Hello everyone,
I just picked up the Core Set and I’d like to get more into 4e.
I’d love to hear from people who’ve played 4e for a while, what books, adventures, modules, or campaign settings do you consider must-haves?
Thank you very much!
Hi everyone, another preview of my game, testing more of the 4e-inspired combat.
This week I've been working on polish interrupts, environmental hazards (pits and explosive barrels), and testing Wizard spells.
The starting party is Wizard, Warrior and Ranger.
Still early, but It's starting to get a better feel for how these systems interact during an encounter.
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.
When I say big project, I probably mean too big. My PC was chugging by the end of this. Probably won't do a map this size again, but it was fun making it.
A question from a new explorer of the World Axis…
The Manual of the Planes makes it clear that both the Feywild and Shadowfell echoes are parallel dimensions, and the Far Realm and Plane of Dreams are not part of the physical universe, but it’s a little more vague about the two Fundamental Planes. It says the matter of the Mortal World was drawn from the Elemental Chaos and that the “mortal world drifts as a lonely speck of light and life in the eternal expanse of the astral mists.” It also states that Astral Dominions are separate realities within the Astral Sea.
So basically in 4e cosmology, you can’t just jump in a Spelljammer and fly to the Feywild, Shadowfell, Far Ream or Plane of Dreams, you need a portal, spell or ritual to “shift” to those planes, and if you are in the Astral Sea, you can enter a Dominion, but for the other two, it seems like portals, Astral Sojourn or Elemental Transference, or Plane Shift can get you to them faster, but could you theoretically jump in a ship and fly to the Astral Sea or the Elemental Chaos? Do they physically exist Above and Below the world or is that more metaphorical? The descriptions are not as clear with those two planes.
The fact that they are called planes suggests they are separate realities, but then they are also described as being the two parts that made up the universe before the mortal world was created. What do you think? How do you see their relationship to the mortal world?
I've been working on my first godot game, a tactical roguelike inspired by D&D 4e.
It's built around turn-based tactical combat, AP/action economy, positioning, powers, and procedural dungeon runs. I'm aiming for something that feels like playing a tabletop RPG through a pixel-art game.
Still very much a work in progress, but here's a short gameplay clip from the current build.
LFR