World & Campaign Builder

World & Campaign Builder is designed to streamline every part of your TTRPG prep and gameplay—from deep worldbuilding to session planning and live play tracking. Whether you're building a sprawling lore-rich universe or following the Lazy DM approach to lightweight prep, this tool lets you create interconnected characters, locations, organizations, and events with ease, all inside Foundry. It’s fast enough to use in real time during a session, and flexible enough to evolve as your world grows. Optional AI-assisted content and image generation offer powerful creative boosts, but the module is fully usable without them.

Important notes

This module is VERY early in development.

It's really a beta. That said, I'm actively working to improve it, and would LOVE if other people think such a thing would be useful to have you try it out and provide feedback on how to improve it - both functionality and usability. To be clear, it's pretty stable. You're highly unlikely to suffer data loss of the world data you put in. You may end up in a state where we'll need to manually fix something to give you access to that data again. I have only had one bug recently (last month or so of development) that caused the latter issue, and it's been fixed. So, I don't say this to scare you, but if you want to use this for a live campaign:

1. Backup often

2. Just know what you're signing up for

   Let me know if you have any trouble or suggestions/requests.

A note on AI and "Advanced Features"

You'll see lots of references to AI capabilities in the instructions and feature lists. There is no AI-generated content (or any other content) provided by the module (other than foreign language translations of UI elements). It merely has the capability to use AI to generate various things if you desire.

The module is fully functional and useful without any use of AI, and by default there are no AI features/functions enabled. You'll never know it's there.

That said, here's the scoop on what you'll need to do if you do want to access the AI features:

• The first advanced features require you to setup a backend server. Which features fall in this category are noted below, but basically it comes down to the AI features. This approach of using a backend has the advantages of:
  • You don't need to store sensitive credentials (i.e. OpenAI tokens) in Foundry (which would then be visible by whoever is hosting the session), and
  • Activities that take some time (particularly image generation) can be done much more effectively
  • Future-proof for more complex features in the future
• Setting up these features is not particularly complicated, but does require:
  • Some basic comfort with running command-line scripts
  • Account creation (currently Google Cloud, OpenAPI, and Replicate.com). The backend is designed to stay within the Google Cloud free tier (assuming you're not running anything else) and the OpenAPI/Replicate costs are minimal (ex. you can create ~5000 AI-generated character descriptions for $0.15 and image generation is about $0.01), but all 3 services will require you to provide a credit card.
  • Full details on the setup are here: https://github.com/dovrosenberg/fvtt-fcb-backend

User Documentation

Convinced already? Head over to the User Documentation for instructions on how to use the module.

Description

The goal of this package is to facilitate creating, planning, and running campaigns in Foundry. It combines the world-building and lore creation of tools like WorldAnvil, Kanka, Fantasia Archive, LegendKeeper, etc. with a framework for organizing your campaigns and sessions (built off of the Lazy DM approach, but able to use used with any style of prep)

You may find this better than the commercial world builders for a few reasons, even though many of those platforms have integration solutions with Foundry:

• It's free (without ads)
• It supports low-cost AI generation of descriptions and images (that works surprisingly well)
• It may be easier than managing the integration
• Most importantly, you can continue to build out lore as you play.

You can use the module just to plan/run sessions or just to do world building. But it will be most useful when used in combination, because it's designed to be easy to pull defined elements from the world into your planning, as well as to easily add to the world during and after sessions.

While I'm seeking to make this module strong enough that it's a reasonable substitute for the primary commercial solutions, it will likely always be missing features that those provide. Instead, the advantage of FVTT Campaign Builder is that it is easy/fast enough to use that you can refer to it in real-time while running an adventure, while still also quickly adding notes to supplement your world encyclopedia later.

I plan to use the module to support a live game where only combat is being done in Foundry. I hope to make the tool useful enough that DM's could use it on a laptop even in a game that isn't using Foundry for play at all.

Play style notes

The campaign planning component is modeled after The Lazy Dungeon Master, which I highly recommend. There is a freely available copy of the original book and I also recommend the newer Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master (though you have to buy that version).

Current features

Feature requests?

• Create characters, locations, organizations, and events with detailed descriptions and images
• Easily see (and click through) the relationships between them
• Create geographical hierarchies (world-continents-countries-regions-towns-etc.)
• Create organizational hierarchies (ex. for religions, governing bodies, large families, criminal organizations, companies, etc.)
• Define your world's species for assigning to characters (and using for AI prompts)
• Directory view of all of your world entries
• Powerful search based on names, descriptions, relationships, tags, etc.
• AI-driven generation of characters, locations, and organizations (descriptions and images) - it's hard to overstate how well the image generation in particular works... you need to try it to believe it
• Maintain connections to relevant Foundry documents (ex. Scenes and Actors) for quick reference
• Quick links to AI-refreshed RollTables for creating NPC, town, store, and tavern names
• Easily plan your play sessions (in Lazy DM style) and track what happens to blend it back into your world
• Lots more - see more details below and in the user documentation

How it works

The module is designed to support the full cycle preparation and playing your game. The general flow of using the module to prep and play games is:

1. (Optional) Build your world. If your preferred approach is to build every little detail out ahead of time, you can do that.

