From Minecraft to D&D night: Foundry VTT is now live

A different shelf of the catalogue

Until this week the Netlonics catalogue was Minecraft — Java, Bedrock and a modded variant. They share a shape: a game daemon listens on a port, players install the matching client, everyone joins by IP.

Foundry Virtual Tabletop breaks that shape, and that's the point.

What Foundry is, and why so many tables use it

Foundry VTT is a self-hosted virtual tabletop — the platform that runs the online half of D&D, Pathfinder, Call of Cthulhu, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, and basically every tabletop RPG with an active digital scene. Its main competitor is Roll20, and over the last few years Foundry has quietly taken over the "I want to actually own my campaign" segment.

A few facts that put the scale in perspective:

• The vendor (Foundry Gaming, LLC) has sold well into the six figures of licences, with steady growth every year since the 2020 launch.
• The companion community runs thousands of free and paid modules — character sheet automation, AI map tools, music players, fog-of-war engines.
• Every popular game system (D&D 5e, Pathfinder 2e, Cyberpunk RED, Call of Cthulhu, ...) has free, community-maintained or publisher-built support.

It's not a niche toy. It's the engine a lot of weekly tables are running on right now.

Why it's a different kind of server

Minecraft is a game server in the classic sense: a binary listening on a UDP port, with native clients connecting from each player's PC. Foundry is a Node.js web application. It serves a single-page app to your browser, syncs state over WebSockets, and stores worlds, scenes, character sheets, assets and modules on disk.

That changes everything downstream:

• Players install nothing. Send them a URL, they join. Tablets, laptops, the GM's second monitor — same code.
• Sessions are GM-led, not matchmaking-based. No queue, no slot count — just the room your GM opened.
• State is precious. Six months of campaign notes, custom maps, painted tokens, hand-edited NPCs. Backups matter more than they do on a vanilla Paper server.
• The asset library grows. Maps, audio, animations. Disk is the long-tail cost, not RAM.

That's why our Foundry tiers are sliced differently from the Minecraft tiers. Disk grows aggressively (6GB → 15GB → 30GB), backup slots scale up (1 → 3 → 5), and the RAM step is gentler because Foundry isn't fighting a chunk-loader.

The checkout we had to rebuild

Here's the thing Minecraft doesn't do: you bring your own copy of Foundry.

Foundry VTT is a one-time purchase from foundryvtt.com — the developer deliberately doesn't licence it to hosting providers for resale. That's their call, and we respect it. But it means our usual "click → pay → server appears" flow doesn't work as-is.

The official self-host route is:

1. Sign in to foundryvtt.com.
2. Open My Account → Purchased Licenses.
3. Click Return License on the licence you want to deploy.
4. Pick Node.js under Operating System.
5. Copy the Timed Download URL that appears. It's valid for about five minutes.

So we added a single new checkout field for that URL. The installer uses it once — pulling the Foundry build straight from Foundry's own CDN — and discards it. We never see or store your licence key. If you wipe the server six months from now and want to reinstall, you generate a fresh URL the same way.

It's an unusual amount of friction by hosting-industry standards. We left it in on purpose, because the alternative is asking you to upload your licence to us — and that's not a thing we're going to do.

How to actually spin one up

1. Buy Foundry once on foundryvtt.com/purchase if you don't own it yet. One licence is enough — your players don't need their own.
2. Head to /games/foundry-vtt and pick a tier. Beginner fits a single party with a few modules; Group handles a weekly campaign with custom maps and audio; Campaign is for long-running multi-world setups.
3. Paste your Timed Download URL into checkout and pay.

There's also a longer-form overview at /l/foundry-vtt-hosting covering the FAQ, the licensing model and the full spec sheet.

TL;DR

Minecraft is about hosting a game. Foundry is about hosting a table. Same dashboard, completely different shape — and a checkout that asks for one extra thing because that's the only honest way to do it.