We’re psyched to announce a new project that’s been in the works for a while now: full virtual tabletop support for your Velvet Generation games via Roll20!

What’s Included?

Roll20 Support comes in two main packages:

• The compendium, which has the full text of the Velvet Generation rulebook, handily cross-referenced and optimized for online gaming.
• The module, which contains a customizable game table made to work with the game’s custom rule system, three bands’ worth of example characters and character art galleries pulled from Velvet Generation and 2002’s Starchildren.

Both the module and compendium will be available on the Roll20 Marketplace and DriveThruRPG. Use the module on its own with your print or PDF copies of Velvet Generation, or bundle them together for a reduced price to get the whole game inside Roll20 itself.

Besides the Marketplace items, we’ve also published:

• An interactive Roll20 character sheet, with sections for individual characters, the band as a whole, the group’s revolutionary progress toward overthrowing the system, and an NPC tracker for the game master.
• The Velvet Generation API package, which enhances games with easier control of dice on the module tabletop, plus one-touch macros and visual effects for on fire and amped dice. The API package is free, but requires a Roll20 premium subscription to install in your campaign. It’s not necessary to play the game, but it helps.

Why Roll20?

This roots of this project go back to the middle of the game’s playtest/development process. Velvet Generation went to Metatopia for testing in its earliest form in 2017. Testing continued at home and at conventions through 2018, 2019…and right up until March of 2020, when the game was almost done.

Astute observers will note that March of 2020 was still more than three years before the game actually came out. But it was almost done!

As it turned out, having to put a hold on all in-person playtesting revealed something a little disturbing about the game: it was actually kind of hard to play online with the options available to most of us. For one, existing virtual tabletop (VTT) platforms usually handle die rolls as one-and-done affairs, so the system’s focus on keeping dice on the table, trading and sharing them with the rest of the band wasn’t easy. For another, this game doesn’t use a tactical minis-style battle map for anything, which rendered a lot of VTT features irrelevant to us.

After a few hit-and-miss attempts at cobbling together an online tool that would cover the gap, I decided to push forward with whatever we could make work for the last round of playtests. The final online playtest sessions involved a complicated Rube Goldberg series of smartphones and dummy Zoom accounts. It was…unsustainable, to say the least. But at that point, we were already running way behind the original projected release date and didn’t want to hold it up any longer. Fixing the online play problem would have to wait until that promise was fufilled.

Once the book was out in the world and the 2023 convention season ended, it was time to finish the job on a set of online tools. There were now a ton of new VTT providers out there, since the pandemic caused online gaming to explode, and it seemed like everyone had a new system to try out. Complicating things was the fact that I wasn’t very experienced using VTTs. I’d been lucky enough in my whole gaming life to usually have a group of local friends down to play whatever I was running locally, so I never had reason to build those muscles.

In an attempt to fix this, I started up an online Blades in the Dark campaign, using Evil Hat’s (extremely helpful) Roll20 module. This fit nicely with what Velvet Generation would need, since both games had a need for a shared visual space but neither cared much for the scale tactical maps or figurines that VTTs tend to optimize for. Playing on Roll20 was sucha success that even once my group would have been able to switch to in-person sessions again, we unanimously decided to keep the game online.

Ultimately, while a lot of newer virtual tabletops out there have flashier features than Roll20, every one I looked at as a potential answer for Velvet Generation was even more specialized toward maps and miniatures for that tactical battle experience, which just wasn’t a thing this game needed. Roll20’s rollable tokens and advanced dice feature (which lets you drag dice directly from your chat window to the tabletop) are exactly the right feature to make our weird little dice mechanic work.