My D&D group needed a virtual tabletop. I could have paid for a hosted service and been done with it in five minutes. Instead I spent a weekend setting up Foundry VTT on a Raspberry Pi sitting in my living room. It works better than it has any right to.
// what it is
Foundry VTT is a self-hosted virtual tabletop application — think dynamic maps, fog of war, dice rolling, and all the bells and whistles, running entirely on hardware you control. The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card-sized computer that costs around $80 and sips power like it's on a diet.
Together, they make a surprisingly capable D&D server that runs 24/7 for pennies a month in electricity.
// how it works
The setup uses two main tools:
- felddy/foundryvtt-docker — a Docker image that handles the Foundry installation cleanly
- Cloudflare Tunnel — creates a secure outbound connection from the Pi to Cloudflare, so the server is accessible from anywhere without opening ports on my router
// what I learned
// result
The server has been running since [date]. My group plays every [frequency] and it has never gone down mid-session. The Pi handles it without breaking a sweat, and my players don't even know it's running off a computer the size of a deck of cards.
You can reach the server at dnd.archwyllt.ca — though you'll need an invite to get in.