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This series of FGU Quick-Start Guides for GMs is brought to you courtesy of Hywel Phillips, a Fantasy Grounds Community member in collaboration with Smiteworks USA, LLC, makers of Fantasy Grounds.
Getting going in Fantasy Grounds Unity
The first time you launch Fantasy Grounds it looks complex and imposing and you’re probably wondering how on earth you’re going to get started, let alone get to the point of running a game for your players. This is how you’re going to do it.
This tutorial will take you through generating a party of four pre-generated player characters ready to run a one-shot adventure.
Install FGU and run Check For Updates
This guide assumes you’ve gotten as far as installing Fantasy Grounds, registered for an account, and run “Check for Updates” to make sure you have the latest version.
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There is also a Quick Start Guide with general information at the following link:
Link: Quick Start Guide
I recommend you start by going through Part One of this tutorial and making a one-shot adventure:
Link: FGU Quick-Start for GMs/DMs: Part 1 - Preparing An Adventure
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There’s a lot going on on the character sheet. We’ll work through it step-by-step as we build our pre-gens.
Rolling Stats
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OK, let’s start with the obvious. There’s a blinking text caret on the Name field. Type in a name for your fighter. I’ve called mine Vendredal Smith.
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Then drag and drop to your choice of statistics for the fighter onto the respective stats. If you mess up just drag-and-drop again to write over the stats.
This is what I got:
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Add Race
Next, we’ll choose our fighter’s race.
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Over the other side of the window are saves. Double-click in the STR box there to roll a strength save. As we add levels to the character these will get updated with the relevant bonuses.
Add Background
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Next step is to add a background to the character.
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In due course if someone now enters a chat message in Elvish in the chat window (see tutorial part one) this character will understand it. It won’t work straight away as this character isn’t yet in an adventure (ie. they are not on the Combat Tracker). More on that later.
Add levels in a class
At last it is time to train Vendredal as a fighter.
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Scroll down to CT: Auto Death rolls. Click on the arrow by “On” until it turns to “Off”. Your players will probably thank me.
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Characters and Automation
We now have a bare-bones 3rd-level fighter. Check out their skills tab.
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Our fighter has three additional features in their abilities tab which we haven’t covered.
Action Surge
Action surge is really simple - fighters just get to take an additional action if they push themselves. We don’t need FGU to implement that, we do it at the table. But what we can do is to make a nice entry on the actions tab to keep track of when they have used the ability. Let’s do that now.
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They’ll get the hang of it very quickly. You don’t need to care about it all. The only reason I am explaining it to you now is so you can see some examples of setting up some simple powers so you can guide your players through it.
Fighting Style
Our fighter is nearly play-ready. Two things left. First, we’ve not chosen their fighting style.
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Enter “1” in the Misc bonus box for armor, close the window. Their AC is now 19.
Token and Portrait
Lastly, we need a token for the character.
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Vendredal Smith is now ready for her first adventure. All she needs is some colleagues.
Cleric and Wizards and Spells, Oh My
You now know most of what you need to know to generate a cleric, a rogue and a wizard to go with Vendredal.
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We haven’t automated the 2+spell level bonus healing feature Disciple of Life. It can be done, but is complicated because it varies with spell level. For now, let’s move on. It’s the player’s job to remind us of that effect for now.
The Rogue
Make a level 3 Tiefling acolyte rogue.
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Sneak attack is now fixed. We can’t test it until the character is on the Combat tracker (in part three!)
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Finally, The Wizard
You know the drill by now.
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When a player asks you a question, you’ll be able to think “Oh, I remember seeing how to do that. It was setting up the cleric character, wasn’t it?” and be able to track it down from there.
Ready To Roll
After all that detail, I can’t leave you without getting you really and truly ready to run your first game.
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