2. Prep for a session. Go through the full Lazy DM method and prepare for your session. Use AI to flesh out your characters, locations, etc. (and even create images) or do it all yourself.

3. Play your game. Reference your prep, create new PCs, locations, etc. on the fly (including AI generation) and record important details of things that were improv-ed during the session.

4. Record the results. Capture the things that did (or didn't) happen - fleshing out the world for easy reference in the future and giving you a head-start on the next session prep.

Build the world

• Create characters, locations, organizations, and events
• Easily see (and click through) the relationships between them
• Locations and organizations exist in hierarchies
• [Advanced -- see below] Use AI to generate detailed descriptions and images
  • The image generation in particular works best with detailed descriptions of the entry you're trying to create an image for. The AI will take into account the campaign genre and world feeling, the hierarchy (i.e. it understands if a city falls inside the broader context of a country it knows about), and your definitions of your species (for characters). The more details it has, the better it works.
• (Future) make specific entries (and parts of entries) available to players for a common lore understanding you don't have to maintain separately.

Prep for a session - layout the key elements for the upcoming session

• PCs - maintain your list of PCs and associated info - back stories, goals, links to character sheets
• "Strong start" - outline the action
• Vignettes - keep a list of potential scenes (see note below on why they're called Vignettes)
• Define Lore (what Lazy DM calls "secrets and clues") - flesh out headlines and link to journal entries for more detail/images/handouts
• Locations - keep a list of locations built in the world that you might use during the session, giving you one-click access to the description, image, association to other world entries, along with links to Foundry Actors and Scenes
• NPCs - like locations, keep an easy list of the character world entries (including links to Actors) that might come up
• Monsters - create a list of the monsters likely to be around with easy links to the actors
• Magic items - a list of Foundry Items that might come up

Play the game

• Keep notes of what's happening while bringing in the elements you've defined
• Scenes, lore, locations, etc. - with a single click you can mark off that they came up in the session for easy reference later
• Locations and NPCs
  • Quickly bring up the full world-building details of your fantastic locations - use the hierarchy (quick - what's the name of that store they came to in this town last time?) and related items (what was the Mayor's sister's name?) to have easy access to the mostly likely topics to come up in that location
  • 1-click access to activate relevant Foundry Scenes and Actors to drag in
• Monsters - drag into the scene from your pre-assembled list
• Magic items - open them, grant players, access, etc.from your pre-assembled list
• [Advanced] Instantly generate names for NPCs, towns, shops, and taverns. This uses RollTables that are populated by AI in the background. With another click you can add them to your world for future reference (or AI generate a full description for them before adding).

Record the results

• Go through vignettes, lore and see which were used; delete or move unused ones to the next session with a click
• Add any new locations, NPCs, etc. to the world - you can do this while playing but it may be easier to just take quick notes and do it afterwards
• Add anything that's top of mind to the next session to get started for next time

Note on characters, actors, and PCs

• Characters (in worlds) can be PCs if you'd like, but they're really intended primarily to represent all the NPCs.
  • Characters can be tied to multiple Actors (ex. if you want to represent a young version and an old version or track the human form of a werewolf separately from the wolf form, etc.) though typically it would be 1:1
• PCs (in campaigns) represent the PCs (and to a lesser extent, the players). They are not tied to world Characters, because I didn't see much value in doing so. The PCs are where you track storylines, related NPCs and organizations, etc. This makes them easier to find and review when preparing and running the game.
  • PCs are explicitly tied to a single Actor

Note on locations, vignettes and scenes

• Locations are places (in worlds) that represent a country, a city, a building (or a room in building), etc. They can be tied to Foundry scenes - and more than one, in case you want to use them for different parts of the location or different times (pre/post a fire, for ex. or night vs day)
• Locations can be added to sessions and then with a click you can get the lore you've built in the world around that location, as well as 1-click access to activate any of the related scenes
• Campaign vignettes what the Lazy DM calls scenes. The are short descriptions of a scene that could happen during a session. I renamed them to vignettes to avoid confusion with Foundry scenes.

Issues?

If you believe you found a bug or would like to post a feature request, head over to the module's Github repo and open a new issue.

Languages

French and German currently supported. Let me know if you want others. PRs also welcome for either new languages or fixes to bad translations in the current ones.

Support

I'm happy to do this for free, as I primarily work on things I like to use myself. But if you'd like to buy me a root beer, I love knowing that people are using my projects and like them enough to make the effort. It's really appreciated!

Copyright and usage

THIS ENTIRE REPOSITORY IS COVERED BY THIS LICENSE AND COPYRIGHT NOTICE

Copyright 2025 Dov Rosenberg

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.