u/athanasioust

Hey folks, back with a big one.

A bunch of you have followed Sanctum along the way and left feedback in past threads, and honestly a lot of this update came straight from those comments, so thank you. Here's everything that just landed, with a short video above showing it in action:

• Battle map with live fog of war. Drop your encounter's combatants straight from the combat tracker as tokens, measure distances, and place area-of-effect templates. As the party explores you brush away the fog, and the revealed map streams live to a separate player screen (a second monitor or TV), so players only ever see what they've actually discovered.
• Players can join on their phones. That player view is reachable over your local network, so everyone at the table can open it on their own phone with a QR code. Still no account, no server, nothing leaves your wifi.
• A built-in dice roller (d4 to d100, with advantage/disadvantage) that drops rolls straight into the combat log.
• A soundpad for ambient music and effects, playing your own local files.
• A guided character builder with a one-click level-up that applies HP, proficiency, hit dice and spell slots for you, plus weapon mastery and a proper darkvision toggle.
• Homebrew spells and feats you can create and use right alongside the SRD content.
• A mind map for plotting your mysteries, and an in-app PDF viewer so you can read your reference docs without ever leaving the app.

Same as always: it stays local and offline, no account, no cloud, your campaign is just a file that stays yours. Windows and Linux, free and open source, pay what you want:
https://athanasioust.itch.io/sanctum

You know the drill by now. Tell me what's useful, what's missing, what felt clunky. Every comment genuinely shapes the next update, so let's keep making this thing great together.

🕯️

Sanctum is a free, offline campaign manager I've been building for D&D 5e DMs. Everything (characters, NPCs, combat, quests, lore) lives in a single file on your own machine. No account, no cloud, no subscription.

The big new thing this update is a battle map, and I built it around the one feature I always wanted at my table:

You drop your encounter's combatants straight from the combat tracker as tokens, move them with grid snapping, measure distances, and place area-of-effect templates (cone, line, circle, cube). Each token shows HP and conditions at a glance.

The part I'm proudest of: fog of war that streams live to a separate player view. You reveal the map on your side, and your players only ever see what they've discovered, on a second monitor, a TV, or even their own phones over your local wifi. No second account, no whole VTT, no internet.

Also new in this update: a built-in dice roller, a soundpad for ambient audio, a guided character builder with one-click level-up, homebrew spells and feats, an in-app PDF viewer for your reference docs, and a mind map for plotting. It runs on Windows, Linux.

It's free and open source (AGPL-3.0), pay-what-you-want:

Download: https://athanasioust.itch.io/sanctum
Source code: https://github.com/Athanasioust/Sanctum

This is still early and I'd genuinely love feedback.

Hello! This is a follow up post to my previous one on the same topic.

Genuine thanks to everybody who downloaded Sanctum and especially to the people who took the time to tell me what annoyed them. Almost everything below came straight out of that feedback, so this one's on you lot.

Quick recap if you missed the first post: Sanctum is a free 5e campaign manager for DMs that runs entirely on your machine. No account, no cloud, no subscription, works with the wifi off. Characters, NPCs, bestiary, combat tracker, maps, quests, magic items, handouts, timeline, factions, shops, calendar, notes. Windows for now.

What's new since the first build:

You can bring your existing campaign in. Point Sanctum at your Obsidian vault (or just a folder of markdown files) and it'll read through them, work out what each note is , NPC, monster, spell, magic item, location, quest, faction , and map the fields over. It shows you every guess before writing anything so you can fix the wrong ones, and it never touches your vault.

Character sheets import and export. Drop in a filled-in 5e PDF and it pulls abilities, proficiencies, HP, hit dice, money, gear, features, spells and slots, filling spell details from the SRD where names match. You can export back out to a printable sheet that's still fillable, so it round-trips. (Scanned or flattened PDFs have no form data in them, so those won't work , the app tells you instead of silently failing.)

No more typing "Ranger" fifty times. Race, class, subclass and background are proper dropdowns now. Homebrew still works , type whatever you want and it sticks around, and anything you've typed once shows up as an option next time. You can also tell a campaign which books you play with (26 of them, SRD 5.1 through the 2024 PHB) and the dropdowns narrow to just those. Leave it blank and nothing gets filtered.

Combat got a lot of love:

- Monsters can have real names instead of being stuck as "Goblin". Name them as you add them, or rename anyone mid-fight. Adding six goblins numbers them properly.

- "Add party" drops all your PCs in at once, and "Roll NPCs" rolls initiative for monsters and NPCs only, since your players roll their own

- Draggable HP slider, with damage and healing logged automatically , and the log survives a reload now

- Concentration tracking with save DC prompts

- Rests use the right hit die per class, and long rests properly restore HP, hit dice, slots, a level of exhaustion and death saves

The NPC relations graph got redrawn. Sizes to your window instead of a fixed box, names sit outside the circles so they don't overlap into mush, and two NPCs with several connections show as separate curves instead of one line on top of itself.

