A local-first virtual tabletop. The GM drives a private panel; players see a clean battlemap with fog, dynamic light, line-of-sight, and a shared initiative tracker, cast to a second screen. It runs entirely in the browser with no build step, no dependencies, and no account — serve the folder and go, fully offline.
▶ Try it live at vtt.worhl.net — a public sandbox, no install and no account. Drop a map and play; export anything you want to keep.
Two things are optional add-ons, not requirements: vwag-table is designed to drive a physical touch table with an infrared frame (but works fine with any display and a mouse), and it can connect to a backend for online play with remote players (see Online play below). Neither is needed for local, in-person use.
GM panel on the left with the initiative tracker; the player display on the right shows the cast map, the live turn order, and a named "Fireball" area of effect.
Demo map: "Stone Ring Camp," an original asset made with zsky.ai. Fog, tokens, dynamic light, and a named area of effect added in vwag-table.
Serve the folder over HTTP (not file://, so the player window and clipboard behave) and open http://localhost:8000 for the GM view:
python3 -m http.server 8000
Or just try the hosted sandbox at vtt.worhl.net — no install, no account. Load a map image, click Open player display, and move that window to your second screen or the touch table; the player view is also reachable directly at ?view=player. A full walk-through guide covers every tool, and a Help link in the toolbar opens it any time. Drive the players' framing from the GM panel — follow the GM view, fit the map to their screen, set the zoom, or drag the red player frame to pan exactly what the table shows, without leaving your current tool. The two windows stay in sync over BroadcastChannel with no server involved. Use Save map and My maps for the local library, and Export / Import in the GM panel to back the whole library up to a file.
- Cast with fog of war — reveal the map to players from a private GM panel; players never see your notes, controls, or unrevealed areas. The GM sees fog as an adjustable tint; players see solid black. Trace polygon areas and name them with a GM-only label, drag-draw quick rooms (rectangle, square, circle, ellipse, triangle), paint with a brush, fill with the bucket, or clear with the eraser. Tokens and images under unrevealed fog stay hidden.
- Player framing — a frame on the GM screen (color and opacity adjustable) shows exactly what the players currently see. Follow the GM view, fit the map to the player screen, set the zoom, or grab the frame and drag it to pan the player display / TV — handy when you're steering a flat table from across the room.
- Dynamic vision and light — line-of-sight raycasting with a spatial-grid cull, light coverage, and darkness. Place wall and obstacle geometry in Draw mode and drop light sources; player tokens are clipped to what's actually visible from where they stand. Line-of-sight is toggleable per session.
- Online play (optional) — beyond the same-room second screen, vwag-table can host a game for remote players over the internet. This needs a relay backend, which is not part of this repo. You have two paths: run your own WebSocket relay that implements the join/redeem and sync protocol, or connect to the VWAG backend by creating an account and logging in. (VWAG is the maintainer's own hosted instance, built for the Victen Worhl Adventure Game; it is separate from this open-source client.) Once connected, the GM mints a join code, a player redeems it on a landing page, and watches the table live — and can drag their own token — with each device fitting the GM's broadcast region to its own screen, letterboxed to its aspect.
- Multi-floor maps — build multi-level locations; each floor has its own map, fog, tokens, and stairs. The GM view and the players' table can track different floors independently, so you can prep one floor while players see another. Tokens traverse stairs between floors, individually or as a marquee-selected group.
- Tokens — drop, drag, label, color, and size tokens, or give them a custom image. Type rings distinguish players, NPCs, and monsters; tokens carry on-token HP and status/condition markers and have an edit panel. They snap to the grid and appear on both displays. Bulk-add by selecting multiple image files — each becomes a reusable token in your palette. On the player display, movement is touch-driven and synced GM-authoritative: the GM clamps and rebroadcasts every move.
- Step arrows — select a token and eight pop-out arrows ring it for one-cell steps in any direction, diagonals included — wall-aware, with a live distance readout. Works on the GM view and for a single selected player token, keyboard- and wheel-free for finger control on the touch table.
- Initiative — a turn-order tracker with initiative and HP, linked to the board tokens: the active combatant is highlighted on the board on both the GM and player views. Advance turns and rounds, and import the party roster in one step. A compact order overlay can ride in the corner of the GM screen and/or the player display independently — it stays put when the docked panel is closed and has its own turn arrows, so you can advance the round without reopening the panel.
- Area of effect — drop a persistent zone (circle, square, or cone) in any color and size, name it through a modal, and it commits and mirrors to the player display in real time with its label. Select any placed zone to edit it — rename, recolor, resize, and re-aim a cone (with a direction slider or the mouse wheel); every change mirrors to the players live.
