Fantasy Grounds Is Now Free: How to Use It as an Offline D&D Campaign Manager

Somewhere in your house there is a notebook with a name in it. A good name. The name of the innkeeper your players adored eleven sessions ago, the one they keep asking about. You wrote it down like a responsible adult. You just have no idea which notebook, which page, or whether you spelled it the same way twice.

That is the entire problem with campaign management, and it has almost nothing to do with writing things down. It's about finding them again, mid-game, pressured, while five people stare at you.

I want to show you the tool that fixed it for me. It's a virtual tabletop called Fantasy Grounds, and as of November 2025 the core software is completely free. No license fee, no subscription, no demo version with the good parts greyed out.

The part that surprises people: I'm not suggesting you use it as a virtual tabletop at all. We play in person, around a table, with real dice. Fantasy Grounds sits on my laptop as a downloaded piece of software and does one job, which is remembering everything so I don't have to.

Why don't the usual campaign managers work?

Because general note apps don't know what a stat block is. OneNote, Obsidian, Notion and Google Docs are all free or close to it, all genuinely powerful, and all of them hand you a blank canvas and a homework assignment. Fantasy Grounds already knows what a monster, a spell and an initiative order are, so there is nothing to design.

That homework assignment is the real cost. You have to invent your own structure, then tweak that structure for the next six months as the campaign shows you everything you got wrong. I've watched DMs spend more time designing their Obsidian vault than designing their dungeon. The vault is beautiful. The dungeon is three rooms and a shrug.

The other option, and the honest one, is paper. I still use a lot of paper. Writing a scene out by hand is deeply satisfying in a way that typing never is, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But paper has exactly one failure mode and it's a bad one: finding the old thing. Names, numbers, that debt the party owes to a merchant house, the promise they made to a dying NPC in session four. It's all in there somewhere, and "somewhere" is useless when the table is waiting.

Here's how the options stack up.

Option	Cost	What you get	Best for
Paper notes	~$5 for a notebook	Satisfying, portable, no learning curve	Prep and inspiration, not live reference
General note apps (OneNote, Obsidian, Notion, Google Docs)	$0	Endless flexibility, good search	DMs who enjoy building their own system (#nerdalert)
Fantasy Grounds (online or offline)	$0	Purpose-built for the game: linked notes, editable stat blocks, combat tracker	Running the game and prepping it in the same place

Download it at fantasygrounds.com. The 5e Basic, 5.1 and 5.2 SRD rulesets come free with the software.

Feature one: a combat tracker that runs the fight for you

This is the thing that moved me off Roll20 years ago, and it's still the reason I open the software every session. You set your players up once as placeholders, drag the monsters in, and the tracker handles initiative, hit points, attacks and conditions without you looking anything up.

Set up your player characters once as placeholders. Mine are literally labelled "proxy" because the players are sitting right there rolling their own dice. All the tracker needs from a PC is a name and a slot. When someone rolls initiative at the table, you type the number in. That's the whole PC workflow.

Then the monsters arrive. Say the party stumbles into three orcs. You drag the orcs in and the software immediately does several things you didn't ask for and will be grateful for:

It rolls their initiative separately. Not one shared orc turn, three individual ones, which is how you get combat that feels chaotic instead of scheduled.
It rolls their hit points individually. Same reason. One orc is a pushover and one refuses to die, and no one knows which in advance.
It can roll their attacks with all appropriate pluses and conditions applied automatically. Read that again. It means you don't have to look anything up in the books.
It numbers them, and you can rename them on the spot.

That last one is where I do my favourite trick. When a player character hits an attack, I ask them one question: what makes this orc distinctive? Now Orc 1 is the blue-eyed one, Orc 2 is the one wearing a stolen hat, and Orc 3 has a "4" tattooed on her forehead. Nobody at the table ever says "I attack the second orc" again. They say "I'm going for the one with the hat," and the fight has characters in it instead of entries.

Everything you need is one click away in the tracker itself. Click the orc's Offense icon and you get its weapons, its damage, its traits. Forgot what Aggressive actually does? Click the trait and the rule text opens. Want the full stat block? Click the name. You are not flipping through a book while four people wait, because the book is inside the initiative order.

And it's all editable live. Decide that the blue-eyed orc is the pack leader and bump his Strength to 17. The tracker adjusts his attack and damage on the spot. He hits for a 25 against your second-level party, and because the attack roll was a natural 20 the software doubles the greataxe damage automatically. Somebody is going to need a new character sheet. That's not the software's fault, but it did the math instantly, which is more than I can say for me at 10pm.

Spellcasters work the same way. Drop in a priest, click Offense, and there's her full spell list with slots per level laid out. Decide mid-prep that she should actually be a serious threat and you can raise her hit points, raise her armour class, or just make her a twentieth-level version of herself and drag in some more spells from the spell list. Tuning an encounter takes about fifteen seconds and doesn't require you to recalculate anything by hand.

Feature two: NPCs you build once and keep forever

Recurring villains normally die in the prep stage, because a custom stat block means a spreadsheet and a spreadsheet means it never happens. Fantasy Grounds skips that entirely: drag an existing monster onto itself and you get an editable copy to mutilate, while the original stays untouched in the library.