Plus a pile of fixes , character creation was crashing on campaigns that had never had a rulebook ticked, and export/import was quietly dropping quests, magic items, handouts, rumors and relationships on a round trip. Both sorted, and old databases repair themselves on next launch so you don't have to do anything.

Get it here: https://athanasioust.itch.io/sanctum

Free, always will be. Windows 10/11, 64-bit, portable exe or installer, your pick. Open source (AGPL), repo's linked on the page.

Keep the feedback coming, either in the itch comments or here. I read all of it, and the list above is proof it works. Especially want to hear what's still clunky and whether the import handled your notes okay, because that one does a lot of guessing.

Cheers, and have a good session this weekend.

Another friday, taking my chance to write this devlog style post for yall.

Genuine thanks to everybody who downloaded Sanctum and especially to the people who took the time to tell me what annoyed them. Almost everything below came straight out of that feedback, so this one's on you lot.

Quick recap if you missed the first post: Sanctum is a free 5e campaign manager for DMs that runs entirely on your machine. No account, no cloud, no subscription, works with the wifi off. Characters, NPCs, bestiary, combat tracker, maps, quests, magic items, handouts, timeline, factions, shops, calendar, notes. Windows for now.

What's new since the first build:

You can bring your existing campaign in. Point Sanctum at your Obsidian vault (or just a folder of markdown files) and it'll read through them, work out what each note is , NPC, monster, spell, magic item, location, quest, faction , and map the fields over. It shows you every guess before writing anything so you can fix the wrong ones, and it never touches your vault.

Character sheets import and export. Drop in a filled-in 5e PDF and it pulls abilities, proficiencies, HP, hit dice, money, gear, features, spells and slots, filling spell details from the SRD where names match. You can export back out to a printable sheet that's still fillable, so it round-trips. (Scanned or flattened PDFs have no form data in them, so those won't work , the app tells you instead of silently failing.)

No more typing "Ranger" fifty times. Race, class, subclass and background are proper dropdowns now. Homebrew still works , type whatever you want and it sticks around, and anything you've typed once shows up as an option next time. You can also tell a campaign which books you play with (26 of them, SRD 5.1 through the 2024 PHB) and the dropdowns narrow to just those. Leave it blank and nothing gets filtered.

Combat got a lot of love:

- Monsters can have real names instead of being stuck as "Goblin". Name them as you add them, or rename anyone mid-fight. Adding six goblins numbers them properly.

- "Add party" drops all your PCs in at once, and "Roll NPCs" rolls initiative for monsters and NPCs only, since your players roll their own

- Draggable HP slider, with damage and healing logged automatically , and the log survives a reload now

- Concentration tracking with save DC prompts

- Rests use the right hit die per class, and long rests properly restore HP, hit dice, slots, a level of exhaustion and death saves

The NPC relations graph got redrawn. Sizes to your window instead of a fixed box, names sit outside the circles so they don't overlap into mush, and two NPCs with several connections show as separate curves instead of one line on top of itself.

Plus a pile of fixes , character creation was crashing on campaigns that had never had a rulebook ticked, and export/import was quietly dropping quests, magic items, handouts, rumors and relationships on a round trip. Both sorted, and old databases repair themselves on next launch so you don't have to do anything.

Get it here: https://athanasioust.itch.io/sanctum

Free, always will be. Windows 10/11, 64-bit, portable exe or installer, your pick. Open source (AGPL), repo's linked on the page.

Keep the feedback coming, either in the itch comments or here. I read all of it, and the list above is proof it works. Especially want to hear what's still clunky and whether the import handled your notes okay, because that one does a lot of guessing.

Cheers, and have a good session this weekend.

Hey all. I'm a computer science student and I've been playing D&D for years, mostly as the DM. Somewhere along the way I got tired of running games with a stat block wiki in one tab, an initiative tracker in another, notes in a google doc and a map somewhere else, so I started building my own tool to keep it all in one place. It's called Sanctum.

It's basically one app for the whole campaign: combat tracker, a bestiary where you build stat blocks (SRD monsters only), NPCs, maps, quests, notes, that kind of thing. The main thing for me was that it runs completely offline, no account, no subscription, and your campaign is just a file on your own computer. Nothing lives on a server, so it still works if the wifi dies mid session and you don't lose anything if some website shuts down.

It's free on itch, name your own price if you want: https://athanasioust.itch.io/sanctum

I'm just one person building this in my spare time so it's rough in places and there's stuff missing. Mostly I'd love feedback from people who actually run games. What annoys you most about your current prep or session setup? That's the stuff I want to work on next.

Thanks for taking a look.