- Map images — add an image to the board (drag a file onto the map, or use Add image in View), then move, resize, and rotate it with on-canvas handles and optionally snap it to the grid. Toggle per-image whether players can see it — hidden from players by default.
- Import prebuilt maps — bring in a DungeonDraft
.dttmodule or a Universal VTT file (.uvtt/.dd2vtt/.df2vtt— the interchange format exported by DungeonDraft, Dungeon Alchemist, Dungeon Fog, Mapforge, and others) and the map arrives with its grid auto-calibrated and its walls, doors, and lights already placed, so line-of-sight and dynamic light work immediately. Roll20 and Owlbear Rodeo maps are supported via their Universal VTT export. - Notes — a slide-out notes drawer lists every note on the current floor with a search box, a show/hide checkbox per note, and show-all / hide-all buttons (drop pins off the map without deleting them). Each note has a short label drawn on the map pin plus a rich-text body — bold, italics, lists, links — edited in the drawer; click a note to jump the view straight to it. Notes are GM-only and never appear on the player display.
- PDF resources — open reference PDFs (rules, handouts, stat blocks) in floating windows alongside the board, kept on the GM side.
- Grid, measure, and calibration — toggle and adjust the grid (size, offset, color, opacity, snapping). Calibrate by dragging a square over one cell: that sets the cell size, aligns the overlay to the map's own printed grid, and sets the ruler scale all at once. Measure reports distance in cells and your choice of feet or meters, using the 5e alternating-diagonal rule.
- Rotation — rotate the GM map in 90° steps (fog, tokens, and stairs ride along, and the player follows), or rotate just the player display so it reads right-side up from across a flat table.
- Map-links and travel — drop links between maps to move from a world map into a region, a region into a town, or a town into a building. The GM authors the links; players can follow them too — when a player takes a link, the whole party descends together to the linked map.
- Splash / blackout — show a splash image or a plain black screen on the player display instead of the map.
- Map library and checkpoints — save full setups (image, grid, fog, tokens, floors, views, and scale calibration) to a local IndexedDB library. With a backend connected, publish a map and its live game state and resume it later from any machine, so another table can pull the map or you can pick a session back up where you left off.
- Ping, undo / redo, and fit-to-screen.
Ports in flight from Lodestar, the upstream this client forked from — several tuned for the touch table:
- Music & ambient sound — a built-in ambient/audio player for table atmosphere.
vmove ·ttokens ·aarea of effect ·mmeasure ·sstairs ·dwalls (line-of-sight) ·llight ·gmap-linksppolygon fog ·nnamed fog area ·bbrush ·eeraser ·[/]brush sizeffit map ·Ctrl+Zundo · arrow keys move a selected token (or pan when none is selected)Alt+clickto ping · right-click a token, zone, or stair to remove it
Saved maps live in your browser's own IndexedDB on your machine. For local and in-person play nothing is uploaded — the image, fog, tokens, floors, grid, view, and scale calibration all stay on your computer. Because that storage is tied to a specific browser, device, and site address, a library only shows up when you reload from the same place you saved it: maps saved on one origin won't appear on a downloaded copy of the client (a different address), in another browser, on another device, or in a private/incognito window, and clearing site data erases the library. A downloaded copy ships only the program files, never your maps, so each machine keeps its own separate library that never syncs on its own.
The public sandbox at vtt.worhl.net is the same local-IndexedDB story, with one caveat: it's a shared demo origin with no login, so the online tier and its server-side session save are unavailable there. Treat anything you make on the sandbox as throwaway and Export what you want to keep.
For anything you want to keep or move between machines, use Export in the GM panel to write your whole library to a single JSON file you control, then Import it wherever you need it. That exported file is the only copy that doesn't depend on a browser setting, so it's the safe way to back up your maps or carry them from one computer to another.
The one exception to "nothing leaves your computer" is deliberate: with a backend connected (your own relay or a VWAG login), you can publish a map and its live game state to the server and resume it later from any machine — so another table can pull the map, or you can pick a session back up where you left off. That's the only path where your data is stored off-device, and only when you choose to publish.
vwag-table began as a fork of Lodestar by UnclePlants, used under the MIT License, and has since diverged into its own program aimed at a physical IR touch table, an online tier for remote players, and the VWAG backend. It is no longer mergeable with upstream; upstream improvements are ported selectively, by hand, with UnclePlants' blessing.
Original authorship is retained and credited: the upstream LICENSE is preserved, and third-party icon attributions, demo artwork, and community thanks remain in CREDITS.md.
MIT — see LICENSE. Bundled icons and demo artwork retain their original licenses; see CREDITS.md.