FGU Quick-Start for GMs/DMs: Part 2 - Pre-generated Characters (Pre-Gens)

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. 

You can download the program at the following link:
Link: https://www.fantasygrounds.com/home/FantasyGroundsUnity.php

If you assistance with installation, please see the following link:
Link: Installing Fantasy Grounds Unity

There is also a Quick Start Guide with general information at the following link:
Link: Quick Start Guides

I recommend you start by going through Part One of this tutorial and making a one-shot adventure:
Link:

At the very least, you need to go through the first few steps to make a new campaign and load the D&D SRD modules. 

Now, onto creating our heroes!

We have a limited set of options in the free D&D 5th Edition SRD, so we’ll go for the classic combo of Fighter/Cleric/Rogue/Wizard.

There are at least three methods you can use for generating them: drag-and-drop, the character wizard and importing from elsewhere (another campaign, or D&D Beyond).

We’ll stick to drag-and-drop as I think it is the quickest for the GM (rather than players agonizing about the cool power choices they have). It has the most similarities across rulesets and, at the time of writing, the character wizard is being re-written so its interface may well change by the time you read this. 

Let’s get going. Start up FGU and load the QuickStartTutorial campaign you built in Part One.

Open

In the sidebar, click the arrows to open up the various options. We’ll be focusing on the player and character sections this time. 

Notes are like stories but for the players. They can keep their own notes, keep them private or share with other players, and so on.

Personally I find it useful to use notes for player-facing handouts as well. At the end of each session I write a brief summary of what happened as a note which I and the players can refer to as a recap at the start of each session. Some old FGU hands will shudder at this, but I find it helps me to think notes are for the players to look at but stories are just for the GM. You’ll find the organization that works for you. 

The only drawback I’ve found is that notes can’t be organized into groups like stories can. The stated purpose of notes for player’s own session notes is rather defeated by the fact that they can only access them when you are running the campaign on your own machine, so they can’t read them out of sessions. As a result, all the players in all my groups keep notes externally on paper on in Google Docs, etc. This is why I use them for handouts.

Right, on to the sidebar.

Open

Click Characters and bring up the Character Selection window. 

Add a new character with the little green and white + bottom right as usual. 

Up pops a new player character sheet (unhelpfully over the character selection window. You be you, FGU). 

Resize and re-arrange to taste. 

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

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.

You’re the GM, you’re making pre-gens for a one-shot, so let’s not be TOO fussy about following the letter of the law for 5E character generation, OK? You can do it entirely by the book, but I’ve probably played fast and loose with what I’ve done here. Shhh, no-one will know. The important thing is to get a playable party in a reasonable time so you can run your first game in FGU. 

Let’s be generous and give Vendredal a 17 strength out of the gate, as befits our party fighter. Click on the “10” in the STR box. The text is editable, even though it doesn’t give any particularly clear indication of being so. So just type 17 and go!

Our fighter has a 17 strength, and FGU has updated the stat bonus for us to +3. 

Now you can just type in the numbers for the rest of the stats, but I want to show you how to generate the rest of the stats randomly with 4d6 disregarding the lowest. 

In the chat window to the far left of screen, type
/roll 4d6d1 

(to be read as four d6, drop 1)

This is what showed for me in the chat window when I did that. It rolled two 1’s and two 2’s, dropped one of the ones, and left us with a total of 5. Oooo, that’s going to be a crippling stat for our fighter to have in something. Not good for a campaign. Fine for a one-shot. Let’s make them really, really unwise.

Drag and drop the dice roll result from the chat window over the WIS score on the character sheet. You’ll see it “picks up” the five, and changes the stat when you drop it.

Cool. Now go back to the chat window and hit the up cursor key on your keyboard. You’ll see it “brings back” the last thing you typed, in this case the /roll 4d6d1 command. If you hit return/enter, it'll do it again. Hit up-cursor, return until you have five rolls ready for the five other stats.

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:

Add Race

Next, we’ll choose our fighter’s race.