Here's the move that changed how I run recurring villains. You want somebody who shows up throughout the campaign, gets away, comes back stronger, and becomes genuinely personal to the party.

So the bandit captain becomes Tina the Fey. I swap the portrait, note that she's half-elven, and give her two first-level spells that fit her: charm person and disguise self. Ten seconds of work, and suddenly she isn't a bandit captain. She's a sneaky con artist who fights like a bandit captain and might charm your biggest fighter, which is a completely different NPC in play.

Every fight she survives, she gets a little more. A spell slot here, a few hit points there, an item she stole from the party. Any notes you attach to her stay attached to her. Your campaign notes stop being a description of a villain sitting in a document somewhere and become the villain herself, loaded and ready in the tracker.

That's the real win, and it's worth saying plainly: your prep turns directly into playable material instead of into reference material you then have to translate at the table.

Feature three: stealing adventures properly

Free adventure modules arrive as complete packages, not PDFs. Between Steam and DMsGuild there are roughly 35 free modules, and every piece of one — story text, maps, NPCs — is draggable, copyable and editable inside your own campaign.

I grabbed an Adventurers League module called Shackles of Blood. It arrives as a proper package: the story text, the maps, and the "personalities," which is what they call the NPCs.

See a story entry you like? Drag to copy, then rewrite it in your own words. See an opening scene that's a bit heavy-handed, the kind where your boss informs you that you are contractually obligated to adventure? Copy it, delete the parts you hate, and replace it with something your table will actually believe.

One habit I'd recommend from the start: put the year and month in the title of every note you create. It takes two seconds and makes everything searchable later, so you're opening the right version of the opening scene instead of the one you abandoned in March.

The published adventure isn't a script you follow. It's a parts bin. The maps are yours, the NPCs are yours, the encounters are yours, and everything you don't like gets deleted without guilt.

The stuff I didn't get to on camera

The maps take pins, so you can attach a note to a specific room and click it during play instead of scrolling a document.

The note system is effectively unlimited, and it's split into notes, stories, and calendar entries. That last one sounds like a small thing until you realize you can date events in the campaign world and have them arrive on schedule.

There's also a store and a companion website, plus a browser-based reader for anything you own.

The honest catch

Two of them, actually, and this is where I try not to sell you anything.

There is a learning curve, and it's real. Fantasy Grounds has a reputation for being clunky, and when you're using the full online virtual tabletop, that reputation is earned. Using it purely as an offline campaign manager cuts out most of the complexity, because you're skipping the parts that fight you.

Its notes aren't perfect. I use Fantasy Grounds for prep and for running the game, but for ongoing campaign history I use a different system, for reasons I'll get into in the note system video. I'd rather tell you that now than have you discover the limitation in month four.

Which one should you actually use?

If you play in person and want one tool for prep and play, download Fantasy Grounds and use it offline. That's my setup.
If you already have a note system you love and it works mid-game, keep it. Add Fantasy Grounds just for the combat tracker if fights are your slow point.
If you play online, Fantasy Grounds now does both jobs for $0, and the learning curve is worth it if you run a lot of combat.
If your prep happens on a bus, on your phone, in five-minute chunks, stay with a note app. Fantasy Grounds is desktop software and it wants a desk.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Fantasy Grounds really free?

Yes. As of November 2025 the core Fantasy Grounds software is free to download and use. There's no licence fee, no subscription, and no demo restrictions greying out features. The 5e Basic, 5.1 and 5.2 SRD rulesets are included at no cost. There is a store for paid content, but nothing in this article requires it.

Can you use Fantasy Grounds offline?

Yes. It's desktop software that runs locally, so you don't need a connection to open a campaign, edit notes, or run the combat tracker. That's exactly how I use it: the laptop sits on the table at an in-person game and never connects to anything.

Is Fantasy Grounds worth it if you play in person?

That's the main argument of this article. Used offline it's a campaign manager that already understands stat blocks, spell lists and initiative order, so your prep becomes playable material instead of reference material you have to translate mid-session. The combat tracker alone justifies it if fights are where your game slows down.

Fantasy Grounds or Obsidian for D&D notes?

They solve different problems. Obsidian, Notion and OneNote give you a blank canvas and excellent search, but you have to design your own structure and maintain it. Fantasy Grounds comes pre-shaped for the game and turns notes into things you can actually run. If you already have a note system that works mid-game, keep it and add Fantasy Grounds just for combat.

What's the catch with Fantasy Grounds?

Two things. The learning curve is real, though using it purely as an offline manager avoids most of the complexity that gives the software its clunky reputation. And its note system isn't perfect — I use something else for long-term campaign history.

The Receipt

Fantasy Grounds core software: $0
5e and A5E rulesets included: $0
Free adventure modules used in this video: $0
This video's total: $0.00
Campaign spend so far: optional $10 (the pay-what-you-want corebooks from video one)

Next up: Buy It, Build It, or Steal One Island

The rules are settled and the campaign manager is running, which leaves the world itself. I'll walk through the three ways to get one — buy a finished setting, generate your own for free, or buy the smallest seed you can find and expand a single island out of it.

Roll high, spend low.

— The Two Dollar DM