I built a free VTT specifically for physical table setups — screen-as-table, minis on acrylic, dynamic lighting, with offline play as a focus
Like a lot of DMs here, I run my games with a monitor lying flat under a sheet of acrylic, with physical miniatures on top. I got tired of existing VTTs being designed for online play, so I built my own — and it's now FREE AND OPEN SOURCE.
The app is single HTML file (no install, no account, no server) designed specifically for this kind of physical screen setup. You can launch and "Install as App" which will let you use it as a seamless desktop app from any device.
What it does:
- Screen Control: Player view and DM view. Place the player view on the second monitor and control everything form your laptop behind the DM screen. It allows you to correct for the size of your monitor so the measurements line up with your setup always.
- Measurement overlay directly on the screen, no more fidgeting with rules or cluttering up the battlefield with Moonbeam, darkness, spirit guardians and going crazy when moving a mini all the time.
- Dynamic ray-cast fog of war with per-token— minis block line of sight automatically (no tracking, you have to move the tokens on the table and then on your end).
- 662 animated spell effects from JB2A (magic missile, fireball, healing, you name it) — streamed on demand, nothing to download and automatically set to your grid size.
- UVTT map import — if you use Dungeondraft, it reads your walls, doors and lights automatically.
- If you dont have UVTT files for dynamic lighting, import your map as an image and use the Walls and Obstacles tool to define the walls yourself. Works great with Inkarnate, which is my preferred workflow.
- Campaign and HP tracking synced across scenes, display de iniciative and HP of your players.
- Works offline after first load (service worker cached) or installed as a Chrome app.
The whole thing runs in your browser. I plan to keep it free always and keep updating it based on feedback. No subscription, fee or anything.
Try it: https://cr-lolo.github.io/VeilCast-VTT/
Source: https://github.com/cr-lolo/VeilCast-VTT
Happy to answer questions about the setup. If you're running a similar physical table I'd love to hear how the app helps you out if it does and implement feedback!
DISCLAIMER: I did use Claude to help me with code since I am a novice in HTML and js, all the effects and animations are from JB2A (https://library.jb2a.com/). I am hoping to use this to also learn, and if anyone out there is more of an expert and would like to help me out they are more than welcome to dm me!
Edit: format errors