In the characters section if the sidebar, click Races. Up pops the race window.

Now drag and drop the shield-link-thingy just to the left of where it says “Human” onto the race section of the fighter’s character sheet:

This is the result:

Whoa! A whole bunch of stuff changed? Yes, it did. 5E standard humans add +1 to all statistics, and FGU just did that for us. Humans get a 30 feet move speed, which FGU’s just filled in. 

Click on the shield-link-thingy on the character sheet to the right of where it now says “human”. That’ll pop up a window with the relevant info for that race. Close that window again as normal with the X in the corner, we don’t need anything on there, I just wanted to show you that things on the character sheet link to the relevant bit of rules so the player can click on it to read further.

While we are here, let’s take a moment to play with a few more things on this page of the character sheet. 

Any time you see a box with a little d20 in the corner, it indicates a rollable field. For example, double click on the box containing the “18” for the fighter’s strength. FGU makes a strength roll for us in the chat window, correctly adding the characters stat bonus, and reports it as a Strength check:

If you look above it in the chat window, you can see a bunch more stuff from when we drag-and-dropped the race onto the character:

As usual FGU is doing a pretty good job of telling us what it has done in the chat window. 

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

Next step is to add a background to the character. 

Go to the side bar → Character section → Backgrounds.

The 5E SRD only has one background - acolyte. That makes our decision for us! Let’s say that all four of our adventurers are members of the same temple, where they were brought up as orphans. They are questing to find lost temples of their god in the desert and bring them back into the fold.

Drag and drop the Acolyte shield-link-thingy onto the “Background” space on the character sheet. As expected FGU adds it to the character. (Annoyingly it isn’t easy to reverse these drag-and-drop decisions, which is why there’s a character wizard. But for us as a GM making pre-gens, it’s fine).

In the chat window we can see it has added a bunch more stuff to the character for us, some of which we probably need to take action over. 

So let’s check out some more of the character sheet and see where those went.

At the right-hand side of the character sheet there’s a bunch of tabs.

Main is the front page with stats, HP, AC, saves, etc.

Skills contains the character’s skills, naturally enough. Note that the Insight and Religion skills have a star next to them, which shows that the character is proficient. 

Abilities is where we want to be; I’ll return to it below. 

Flick through the other tabs for now and we’ll get back to them.

Inventory is for items the character has. 

Notes are height, weight, background, personality, etc.

Log is a list of adventures etc. mostly useful for organized league play.

Actions is where all of FGU’s powerful automation comes in for spells and abilities, we will tackle that much later on.

For now, let’s look at our fighter’s abilities.

Click the link-shield-thingy next to Shelter of the Faithful and up pops a window describing what it does. Helpful.

Under languages, note that it says “Common”, “Choice” and “Two of your choice”. Not so helpful.

Click on the line where it says “Choice” to edit it and change it to “Elvish” (using the delete key, it’s a freeform text entry). 

On the line where it says “Two of your choice” edit it so it says “Orc”, then hit return- on the extra line that shows up, type “Celestial”. This is what you’ll end up with:

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. 

Go back to the main tab of the character sheet. 

Open “Classes” from the sidebar. 

Drag-and-drop the shield-link-thingy for Fighter to the class and level section of the character sheet.

Something new happens: a choice window pops up prompting us to select skills.

This is just a checklist of options and it tells us to choose two. 

Select Animal Handling and Athletics, a check box appears in the bottom corner. 

Click that check box to accept.

So we’ve got a first level fighter, and the chat window shows a bunch more stuff added. I planned on these being 3rd level characters, so let’s level them up. 

Once again, drag and drop the Fighter class from the class window to the character sheet “Class and Level” line. Vendredal is level 2. Do it again; they are level 3. 

Again this is a drastic all-or-nothing method with no easy way to undo, unlike using the character wizard. But for a GM making pre-gens, it’s quick and easy.

