Onamap-A “Virtual Tabletop” for Shadowdark (and more)
This article series is about how I’m creating a VTT website called Onamap from scratch using Django. The goal is to be really really easy to use and unreasonably performant, and to share how I’m doing this.
This will be the last non-technical article in this series, for a while, I promise! But you need to know what I’m building so you know the motivations behind everything.
Shadowdark is a Dungeons & Dragons-like fantasy role playing game (RPG). In 2023 it raises about 1.4 million dollars on a Kickstarter campaign, and is fairly well regarded in the gaming community. More broadly, it’s part of the “Old School Renaissance” (OSR) gaming movement that tries to capture the magic of playing D&D in the 70s and 80s.
A “Virtual Tabletop” — VTT — is a tool that allows you play RPGs online by sharing screens and information, or if you’re in person, takes care of managing things such as your character sheets. Onamap is definitely more leaning into the latter but who knows as things develop.
Why write another VTT?
There are a quite a few of these things out there, but I’m really familiar with 3 of them.
Roll20 — this is the great granddaddy of VTT, being around since 2012. I have played this a fair bit and it’s very very clunky and complicated. But it is also very feature complete, supports lots of games, and is well funded. I understand from their blogs that they’re trying to address the complexity.
D&D Beyond — this is the official D&D VTT, owned by Hasbro. It is really really slow and poorly structured, but feature complete for D&D 5e players (and for whatever their new system is called). Unfortunately. Hasbro is a company run by non-gamers that seems to see their customers and products as cows to be milked.
Owlbear Rodeo — a new favourite amongst many DMs, it is mainly about sharing maps and tokens. Recent upgrades have original users complaining about complexity. A common problem as your bring your product to feature complete, and something I’ll be keeping my eyes on as I make Onamap.
There is also Foundry and Fantasy Grounds, but I have little experience with either.
So why write another VTT? “It’s fun” and “Why not?” are part of the answer, as well as “become a better developer”. But the core answer is from my original article: I want to write something unreasonably fast and really really easy to use, and none of the existing sites I’ve used are one of those, let alone both.
Onamap Timeline
This is very very high level and the order is likely be swapped around a bit.
- Be a Great Individual Character Sheet system for Shadowdark
- Be a Great Group play management system for Shadowdark, including real time updates between multiple players. (We are here)
- Character Creation and/or integration into Shadowdarklings
- Support Extensions — custom classes, races, etc..
- Support multiple sets of rules, likely starting with AD&D or OSRIC
- Encounter Management (e.g. Monsters, Treasure, descriptions)
- Dungeon and Town Management
- Be able to share Dungeons (etc) with other DMs.
- Maps and / or integration into Owlbear Rodeo
- Integration with Discord
