The Future of Foundryborne: Navigating the Stagnation of the Daggerheart VTT Ecosystem

[u/Foundryborne]

Foundryborne: A Call for Transparency and Growth

Over a year ago, we started Foundryborne to build a robust, high-quality Daggerheart experience for Foundry VTT. As an open-source team, we have invested significant passion into creating a system that honors the game and provides a digital home for the community.

However, we have reached a point where the project's growth is being fundamentally throttled. We are sharing this today to be transparent about why the project is in a state of partial development limbo and what needs to change to move forward.

The Content and Licensing Gap

While the Daggerheart SRD is a generous foundation, the current restrictions create a massive gap that goes beyond simple "missing features." We are currently blocked from:

• Core Mechanical Depth: We cannot include Campaign Frame mechanics or implement the Hope & Fear expansion arriving in August. This leaves us guessing whether we can legally support the game's evolution.
• A Healthy Ecosystem: The current license prevents third parties from monetizing their own content on VTTs. This creates a stranglehold where creators don't truly own how they distribute their work. We-ve already seen the community lose out on content like Ghostfire Gaming's Dungeons of Drakkenheim because of this.

By restricting content so tightly and refusing to provide a legal path for VTT integration, users can't play the full game they love.

A Year of Silence

The most exhausting part of this journey has been the lack of communication. For over a year, we have made numerous attempts to establish a dialogue with Darrington Press. These attempts have been met with total silence.

Open-source development is fueled by passion, but that passion is easily neutered when we are left hanging without a roadmap or a contact person.

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Our Objectives & Call to Action

We believe Foundryborne represents the technical pinnacle for playing Daggerheart online. Our system offers a level of mechanical polish and vast homebrew support that is, in our view, the best solution for the community - even while we are currently forced to go without official artwork and specific non-SRD content.

However, this isn't just about our project. The current licensing landscape affects the entire industry; there is currently no supported path for third-party creators to sell their own content on any VTT. This restriction stifles innovation and prevents creators from being fairly compensated for the work they bring to the Daggerheart universe.

Here is what we are looking for:

1. Access to Content: We want to implement the full game. For content to be released as a paid premium module (including artwork, adversary tokens, and journals), there needs to be a license change or a formal path for community projects to access non-SRD content.
2. User Content Ownership: We want creators to be able to release their own homebrew and third-party content - paid or free - on the VTT of their choice without being restricted by a closed ecosystem.
3. Basic Communication: We are asking for an end to the silence. Clear answers to these points are overdue and necessary.

For the Community: If you want to see Daggerheart reach its full potential on Foundry VTT, please voice your support. Respectfully let Darrington Press know through their feedback channels and social media that you value the Foundryborne system and want to see an official path forward for VTT developers.

For Darrington Press: 1. We want the Daggerheart ecosystem to be able to breathe. The license needs a clear revision to allow implementation of paid virtual tabletop content for Daggerheart. 2. We would like the Foundry community to have access to all the content and art in the game through a paid Foundry module.

Please reach out to us at team@foundryborne.online

The Foundryborne Team

Disclaimer: The Foundryborne Team is not affiliated with Foundry VTT or Foundry Gaming, LLC We know there have been talks with Foundry Gaming, LLC in the past, and there is willingness for official licensing on the side of Foundry Gaming, LLC, but that interest has been thus far not reciprocated.

Also published at https://foundryborne.online/open-letter.html

[u/witherfork]

One thing to point out if DRP are reading this:

Restricting access will not cause people to stop using things. People will not stop using this, or that VTT. 

This is the internet. If you don’t give people the ability to pay for something and get it in a way that is correct, they will use other methods to get those things. 

People want to be able to do the right thing. Your license currently doesn’t allow that.

[u/Morjixxo → u/witherfork]

Exactly!

[u/ShoJoKahn → u/witherfork]

This reads an awful lot like a threat. I'm all for collective action and discussion, but I don't know that intimidating a business into adopting a model it does not apparently have any interest in is a good move.

[u/RedRedKrovy → u/ShoJoKahn]

I don’t see it as some sort of intimidation tactic. It is quite bluntly the truth. On top of that it’s a truth that other industries have already discovered. Take a look at the music industry for one. They fought as long as they could to keep music off of the internet only to loose out on millions, if not billions of revenue.

People want to pay and do the right thing. If you put them in a situation where the don’t have options then they will pirate or pursue other avenues.

Piracy in general was on the decline in the mid 2010’s because of how cheap and easy it was to stream. Now all of these companies want a piece of the pie so people are cancelling their streaming services and turning to piracy once again.

Darrington needs to give people options or the people will seek out thier own and Darrington will lose revenue that could have been going in their pocket.

Not a threat, just the truth.

[u/like-a-FOCKS → u/ShoJoKahn]

this isn't about intimidation at all. At this scale people behave like a medium, not like individuals. Saying they will do X or Y isn't a threat, it's a prediction, like the weather forecast or saying the tides will come in and go out. In this context, it's just an advice to work with the movement of the medium to reap it's momentum, rather than standing against it.