You should end up with something like this:

Vendredal’s hit points have been auto-calculated including Con bonus - max of 31 at the bottom in the middle there. WND to the left of it keeps track of how many wounds they have taken. (If you prefer to see how many they have remaining instead, there are extensions that can modify the character sheet display for you. But that’s outside the scope of this QuickStart). TMP is for temporary hit points granted by spells and the like.

HD shows what hit dice the character has available to spend. Let’s give them some damage and spend a hit dice as though they had short rested to show how it works.

Type “10” into the WND box. Then double-click on the black dice in the HD box. It’ll roll a hit dice, add in the CON bonus, and heal the damage, leaving them with 2 HD. 

While we’re here, click the little yellow d20 under Death Saves. FGU rolls a death save in the chat window for us. The check boxes can be used to track successes and failures.

By default, FGU does death saves automatically. But my players hate this - if the only thing they can do is to roll a death save for their character this round, then, by damn, they want to roll it themselves.

On the sidebar, click the cog wheel to bring up the Options window.

Scroll down to CT: Auto Death rolls. Click on the arrow by “On” until it turns to “Off”. Your players will probably thank me.

Characters and Automation

We now have a bare-bones 3rd-level fighter. Check out their skills tab.

Note that FGU has now added in their proficiency bonus where applicable. To make a skill check, double-click on the box with the bonus in with the little d20 in the corner.

The skills tab is complete. 

Let’s look at the Abilities tab.

Here we start to see some of the limits of FGU’s built-in automation. You might have been expecting to be asked to choose a fighting style - but that’s left to us to do by hand because there are too many possible options for the automation to completely handle without us.

You’ll notice it has chosen the Champion martial archetype for us. That’s for a different reason; the SRD classes only have the one archetype, so there were no choices to be made.

If we click on “Improved Critical” link, we can see that this character “crits” (gets a critical) on a 19 or 20 with a weapon. FGU is smart enough to automate some character features, but not all, usually because it can get insanely complex to automate with multi-classed characters.

You can just rely on your players to remember this if you like. Or you can implement the necessary automation yourself quickly.

Go to the actions tab and click the little magnifying glass next to weapons. This is a sign in FGU that there’s a more detailed thing to inspect “underneath it”.

In this case, there’s stuff to do with weapons “crit” in a new window. 

Click on the Crit on: Melee box that currently says 20, change it to 19. Ditto for Ranged.

Close the window.

We’d better give our fighter some weapons to attack with!

Go to the Inventory tab.

Open the Items window from the sidebar.

Type “chain” in the search filter box to locate Chain Mail, then drag and drop the chain mail’s link-shield-thingy from the Items window to the character sheet inventory tab, like this:

When you drop, FGU does a bunch of stuff for you.

First, it adds the chainmail to the character’s inventory.

Second, it spots that this is armor they are probably going to wear, and equips it. The little red icon like a shirt indicates equipped - click on it to cycle through Equipped, Carried and Not Carried. Make sure it ends up equipped.

Check the front page of the character sheet. The character’s AC has improved from 12 to 16 because they’ve just put the armor on. FGU is also keeping track of the weight of what they are carrying, should you care about encumbrance.

Our fighter needs more than that so let’s drag-and-drop a longsword, a shield, and a longbow from the items window to their inventory. That’s enough to be getting on with for our quick one-shot character.

With the shield equipped their AC has further improved to 18.

Now check out the actions tab.

FGU has added the longbow and longsword to the Actions tab for us. Click in the Ammo box and give them 40 arrows by typing 40 into the box. 

Double-click on the +4 in the box with the d20 and the yellow star. FGU rolls an attack in the chat window, adding the character’s attack bonus correctly, and checks off one of the arrows. If they retrieve arrows after the battle, clicking on the check box restores it.

Double-click on the 1d8+2 piercing - FGU rolls the damage. It knows it is piercing and can make sure resistances, etc. are correctly applied once we’re running an adventure for real.

We are nearly done with our fighter. But they have two more features which we can help them keep track of on their actions tab.

