Official Website

          [Official Discord](<https://discord.gg/jgnygKC>)       

Intro

A practical but beautiful VTT. Elegantly built to try and hide the UI as much as possible without sacrificing what you need during gameplay. Alchemy is designed with streamers in mind to finally bring native support to a VTT for video chat and streaming. It also has spectator mode for people to watch your games without leaving the platform! Spectator mode gives viewers a much more in depth and interactive view of your game than just watching a stream.

It currently runs a simplified version of D&D 5e natively. The character sheet has to be manually built by typing/copying race and class abilities etc. But items or spells from the SRD can be found and added with a few button presses. It can also be custom edited to support systems like Cypher, or Princes of the Apocalypse.

😕 Alchemy is still listed as Early Access even though they have a marketplace selling items.

Cost

Costs vary depending on how much of the program you buy. Subscription for creating an unlimted number of characters is $8 per month. 3rd party books can be as much as full hardback price. There are many free packets though that you could use to craft a small homebrew campaign within though if you don’t mind constraining yourself to free offerings.

Features

• Battlemaps
  • 😕 Shared battlemaps with player show up as the background to Alchemy with whatever environmental effect you’re looking for. It works better though for artwork rather than classical battlemaps.
  • ❌ Basic drawing capabilities
  • ❌ Map-making tools
  • ✅ Ruler - coming in V1, basic measuring. cones/spheres/squares are also on the way but they might not make V1
  • ❌ Fog of War - coming in V1
  • ❌ Dynamic Lighting
• Chat & Dice
  • ✅ Basic chat with roll commands & macros
  • 😕 Die rolls from character sheets aren’t available, but there is a context sensitive menu for Actions, Spells, Skills, and Equipment built into the UI
  • ❌ Visual (non-chat) dice rolling interface - Something like this is coming, but Alchemy is trying to create a “window into the world” instead of a “tabletop representation” so it won’t be just physical dice like other VTTs
• Character Sheets
  • 😕 Character sheets for various games outside of 5e require using their custom creator
  • ✅ Sheets can be fully imported from DnDBeyond or JSON, but you must use the full app
  • ❌ Moving character sheets between games
  • ✅ Custom character sheet creation
• Compendium
  • ✅ Game SRDs available
  • ✅ Game rules available for purchase or upload
  • 😕 Drag-n-drop to character sheets isn’t available, but you can search for items and then click ‘add’ - Possibly having more Drag-n-drop support in V1
• Handouts, Etc
  • ✅ jpg, png, webp, mp4, m4v, and webm support for handouts. These can be sent to individuals or the whole party
  • ❌ Playing cards, random tables
  • 😕 Calendars don’t exist, and note taking is VERY basic
  • Storage
• Automation
  • 😕 A basic turn tracker is included that allows players to roll their initiative, but it doesn’t know which round you are on. A nice feature it does have though is a timer! show those slow players just how much they’re holding up the game lol.
  • ✅ Spells and attacks take two clicks, first to view it and second to cast/attack but it is all done right from the base table, not by bringing up the full sheet
  • 😕 Targeting, damaging, healing, and other effects have to be done manually if there’s any support at all
  • ❌ Macro buttons
  • ❌ Community modules
• Music & Video Streaming
  • 💙 Integrated voice & video calls is this platform’s bread and butter. The implementation is great and visually stunning
  • 💙 Stream uploaded music to players. Music is tied to scenes, so every time you switch to a new scene the music you curated ahead of time will be ready. And you can set a special ‘in combat’ music for each scene as well.
• Extras
  • ❌ Mobile device support doesn’t seem to be on the horizon, and the UI does take up a lot of screen real estate when you’re under 1080p
  • ✅ Help & support through discord works pretty well. The developers are responsive and timely
  • ✅ Community content is a bit sparse at the moment, but its built and ready for when more games are hosted on Alchemy

Pros & Cons