

If you link a host token to a personality and then export the module, Fantasy Grounds thinks that the token that goes with thepersonality is located in %campaign%\tokens\host. %campaign% is the name of your adventure campaign (Heathen) rather than thename of your host campaign, so the token links don’t work. The first workaround to this bug is to place a copy of all the tokens youused into your host campaign’s \tokens\host directory. This leads to a cluttered token box over time, and makes sharing youradventure module with someone else more cumbersome, since you need to include the tokens you used separately, and the recipienthas to copy those tokens into their host campaign.

The second option (which I recently discovered) is to link the exported tokens to the personalities. To do that, you have to export youradventure campaign to a module (exporting the tokens with it), then open your adventure campaign again and load your adventuremodule. This will make your exported tokens appear, and then you can link those to your personalities! When you export the modulenow, Fantasy Grounds will think that the token that goes with the personality is located within the module file (and it is). After usingthis process, you can share your module with someone else just by sending the module file! So what we need to do now is talk abouthow to export a module.

Before I show you how to export your module, you need to do one more thing to the adventure campaign:

Type the name of the adventure in the chat window, and instead of pressing Enter, drag the text to each of the tabs. This will attach alabel to the tabs, which makes it very handy for telling which tab is which when you load modules! Examples are below:

Exporting a Campaign to a ModuleTo bring up the export window, you type /export in thechat window. The process is simple—you fill in thefields and use the radial menu to choose “Export”.That’s it. The file is saved in your \modules directory.So here’s the breakdown:

Name: This is displayed in the module window.File name: This is the filename to use (.mod is addedautomatically).Author: This subtext will be listed below the Name.Index group: If you index the exported data (seebelow) then you have to give a category name. Youprobably won’t index adventure modules.Merge ID: When you load a module, new tabs appearin the windows. If two modules have the same MergeID they will share tabs.Thumbnail: This is a graphic you would like to showin the module window. It looks in the campaign folderby default; so put “.\modules\filename.ext” if you wantto keep the thumbnail with the modules (I do).Exported data: Check each section that you want toappear in the module (or drag individual entries); I wantall of them to show up, so I check them all. In myMonster Manual module, I only check the Personalities.The letters indicate who should see the module (youwant “H” for adventure modules) and if you want themodule to appear in the library, then also check “I”; Ido this with my Monster Manual.Exported tokens: Drag the tokens you would like toexport into here—make sure you always drag the hosttokens, not the exported tokens.

Exporting Your Campaign with TokensFollow these steps in order to export your campaign to a module, whilekeeping your tokens assigned to the personalities correctly:

1. Export the campaign once, only filling out the Name, File name,and dragging your host tokens into the Exported tokens area.

2. Close Fantasy Grounds II and reopen it, and open your adventurecampaign again.

3. Open the module window and load the adventure module youjust exported. (It only contains your exported tokens.)

4. Drag the exported tokens to the Personalities you want to attachthem to.

5. Re-Export the finished campaign, and make sure you still put thehost tokens into the Exported tokens section (close the module ifyou want to make sure you don’t use the wrong tokens).

Load the Module!The last remaining step is to open up your host campaign, go to the modules window, and open up your new adventure module, whereyou will find labeled tabs for your new adventure module!

Disclaimer: I specifically grant Smite Works Ltd. permission to distribute this tutorial PDF via the Fantasy Grounds website.