It’s a lot of work to put all this in for characters as the GM. Remember that for the most part players will be taking care of this. And you can buy modules and extensions which have all of this entered already if you have the cash but not the time: I can recommend Rob 2E’s Effects coding modules for 5E. What we are about to do is in the Class Effects coding module, which you can get at the link below:
Link: https://www.dmsguild.com/product/210436/Fantasy-Grounds-5E-Effects-Coding--Class-Features

There’s even an extension to automate adding this stuff to the character’s actions tab for you but that’s beyond the scope of this tutorial.

Let’s add it by hand as a learning experience.

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.

From the Abilities tab, click the “Action Surge” link-shield-thingy to open the window describing it. Then go to the Actions tab.

Now drag and drop the Action Surge link-shield-thingy from the top left corner of the ability description into the blank space in the middle of the actions tab, and this should appear:

You’ve just added Action Surge, and that link-shield-thingy will open up the description if the player need it. 

In the blank bit next to Action Surge, just under “Powers”, you can enter a “Set” for this power to be part of. It’s useful if they start multi-classing or get hold of potions. I typed in “Fighter” to show it is a fighter power, then clicked outside that text box to commit the change so FGU implements it.

Now we have a category called Fighter. Cool beans.

We want to add a check box to keep track of when this gets used.

At the bottom of the action tab is some other stuff.

Click on “Mode”. It cycles through Standard, Preparation and Combat. 

Standard shows a normal overview. 

Preparation is for keeping track of stuff like spell prep, and power uses. 

Combat shows an abbreviated version where only stuff you haven’t used still shows up; I don’t use that one personally but your players may like it. 
Preparation is the one we want now.

There’s a bunch of spell stuff which doesn’t apply to our fighter. The bit we are interested in is next to our Action Surge power.

Click in the box that says “0” and type “1” instead. 

Click on the box next to it that says “Daily” to cycle it through to “Rest”. Now FGU knows that this is a power that can be used once per short rest.

At the bottom, click on Mode to go back to Standard. Congrats, Action Surge now has a tick box to keep track of usage. If you trigger a short or long rest for the party, it will even reset these for you.

OK, that wasn’t so bad. What’s next?

Go back to the Abilities tab and click on the link shield to open the window for Second Wind.

Go to the Actions tab and drag and drop its link shield to the blank area just under Action Surge to add to our fighter’s actions.

Something rather strange has happened. This action has some extra fiddly stuff with it - Heal 1d10+3.

We’ll look at that in a second. First of all, type “Fighter” in the blank text box next to Second Wind, then click somewhere else. FGU puts this under the Fighter category for us.

Go to Preparation mode down at the bottom, and change that to 1 per rest for Second Wind too:

Then back to standard mode and voila - check box.

What IS that healing box all about? It means that the player can automatically roll the healing from their Second Wind on their character and have FGU keep track of it all for them.

Go back to the character front page. Give our fighter ten HP of wounds again:

Now in the actions tab, click on the + by the left of “Heal”. FGU rolls the healing for us, and applies it to the character.

The player has to keep track of the uses by hand, but there is a check box by the power to allow that. It’s a bit case-by-case whether FGU automatically tracks uses or not - weapons ammo it does, but spell and power uses it doesn’t. In my experience that’s quite wise, as players sometimes trigger stuff by mistake. 

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.

Let’s go for defense, which adds +1 AC when wearing armor (which they are).

To implement this, go to the Main tab. 

Click the little magnifying glass next to AC. Up pops another window.

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.

This should be a small-ish transparent PNG file. Google Image search, draw one yourself or buy one from one of the artists who design them.

From the sidebar, open the Assets window. Click “Tokens” at the top.

Then Folder at the bottom.

Up pops an operating system finder window. I’m on macOS, so your file window may look different.

Copy your token PNG into here.

