Give your story a place. Give your characters a face.
A quiet conversation by the fire. A familiar face with a very unfamiliar expression. The whole party caught in the rain.
Exalted Scenes brings backgrounds, expressive characters, weather, and cinematic scene control into Foundry VTT. Build the place, bring in your cast, and let your players react through their characters as the story unfolds. Use familiar portraits, larger Hero artwork, or a little of both.
I'm Gabú, from Wand & Widgets. I made this for my own games, and it's become one of the modules closest to my heart. I'd love to show you what you can do with it :)
Get Exalted Scenes on Patreon · Watch it in action: 2 minutes
Foundry VTT v13 and v14 · Works across game systems · Premium module
A cast that can react.
Your players can smile, look worried, change their pose, or quietly give the villain a very unimpressed look. You can do the same with your NPCs. A conversation gets another way to come alive.
- Expressions and poses. Give a character different emotions, choose favorites, and change their artwork during play.
- Portraits or Hero Mode. Use framed faces or transparent half-body and full-body artwork. You can mix portraits and Heroes in the same cast.
- Looks for different appearances. Keep outfits, armor, and other visual variants together, with labels and search to find the pose you want.
- A part for your players. Assign characters and decide what each player may change. Their Player Panel keeps their own cast close by.
Start with one portrait. Extra expressions and Hero artwork are optional, and you can add them whenever you're ready.
Your whole scene, in one window.
The Directing Desk puts scenes on the left, characters in the middle, and controls on the right. Pick a place, gather the cast, adjust the presentation, and get back to the conversation.
Preview privately, then press Play. Check a composition on your own screen before sharing it with the table. During play, the compact GM Live Dock, Foundry sidebar, and keyboard shortcuts give you other ways to reach what you need.
Move the story along. Keep your preparation.
When the party leaves the forest path for a nearby clearing, your cast, expressions, and settings come with you. Change the background without rebuilding the whole scene.
And when a place needs something special, save its own cast and settings as a prepared setup. Load that setup from the Scene controls when the moment arrives. You can prepare carefully and still have room to improvise.
Let the weather into the scene.
Rain across the rooftops. Snow around an old shrine. Fog creeping between the characters. Ash drifting through the aftermath.
The Atmosphere controls let you combine effects, adjust their appearance, and place them behind the cast, in front, or in both layers. Save combinations as presets. Each player can choose a lighter quality setting or turn weather off on their own screen.
Frame the conversation your way.
Keep a neat row of portraits, give your Heroes room on the stage, or arrange the cast freely. Move, resize, and mirror characters to find the composition that feels right.
- Portrait framing. Choose circles, rounded squares, squares, or taller portrait frames. Adjust each expression's crop, plus names, colors, and border effects.
- Theater Mode. Prepare different shots with their own visible cast and character positions, then move between them during a conversation.
- Cast Only. Keep character portraits over your current Foundry canvas while the battlemap stays visible.
- Still or moving backgrounds. Use images or video backgrounds, with transitions between scenes.
The face on screen. The token on the map.
Connect a character to a Foundry Actor or assign its exact Scene Token. Hover over the portrait or Hero art and press your Target key, T by default, to target the available token on the current map. Hold Shift to keep your other targets.
Build a library that feels like your campaign.
Bring in your backgrounds and character artwork, import whole folders of expressions, or drag Foundry Actors into your cast. Organize scenes and characters with folders, tags, favorites, and search.
Scenes, sequences, and slideshows. Build a scene with several backgrounds and advance it yourself, or make a slideshow with timing, transitions, shuffle, loop, cinematic bars, and background motion. A journey, a recap, or a few places waiting for the party.
Light and Dark interfaces, resizable windows, and configurable shortcuts help the workspace fit your table. The module includes English, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, and Polish.
And a soundtrack to go with it.
With the optional Narrator Jukebox integration, give a scene music, layered ambience, saved ambience presets, and quick sound effects. Characters can have themes and entrance sounds, and players can request music when permitted.
Decide whether the next scene keeps the current music and ambience or replaces them. The conversation can move to a new place without interrupting the song.
Bring it to your table.
Exalted Scenes is included in the W&W Adventurer and W&W Arcane Circle tiers on Patreon. It works across game systems on Foundry VTT v13 and v14, with no required companion module. Narrator Jukebox adds the audio features, and Monk's Common Display is an optional integration for shared displays.
- Link your eligible Patreon access to your Foundry account.
- In Foundry's Setup screen, open Add-on Modules → Install Module and find Exalted Scenes under Premium Content.
- Enable it in your world, open the Directing Desk, and start with a background and a character.
The pictures and animations on this page come from our recorded demonstrations. Bring your own backgrounds and character art; the campaign artwork shown here is not a bundled asset pack.
If you already use Exalted Scenes, the full 8.0 update post takes a closer look at what changed. If you're meeting it for the first time, I hope you can picture a little of your own game here. And if you have questions, come say hi. <3
Get Exalted Scenes on Patreon · Watch the launch film · Come say hi on Discord