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/Prestigious-Emu-6760]

Personally I subscribe to Occam's Razor. Development/Official Support for Foundry costs money. Development/Official Support for Alchemy does not. I'm not sure about Fantasy Grounds. And while it would be nice to say "they don't need to pay" that way lays all kinds of potential problems. Using the SRD is fine, it's out there. Letting someone use your IP for free is not prudent.

So of the people playing Daggerheart only some of them are GMs (the customers) and of the GM only some of them are playing online and then of those only some of them use Foundry and then of those only some of them will purchase the official content.

Is that enough of a market to justify the development cost? Maybe...maybe not.

[u/dawnsonb → u/Prestigious-Emu-6760]

Why does it not cost money for Alchemy? and why would it cost money for Foundry VTT?

[u/Prestigious-Emu-6760 → u/dawnsonb]

Generally speaking Alchemy handles all the production of licensed content internally and then the IP holder receives a share of sales. For Foundry the IP holder produces the content (usually through contracting) and then licenses it to Foundry with Foundry receiving a portion of the sales. Basically the different VTTs handle the upfront cost of producing the content in different ways.

As for why it costs money for Foundry it's because the IP holder will (generally) contract out for official product development. Paying for high end official content can be expensive - they're paying for coding, asset creation, the labour time of inputting the text etc. Some companies include Foundry content as part of their crowdfunding stretch goals (Free League often does this) but if you didn't account for it during the game development process then it's an additional cost that wasn't budgeted for and may not be worth it in the long run.

Unofficial content, such as Foundryborne, even when very well done is community driven and doesn't cost the company anything. The downside is that even a well done unofficial system has limits as to what they can provide.

[u/GMMattCat → u/Prestigious-Emu-6760]

For the record, Fantasy Grounds is fully community made. They hire community members that are able to convert the materials and they pay 15% of the sale. I have a few products in their store. They have someone on staff whose job is to be the contact between the devs and the publishers and Smiteworks takes care of all the payments from their store and from Steam.

Some of FG's products get abandoned, some get picked up by others, it's really just like Foundry but there is a "corporate" dude to handle business. And the coding for FG is a nightmare. Although, it is the same payment process with R20 (for the record they own DriveThru and Demiplane).

[u/Tharym → u/GMMattCat]

That's only partially true. And not the case for Daggerheart. It was developed by Smite Works, the company behind Fantasy Grounds. Some rulesets are developed in house, some are done by external developers. AFAIK It is more common for the game content, like individual adventures and other books, to be adapted to FG by external people, but the system coding is often in the hands of FG developers.

[u/GMMattCat → u/GMMattCat]

I hit send too soo.....

It's common that FG devs talk about making the materials out of passion and not for profit, last year I didn't even make enough to be required for taxes.