Go back to FGU, hit the refresh circle arrows just next to “Folder” at the bottom. The campaign sack should appear if it wasn’t there before:

Click on that and there’s your token:

Drag and drop the pic from the Assets window onto the box at the top left of the character sheet.

For reasons lost in the mists of time, FG has a separate character portrait and character token. You’ve just set the portrait, and FG copies that image to the token with a square box around it.

If you find this as aesthetically painful as I do, never fear. Drag and drop from the asset window over where the hideous token has appeared and it will overwrite it with a nice smooth round one as nature intended.

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.

Remember that other methods are available which automate a bit more of this and are more player-friendly. I wanted to give you the gory details so you understand how it all fits together.

The main complication for the other characters is spells.

Let’s do a cleric first.

Make a new character:

• Characters window from the sidebar, green and white + to make a new one

• Roll or assign the stats

• Race -> Human

• Backgrounds -> Acolyte

• Class -> Cleric, repeat to get to level 3, choosing your skills when they pop up

• Items -> Chain mail, shield, spear, Crossbow, light

Give them 40 shots with the crossbow. Note that spear has both a melee and a ranged entry; give them just the one spear that they can throw in extremis.

Honestly, that shouldn’t have taken you much longer to do than it took me to type once you’ve done a couple of characters this way. 

Don’t forget to grab them a token. 

On the actions tab note that FGU has added spell slots for us, but not yet spells:

It’s pretty easy to add them.

Sidebar -> Spells. Up pops the Spell window.

There’s a lot on there, but we can select by source (which in this case means class) and level. So from the drop-down menus choose Level 1  and Cleric:

That’s a more manageable list:

My cleric at level 3 should know 3 cantrips and be able to prepare WIS modifier plus level spells per day (7 for me) plus their domain spells of bless, cure wounds, lesser restoration and spiritual weapon, which are always prepared.

For a one-shot, we could just drag over the spells they have prepared for today, but it doesn’t take very much longer to do “properly”.

Drag over all the level 1 spells from the list to the actions tabs of the character sheet, one by one.

Fortunately we can save some space by collapsing the spells to hide their effects using the little magnifying glasses next to each spell’s shield-link-thingy in the list. Do that, then choose all the second level cleric spells from the Spells window and drag all of them over too. You should end up with this, or something very like it.

Now let’s choose which spells we have prepared today by going, naturally enough, to Preparation mode down at the bottom left (click where it says Standard to cycle through it).

Start by ticking the domain spells:

Then choose the other 7 they can have prepared, to taste. Come out of Preparation mode and you’ll see the usefulness of Combat mode - it only shows spells that you have prepared (AND that you have spell slots left to cast, in fact).

That’s a much more bearable list. 

To finish our spells we need to choose 3 cantrips - from the Spell window, choose “Cleric” and “Level 0” and drag and drop three to taste. 

I picked light, spare the dying and sacred flame.

Let’s just take a look at sacred flame before we move on. Click the magnifying glass to open it if it isn’t already open.

You can see three icons - Cast, Atk and Save. “Cast” does whichever of Atk (make an attack) or Save (force foe to making a saving throw) is appropriate to the spell. 

Double-click the yellow d20 little icon by cast. This pops up in the chat window:

FGU knows that when the Cleric casts that spell, someone is going to have to make a DEX DC 14 saving throw (which it has calculated from his stat and proficiency bonuses). 

If he had a target selected in a combat, FGU would automate that foe rolling his save and tell us whether it passed or not. 

Underneath is the damage; click the little yellow blood drop icon and it rolls the damage for us. If this was spell which does half damage on a successful save, FGU can keep track of that automatically - even for a large group of foes. It’ll track which ones made their save and which ones failed, and apply full or half damage accordingly. 

But that’s for the next episode of this Quick Start Tutorial.

There are a few other abilities on the Cleric’s Abilities tab that we might want to automate (or buy an effects coding module that has all of it done for us- I think the PHB has more of it already coded, from what I remember). Recall that we are doing all of this with the bare-bones free 5E SRD ruleset that comes provided with FGU!

