Today we’re going to take a look at one of
my favorite new features from Foundry V10, Adventures. Adventures make it easy to bundle
up your content so that users can import it into their worlds and they keep everything
from Scenes to Playlists organized so that all of your links and folders continue to
work as expected after they’re imported. We’re going to start by setting up
a module, creating an Adventure, adding some of the content from our world to it,
and lastly we’ll build the Adven
ture so that it will be easy to import. Let’s get started!
Unlike other things in Foundry like Actors, Items, and Scenes, there’s no tab for Adventures
in the sidebar. That’s because an Adventure needs to be in a Compendium Pack. Since I want
to make this Adventure installable by other people I’m going to make a module, give it a
Compendium Pack, and store everything in it. In V11 of Foundry VTT you can easily create
a module by heading to the Setup page, clicking on the ‘Add-on Modules’ tab
, and
clicking on this gear icon. If you’re still on V10 you can check out our packaging guide down
below to learn how to make a module yourself. Once you’ve clicked on the gear we can start
making our module! First, we’ll need to enter a title. You can name your module whatever you
want and you’ll notice that the package ID below is automatically created based on your title.
If you want to change it, just enter a new ID in the field. You’ll want to make sure that it’s
all lowercase and us
es dashes instead of spaces. If you plan on distributing this module
you want to make sure that the ID is unique because two modules can’t share the same ID.
You can leave the Package Version as it is or change it if you prefer a different
versioning scheme. The Package URL can be left blank or you can add a link to where
people can learn more about your module. The description can be plain text or
include HTML and should be a simple description of what your module includes.
The compatibilit
y fields define what versions of Foundry VTT your module works with. The
minimum version will stop anyone with an older version of Foundry from installing it and
setting a maximum will ensure that no one with a newer version than what you list can install
it either but you don’t need to set a maximum. The verified version is just the latest version
you’ve actually tested against. We can leave these all as they are because we’ll be building the
module in V11 which means it won’t be installab
le by anyone using V10 or earlier versions.
Then we can head to the ‘Authors’ tab where we can add everyone who is going to work on this module.
Just press “Add Author”, enter a name and any other details that you want and then you can add
more authors or remove any that you don’t need. Next up, we can choose the Compendium Packs
that we want this module to have. You can add a Compendium Pack for anything but I’ll just
add an Adventure pack. We can set the pack’s label and just like the Modu
le title you can
see its name is being generated automatically. One important thing to know for Adventure packs
is that if you want it to include system-specific content like Actors or Items you’ll need
to set the game system for that pack and anyone who isn’t using that game system
won’t be able to import your adventure. If you just want to store Scenes, Journal
Entries, Cards, or Playlists you don’t have to set a game system though and
everyone will be able to import it. If you want a pa
ck to only be visible to
Gamemasters just check the “GM Only” checkbox. Lastly, we have ‘Relationships’ which is where
you can define any systems or modules that your module relies on. You can select any game system
or module that you currently have installed and give it a category. If your module requires a
specific Game System leave it on ‘Game System. If you have a hard requirement for a given module
you can set it to be a “Required Dependency” which will prevent users from activating yo
ur
module without also activating that module. “Recommended Compatibility” will encourage users
to install and activate the selected module but it won’t require it, and “Known Conflict” lets you
tell users that your module will not work with another module that they’re currently using.
Once you’ve finished filling everything out press “Create Package” and you’ve
got a brand new module ready to go! With our Module created let’s jump into our
world, activate the module, and we can now see the
Pack we made in our Compendium Tab!
Through the power of editing I’ve also already created some content in this world that we can
use. If you’ll be distributing this module to others just make sure that anything you’ll be
including in your Adventure stores its assets in the module’s folder. For example, this Actor
has its portrait art stored in my module’s folder. Now that we have our Compendium Pack and some
content we can make our first Adventure! Almost. The lock next to the Pack means
we can’t edit
it. You can unlock a Compendium Pack by right clicking on it and selecting the Toggle Edit
Lock option. Then you can open it normally. It’s empty right now so press the Create Adventure
button and you’ll see the Adventure Builder pop up with tabs for Summary and Contents.
The Summary tab contains all the basic information about your Adventure like the name,
banner image, banner caption, and description. The Contents tab is where things start to get
interesting. You can drag an
d drop any content, including entire folders, from the sidebar or
the Macro bar onto the builder and it will be staged for inclusion in your Adventure. It’s easy
to remove anything from the staging ground that you don’t want by pressing the x to its right.
Once you’ve added everything that you want to include in this Adventure you can press Build
Adventure. That will take everything we’ve staged in the Builder and pack it into
an importable Adventure. As you can see, it’s now available in ou
r Compendium Pack and
if we open it we’ll see everything we filled out before exactly how other users will see it.
What if we forgot something or want to make changes though? Thankfully, that’s easy
to do! Just right click on your Adventure, select Rebuild Adventure and you’ll see the same
window as before. If we change to the Contents tab we can see everything that was already added
to our Adventure no longer has a green background since they’re no longer new additions. If we
add some new
content to the Adventure though it will be highlighted green and if we remove
something that was already in the Adventure it will be highlighted in red to show that it
will be removed when we rebuild the Adventure. There’s one thing that’s very important to note
here though: when you press the Build Adventure button absolutely everything in the Adventure
gets updated. That means if any content is missing in your World it will be removed from the
Adventure. For example, if I close this windo
w, delete an Actor that was part of the Adventure,
and then open the builder again you can see that the Actor now shows in yellow which
means it will be removed if we press Build. The best way to make sure that you don’t
accidentally delete anything is to create a new world, import your Adventure,
make any changes that you want to make, and then re-build it. That way you
know that everything in your world is using what’s in the Adventure and any
changes you make will be caught. Then, just
add any new content you’ve made to the
Adventure and run Build Adventure again. Once you’re finished, you can distribute
your module exactly how you would normally. I hope you enjoyed that Adventure as much as
I enjoy this shirt from the Foundry VTT merch store that you can find in the description
below and I’ll see you in the next one.
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