Included here are some screenshots of what joining the campaign basically looks like in Fantasy Grounds when the campaign is running. Fantasy Grounds is continually being updated and can be customized to some extent so may look a little different for you. Some of the steps below can be completed whether I’m running the game live or not while many of the steps will only work if I’m running the game live.
Starting the Updater
First you will download a client updater. When you start it, it will go out to fantasy grounds and start downloading the actual game client for you. You should see a status bar as it goes and gets updates and brings everything up to date. When done, click on the launch Fantasy Grounds button in the lower right corner.
Verifying You See Games to Join
This should start the game client and bring you to a screen that looks like this.
At this point click on the “Join Campaign” button on the left hand side about middle of the page on the left. When you click on “Join Campaign” it should pull up a window that looks like the one below.
Note that for most of you, this is as far as I need you to go the first time you download Fantasy Grounds. If you can get this far and can see a list of games you can join, that’s step one!
Joining The Cheesemonger’s Fair Campaign
To continue on further, I as the game master will need to be actually running my Campaign on my machine. When I’m running it on my machine you should be able to find it on the list of games to join seen below.
There is a Join Room by GM name field where you can type in “Truthster013” and search for me or you can just scroll through the list till you see the Campaign as shown below. Note the GM “Truthster013” is on the left side of the highlighted line and the name “The Cheesemonger’s Fair” is on the right. This will only show up if I’m actually running the game live on my computer at the time. If you don’t see it, I’m probably not running it.
When you click to join (double click or highlight the line and click “join”) you likely will get some red text letting you know the GM has set a password on the game. Here you will enter our secret password which I will give you via text. It will be a really tough one to remember too (kidding).
Once you’ve entered the password you should get a screen like the one below where it’s loading the campaign assets into your machine. This might take a little bit (a couple minutes).
When the assets are loaded you may get a generic Fantasy Grounds desktop screen like this. It should have buttons and windows loaded but two times Rhonda tried it and gave up waiting after a while and clicked on a screen which brought up the next screen shot after this showing the buttons. I’m not sure if it’s coincidence that she gave up just as it was loading already or if you have to click again to get it to show.
Eventually, either due to being patient and waiting for it to load or by clicking on the desktop you should get something like this. Buttons will appear on the right hand side, some pop ups in the middle and a chat window on the left with some information.
You can lick on the red “x” in the upper right corner of the “Campaign Setup’ menu to make it go away leaving you looking at the “Character Selection” screen seen here.
All of your characters should be loaded and you can open your own or any other players character to view it. Take a look at it and see how it’s laid out. We’ll cover this more when we first log in for a intro to Fantasy Grounds.