If you drag the Channel Divinity: Preserve Life feature onto your actions tab it makes a healing effect which might not be exactly what you want in play but is fine for now.

Drag and drop the other Channel Divinity ability though and we get a problem which we need to fix:

I’ve put these in a power group called “Cleric”, but FGU doesn’t know how to calculate saves for this group, so the turn undead save DC is showing up as 8 where it should be 14.

To fix, click the magnifying glass for the power group, next to the green and white plus button for the cleric group.

The power group window appears:

We need to tell it to use WIS for this group. Click on the box next to ability with “-” in it, cycle through until you get to WIS. 

While we are at it, at the bottom enter Uses 1 and click Daily to cycle to rest.

Close the window.

The turn DC is now correct and a check box has appeared to keep track of uses.

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.

In the skills tab, you need to choose two skills to be expert in. Do this by clicking the star next to the skill which indicates proficiency - it cycles through the options, one of which is “Double Proficiency Bonus” which is what we want.

Give them a rapier, a short bow, leather armor and thieves’ tools. 

We can add an entry for thieves tools in the Skills tab - green and white + button. 

Type Thieves’ Tools in the blank line which appears, then click elsewhere to “fix” your change. In the Stat box, click to cycle until Dex comes up.

Click on the star in front of the name to give them their proper proficiency in it.

On the Actions tab, give them 40 arrows as usual.

Open the “Sneak Attack” feature from the Abilities tab and drag and drop its shield-link-thingy  into the Actions tab:

That’s nearly, but not quite, right. At 3rd level rogues get 2d6 sneak attack.

Click on the magnifying glass to the right of effect (just by where it says 0 rd).

In the Description text box, click to edit, change 1d6 to 2d6 and close the window as usual.

Sneak attack is now fixed. We can’t test it until the character is on the Combat tracker (in part three!) 

Finally, The Wizard

You know the drill by now. 

• Create a new character.

• Roll or assign stats. 

• Drag and drop race -> Elf.

• Background -> Acolyte.

• Class -> Wizard, then repeat to level 3.

Most of what we need has been done automatically.

You can add the proficiencies from the Elf Weapon Training feature by adding lines under proficiencies and typing in Longbow etc. on the abilities tab by hand. 

Let’s make use of that by giving them a longsword and a longbow from Items (sidebar -> Items to open the window). The weapons get added to the actions tab as usual, and if you’ve listed them in the proficiencies as I suggested above you’ll see they have stars by them, indicating FGU has picked that up and added proficiency bonus correctly. 

Let’s give them “Clothes, fine” and a component pouch for their spells by dragging and dropping from the Items window as usual.

Arcane recovery needs to be kept track of, so drag the feature to the Actions tab, go to preparation mode and choose 1 Daily.

As a third level wizard, they get 3 cantrips plus one from Elven ancestry. They can prepare level plus INT bonus spells, so 6 in my wizard’s case. They get at least ten spells to choose from - maybe more if they’ve found some on their adventures.

Let’s just go to the spell window, list the level 1 wizard spells, drag a few across, repeat for level 2. Add four cantrips, and pick some spells to be prepared (maybe tell the player they can swap them around at the start of the session if they like).

This looks like a reasonable selection. A bit heavy on the defense, but 14 HP isn’t funny. 

Let’s give them two potions of healing, too. Drag and drop to their inventory from the Items window.
Click on the “1” on the left of the Potion and type 2 to change the quantity they have.

We might as well go the whole way and set up an action for that potion since one isn’t set up by default.

Again, you can buy modules with all this done for you (and extensions that automate actions, like when you add stuff to inventory, it adds actions to match). We’re doing this with the bare-bones 5E SRD so you can see how it works “behind the curtain” and so you can run a game with no additional purchases. 

In the actions tab, press the blue and white star down at the bottom to add a new power.

Change the name from “New Spell” to Potion of Healing. In the box to the right of that, type Potion.
Click out of that box to “fix” the change. 

