Hi, for the past 3 years I’ve been developing and using my own VTT, that until then it was only accessible to me and my close group of friends, but now I’ve decided to make it open to everyone else, open-source it, and distribute it under aGPL license.

What’s the pitch? Basically I’m not very much into remote playing but sadly it’s most of the game I play due to schedule problems, friends moving away and many other reasons that we all know that make in-person games scarce. So for me VTTs that always been kinda of just homework, I already have the game ready to run now I need to setup the environment to play, not the biggest fan of that, and I’ve tried many VTTs before and although some fit my requirements, I live in Brazil and a common reality here is of that of people that only have smartphones (and not good ones) to play online, so even the VTTs that fit my requirement were often too heavy on their devices, so for a long time I played using only shared Google Sheets or even just Discord and each player managed their own sheets however they wanted, but none of these approaches left me very happy so I decided to make my own VTT with a few points in mind:

  • Markdown based sheets: Sheets are basically Markdown notes (thus the name Tabledown), this allows me to quickly customize sheet templates for any games I need;
  • Super lightweight: This entire application is built with vanilla HTML, CSS and JS, it runs natively on the browser with no frameworks and libraries, this is mostly a choice to remove any overhead that comes with opinionated frameworks, so every render, every event listener, every request in the application is intentional to be able to squish performance out of this thing;
  • Mobile friend: Everything is built first on small screens and scaled up to allow for a good experience on mobile;

This application has changed a lot of the past 3 years and I decided to make it public now, I don’t charge for anything obviously but I do have a ko-fi page for donations at the landing page.

At the landing page you can also find self-hosting guide, tutorials, more information about features and so on. I am fully aware that this is likely to be a very niche VTT since a lot of people prefer more features while this focuses on less, but if this is something that makes me happy to use I’m pretty sure there must be other people out there that will be happy to use it too.

Anyways I’ve publish it on my own domain but it’s also published to be played embed on Itch in case anyone prefers that:

Anyway, thanks for your time!