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Running FoundryVTT Off a Raspberry Pi

If you are one of those amazing individuals who enjoy a good tabletop RPG session, have a Raspberry Pi lying around, and want to run a game of practically anything TTRPG from home, then this guide is for you.

Running FoundryVTT Off a Raspberry Pi

If you are one of those amazing individuals who enjoy a good tabletop RPG session, have a Raspberry Pi lying around, and want to run a game of practically anything TTRPG from home, then this guide is for you.

Let me introduce you to FoundryVTT. Essentially, it's a tabletop that you run on an online session, much like Roll20, only way more customizable. To see what this is, you can give the demo a try at https://demo.foundryvtt.com/join. You can run this off of any machine that runs Windows, Mac, or Linux. I'll be focusing on the Linux type, since I'm talking about the Raspberry Pi. In order to get started, you'll need: a Raspberry Pi, a FoundryVTT license, internet, and some friends to play with (debatable). I currently host and run the TTRPG nights off of a Raspberry Pi 3 (RPi3), but anything past that should work fine. A license for FoundryVTT costs $50 USD. A bit steep but honestly it is worth the price and then some. Internet is a thing; if you're using an RPi3, you can choose between landline or wireless. I highly recommend going the landline route.

I won't go into the details of how to install and do basic setup for the RPi3 because if you're here, you probably already know some things about that. Below are the steps that I went through (more than once) to get FoundryVTT up and running from the start.

  1. Go to https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/ and download the application. Trust me, this makes everything way easier to deal with when installing this on an SD card. NOTE: Pick the 64-bit version of Raspberry Pi OS. You NEED the 64-bit version. This is not debatable.
  2. Before we get to the FoundryVTT installation, we need to set up some things for the online access stuff. You could do this after, but in case you're like me and make a mistake that you can't figure out how to fix... we're going to do this first.
    1. Next up is getting a "domain" or "URL" for your sessions. I'm a huge fan of utilizing free things and No-IP is great. Follow all the steps at Peppe8o for No-IP on the RPi. This will get you set up for sharing your IP to a URL that you "borrow"/"rent". NOTE: Be sure to renew the name every month. It does expire every 30 days, but if you fail at doing so, you can honestly just make another URL and temporarily use that while the original goes through its redemption phase. This has happened to me and if you were there that night, you know my frustration when I realized I forgot.
    2. When you're setting up the No-IP stuff, you'll need to select the URL as the type, and in the box where you put your IP, do 10.0.0.1:30000 (substitute 10.0.0.1 with the number you have). This will have it show up to others.
  3. Once you're ready for FoundryVTT, follow the official FoundryVTT Linux installation process. I created a separate user for all of this but you do what you want in the end. I stopped the instructions at the (Optional) D. Accessing Userdata Files with Cyberduck section. You don't need this unless you know what you're doing with it.
  4. The final step that you need to do is to get the SSL for your sessions. Head to the SSL guide on FoundryVTT and follow all the steps. This gets you the self-signed certificate required for hosting safely to others online.
  5. Congrats. Go to either the IP address or the URL and get started in setting your new game(s) up.

Errors that I encountered:

  1. I tried a method that involved another route for acquiring an SSL for the RPi via Apache instead of step #4 above. This does work if you're encountering issues with #4.
  2. I did encounter errors with port forwarding at one point, but it was a user error in the end. I came across these 2 posts that didn't pertain to my situation, but did give me information to pass on to others. Reddit Port-Forwarding Not Working || StackOverflow LetsEncrypt Renewal Fails.
  3. This can be super helpful for port forwarding, straight from the FoundryVTT website.

If you fancy a try at this, let me know! This was a pretty fun activity for even more fun memories. Overall, this shouldn't take you a super long time to set up, but if you have questions, ask away and I will do my best to assist. You can do so over at our Discord 😄

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