Now we need to add a healing action to that power. 

Right mouse click on the Potion of Healing power you just made.

Arrow to add an action, then + to make it healing. 

Now, click the magnifying glass to the right of the big empty box after Heal. Up pops yet another window.

It’s the last one I swear. Last except for one or two, maybe. Anyway.  

Drag and drop a d4 from the dice tray to the blank space where it says “Dice”.

A Black d4 in a box appears. Drag and drop a second d4 from the dice tray into this box:

Click on the empty box under “Bonus”, click +2. Close the window. 

The effect in the Actions tab should have updated and now shows a 2d4+2 healing effect. You or the player can drag and drop that onto other characters or themselves to heal them, once they are all in the Combat Tracker.

Finish up any little fiddly bits you want to fix (like entering the right number of languages to speak for each of them on their Abilities tab). Make sure they’ve all got a token.

And we have our party. Very nearly.

Open the Character window again from the sidebar.

This is what your players will see when they join your game, and they will get offered any characters not already claimed by another player to claim as their own for the game. (You can clear ownership if someone makes a mistake of course). 

For now, we want to add all four of these characters to the Party Sheet. 

On the sidebar, click the middle icon in the top row to open the party sheet.

Drag each of the characters’ tokens one by one from the character window onto the party sheet by grabbing hold of their picture in the character window and dropping onto the party sheet.

The party sheet gives an overview of all the characters, current HP, stats, who has darkvision, and a bunch of other useful stuff for when you start handing out XP and treasure.

You can close it for now.

You now have an adventure and a party to go on it. I’m sorry if it was a bit fiddly, but this way you get ahead of your players on the learning curve. It all probably feels very confusing and very complex, which in fairness it can be, somewhat. But you’ve seen the full gory details all the way up to building your own actions to automate things like Potions of Healing, and I think it is worth seeing all of this once when you are learning.

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.

There’s one more window to open- the Combat Tracker.

Sidebar, top left of the little row of icons, Crossed swords to open the combat tracker. 

Up pops yet another window.

From the Character Window, drag and drop each of your party members onto the Combat Tracker. 

Close the character window. As the GM you will access the characters from the Combat Tracker directly from now on.

Open up the map you made in the first tutorial. (From images in the sidebar if you didn’t put it in a slot at the bottom of the screen as I suggested). 

Drag and drop your characters' tokens from the combat tracker onto the bottom left hand corner of the map. (Not their shield-link-thingy - clicking on that in the combat tracker opens their character sheet for you. The picture of them in the tracker). 

This will place your four heroes ready for their adventure, which I’ll cover in part three.

In the image window, make sure you are in play mode (the d20 icon at the top of the yellow control panel). Make sure line of sight is enabled.

Now click on one of the PC tokens to select it. While the token is selected, you can move them around, and you can see how FGU traces out what they can see based on the walls you drew earlier. 

Enable “Player Vision Preview” to get a view that more closely matches that shown to the players - you’ll see the far parts of the map go black, because they haven’t seen or visited there yet. Disable that for a more normal GM “God’s eye view”. You can still see the LOS for the selected token to judge who it can see or shoot at, but you can see the whole map underneath too. 

Grab a token and zoom around the map a bit, either by dragging with the mouse or using the cursor keys. Note that they can’t go through walls. As GM if you want to override that, hold down shift as you drag the token, then release where the token is where you want it to be. It “teleports” there ignoring walls. 

/save in the chat window just to be sure...

… and right-click to exit FGU. 

This may have seemed like a bit of an ordeal, but you’ve set up all the stuff ready to run and take advantage of FGU’s very powerful automation tools to track everything from Blesses to HP and healing and everything in between. Session two is an absolute BREEZE to prep, I promise.

You’ve also learned what about 90% of those scary things on the sidebar do, too. 

And for your next adventure, you can buy a commercial module which has all this work done for you. But this way you understand how it all fits together, hopefully. 

Congratulations! You’re ready to run a game!