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Welcome to the fantastic-depths wiki!

This is the home of all documentation for fantastic-depths (FaDe), a Foundry Virtual Tabletop game system built to run classic fantasy RPGs. While it was originally written around Dark Dungeons, it works well with a great many OSR games — B/X, BECMI/Rules Cyclopedia, Old-School Essentials (OSE), White Box: FMAG, and many others that share the same old-school DNA. Whether you're a player setting up a world, a GM building custom content, or a developer looking to extend the system, you'll find what you need here.

The system itself is rules-agnostic: it provides the framework, and the actual game content lives in modules. That arrangement lets each game keep its own identity without the system favoring one over another.

Setup

Once you have the fantastic-depths (FaDe) system installed in Foundry, create a new world for FaDe and log into your world as game master. That's really all it takes — the system registers everything it needs (actors, items, sheets, and settings) on its own, so you can jump straight into building your first character.

Which content module you load depends on the game you're running:

• BECMI/Rules Cyclopedia — implemented in fade-compendiums. Install it alongside FaDe and the official rules content is ready to import.
• White Box: FMAG — ships in its own module, so just install that one and you're off to the races.
• Anything else — the system works well with many other OSR games. A module for your game of choice may already exist, or a developer can create one using the pluggable rule systems. If you're starting fresh, the core system is perfectly usable on its own.

Items are not required to be imported for the system to work. You can run a perfectly functional game with the system alone and build everything from scratch. That said, if you wish to override a module's values or customize aspects of the system, you have a couple of options:

• Create world items. Build your own versions of anything — gear, monsters, spells, conditions — right in Foundry. Your world items take precedence over module data.
• Customize the module itself. If you want to change how content behaves for everyone, put your own customizations into the module's compendiums.

Whichever path you choose, the system is designed so your content and the module content coexist without fighting each other.

A note on copyright: FaDe and its content modules are careful to respect the rightful owners of each game's rules and text. Game mechanics aren't copyrightable, but the creative expression around them — prose, stat block layouts, names tied to a specific presentation — may be. Different games take different licensing paths, and the modules for each game reflect that. When building your own content module, be mindful of the same thing.

All game titles and trademarks mentioned here belong to their respective owners. FaDe is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any of them.

Getting Started

• Home — this page.
• GM Guide — a user-facing tour of the rules systems, item types, and GM tools FaDe provides.
• Player Guide — how to build a character and play the game.
• System Settings — a complete reference to every FaDe setting.
• Light and Vision — how light sources burn, fuel, and illuminate the scene.
• Active Effect Variables — a reference of the system variables you can modify with active effects, for both actors and items.

Developer Docs

New to FaDe development? Start with the Developer Guide for an overview of the architecture, then dig into the deep dives on specific subsystems:

• Developer Guide — the system's structure, conventions, and how the pieces fit together.
• Registry — the pluggable rule systems that let modules swap in their own implementations.
• Actors and Items — how actor and item documents are built, from data models up to the sheets.

Happy adventuring!