Version 2.4.0 Released
note this post originally appeared on Patreon
Version 2.4.0 is now out.
New in this version is support for the new content Paizo released late September/early October:
- Standalone Adventure Night of the Gray Death
- Adventure Path module Strength of Thousands #3: Hurricane's Howl
- Adventure Path module Strength of Thousands #4: Secrets of the Temple-City
- Pathfinder Society Season 3-02 - East Hill Haunting
- Pathfinder Society Season 3-03 - Echoes of Desperation
- Bounty #11 - Forged Facade
- Bounty #12 - Somewhere Below
- Bounty #13 - The Blackwood Abundance
- Bounty #14 - The Blackwood Truce
- One-Shot - Head-Shot the Rot
Additionally, this release has several minor bugs that were logged in the bug tracker, and added linking to actors within journals (for the newly released adventures at least) so you can now drag & drop the actors from the journal to your scene directly from the journal notes in the scene.
I know this might be a little bit controvesial, but this releases add optional telemetry for usage statistics. Whenever you import an adventure and consent to sending telemetry data, it will send data to my server that contains which adventure was imported and a censored copy of the name/email in the watermark to help identify when the same person imports the same PDF multiple times. For example, when I imported Bounty #13 testing this out, this is what was received by my telemetry logger:
36701845 "K**** H******" "p***o@b**************t" "Bounty #13 - The Blackwood Abundance"
Finally, I'd like to use this space at the end as a soapbox and maybe storytime. This project was started over a year ago as a passion project. I felt that the Foundry VTT was a much better experience than any other virtual tabletop that I've used and specifically the PF2e system was much farther ahead (and it continues to get better even now). At the time, the Foundry VTT marketplace wasn't very populated and at the very least Paizo was not selling any content.
In the meantime, I wanted to prepare some adventures that I had purchased to run within FoundryVTT. Copy/pasting text from the PDF into journals was very frustrating and took a while. Extracting the maps by taking screenshots and trying to line the grids up wasn't the best solution and very error-prone (it's a lot easier now). Drawing walls on the scenes was time-consuming. More importantly, everyone that used Foundry VTT and wanted to play that scenario had to do the same tedious work. I decided to make PDF to Foundry in the meantime until Paizo started selling their content for Foundry VTT users.
I can enter data about which images are maps and what dimension and grid information and calculate it one time and everyone that uses this tool won't have to do that step again. The module can detect the formatting of the PDF and fix the weird formatting that PDFs have when you copy/paste from them. Additionally, I can draw the walls and share that with everyone. If I spend 4 hours adding support for an adventure and it saves the average person 2 hours to prepare that adventure then I have saved humanity time as long as more than 2 people use the module. And it's even possible that I can prepare it within PDF to Foundry faster than the average user because of the tools I've built up for this task. The Dinner at Lionlodge one-shot was released without my advance knowledge during a convention and played by the lovely people at Glass Cannon Podcast, and I was able to finish preparing it for PDF to Foundry and get a release out before they finished playing the adventure.
Now that being said, I'm just a volunteer. I am not affiliated with Paizo or Foundry VTT. I don't gain financially from either party. I really enjoy PF2e and want Paizo to succeed and continue making content and the same can be said for Foundry VTT. I'm just doing this for fun, and for you. I said when I made this Patreon that the money would be solely used to offset the money I spend on buying content to input into PDF to Foundry and that continues to be my intent.
Because my tool is basically just a very smart importing tool, I'm limited in what I can do. The output of my tool is never going to be as good as a world that is hand build and redistributed. It will never be as convenient as purchasing and downloading from a marketplace. The existence of this Patreon shows that there is a significant demand for people to spend money for Pathfinder 2E content for use in Foundry VTT.
I am just saddened that there are people within Paizo that think that my tool harms Paizo financially. I'm saddened that people within other virtual tabletops have implied that I am unethical for having this Patreon. If anything, I believe I have personally made Paizo thousands of dollars. 100% of the money from PDFs that were purchased for use with this module goes directly to Paizo. I don't take a cut and Foundry VTT doesn't take a cut (the government and the banks take their cut though). And many people have indicated that they have purchased a PDF purely for Foundry VTT, whether they had the PDF in another language (which my tool doesn't support) or they only had a hard copy that they purchased at their FLGS, they spent more money to acquire it.
And I believe the existence of my tool also prevents piracy. I know that on another virtual tabletop, world for PFS scenarios are freely shared between GMs because of how much work it is to set up, and nobody ever actually checks that the person receiving actually owns the scenario. With my tool, people don't share worlds, they say "Install PDF to Foundry and import your PDF". And my tool does its best to prevent piracy as it checks that there is a watermark and is heavily obfuscated. I would love to be able to verify that the PDF was purchased from the user's Paizo account, but unfortunately that access is not available to me.
Anyways, this is just a long winded way of saying that Paizo really ought to sell their content on the Foundry VTT marketplace. And that's why I added telemetry, to gather some amount of data.
Finally I want to make a reminder to please not harass people. As a huge hypothetical example, I would be happy if a particular GM that is popular on YouTube/Twitch started playing Pathfinder 2e because I think they would enjoy it based on my interpretation of their content. That doesn't mean that they should or ought to. And if DEFINITELY doesn't mean that I should tell them to because that's just back-seating someone's life. So please don't.
P.S. I only got to skim a bit of it while inputting them, but Night of the Gray dead looks like fun, and Head-Shot the Rot looks like a LOT of fun.