Back in April of 2023, there was a Kickstarter for a new VTT that was claiming to be focused on theater of the mind rather than automation. That immediately interested me because I tend to play games that are investigative horror, which really don’t need automation. They have relatively simple game systems, at least compared with D&D. And combat really isn’t the focus. Sometimes the automation just gets in the way. And I wasn’t alone in having it catch my attention, the pledges skyrocketed to just under three quarters of a million dollars.
I waffled for a while, but eventually decided not to back it because I saw a few red flags. The “theater of the mind” should have been a slam dunk for me, but it seemed to be more about lacking basic features that other VTTs had more than it did adding new ones. To me, there’s a certain art in crafting a system that fades into the background when you’re playing, yet provides the kind of automation you need when you’re not actually sitting at a table.
The big selling point seemed to be splash screens with some kind of special effects. Very high concept, but in the end not really all that useful when you’re actually sitting down at the virtual table. I make up my own splash screens and after the initial session, you pretty much ignore them, and when I ran Masks of Nyarlathotep, by the time we got through a region, I was sick of looking at it. The Alchemy Kickstarter also had this weird thing where to buy a game system, you got a collectable card in the mail. Why do I need a card if it’s going to be online? It just seemed too “high concept” and not really grounded in the reality of what you need to play a game online. They were also selling games by themed decks, so one deck was all horror, one was all SF, one was all fantasy. The problem here is I wanted one or two systems out of each, not a “deck” of things I was never going to play. It seemed a real stretch just for a gimmick.
Since then, nothing has made me regret my choice. I’ve tried the platform several times and found the interface extremely confusing. Often the reasons things are implemented the way they are just seem baffling and without any internal logic. And keep in mind that I’m using Foundry these days, which is the one known for being complicated.
Which brings us to today. A year and a half after the Kickstarter Alchemy offered the incredible deal of essentially everything that Free League publishes in full Alchemy VTT versions for $30. If that wasn’t enough, you also got the original PDFs. Even for just the PDFs, it was an insane bargain. It let me fill out my collection of things like Tales From The Loop that I find intriguing, but have a hard time justifying a purchase because I know in my heart I’ll never actually run it. The humble bundle sold like hotcakes. Possibly a little too fast for Free League who quickly put an end to the inclusion of the PDFs. But while I bought it for the PDFs, it also gave me a completely full set of multiple game systems to play with on Alchemy and really figure out how the system worked and if I was missing out on something.
If the article title didn’t clue you in, the TLDR is I wasn’t very impressed and to some extent I should probably apologize for something that’s really as much a rant as a review. but my reactions ranged from disappointed to outraged that they were asking money for what’s obviously an incomplete project.
Even with a fully implemented game system and scenario, Alchemy’s UI remains confusing and awkward. The implementations of game systems and adventures also lag far behind Roll20 or Foundry. In terms of describing the system and reviewing it’s features, I’ll be looking at Vaesen and Dragonbane. This should make a good comparison because I own them on multiple VTTs. They’re also very different game systems. Vaesen is a Year-Zero-Engine game using a dice pool of D6s. Dragonbane is a skill based roll low system based on Basic Roll Playing (Runequest, Call of Cthulhu), but using a D20 instead of percentile dice.
First, the UI. This is actually one of the big selling points for Alchemy and it’s unlike other VTTs I’ve used. The system purports to be for “theater of the mind” and there’s a large splash screen, usually taken from the book cover or title page of the game or adventure. If you pony up for the “enhanced” versions, things on the splash screen move and there’s some sound effects. Each scene also has a tactical view, which is intended for maps and has a grid and options for fog of war. That is accessed by a GM clicking on a button in the GM interface. Roll20 and Foundry pretty much just have the tactical screen and if you want a splash screen, you just put up a graphic instead of a map and remove the grid.
The next thing you notice is that unlike roll20 or Foundry, there’s no character sheet that looks like a piece of paper that you’d use in an in-person game. Skills and stats are integrated into the interface at the lower left like a website or the interface for a video game.
In that corner, there are three tabs: skills (including stats), actions, and equipment. In the center, you get a small portrait of your character (provided you’ve added one) and your important stats like HP plus a dice rolling system for random rolls. On the right are trackers (things like Sanity in Call of Cthulhu or conditions in Free League games) and handouts.
If you right click on your character and select view, there’s a “sort of” character sheet that lists things, but it splits things into several tabs and I don’t find it very user friendly. Personally, I prefer something that looks like a proper character sheet, particularly if it mirrors physical character sheets. Big bonus if I can pop it into a separate window, which I can in both Roll20 and with an add-on in Foundry. But that is a preference. That’s not necessarily a flaw. A lot of people really dig the Alchemy interface. It works well for game like Vaesen with 4 stats and 12 skills. It’s a little more awkward for Dragonbane with 6 stats and 30 skills. I’m pretty skeptical about something like Call of Cthulhu with 8 stats and 46 skills. The list is just going to get too long to scroll through looking for a skill.
Click on a skill and it “loads” the skill into the dice roller at the center of the screen, then click on the “test” button and it reports the roll and success/failure. Dice don’t roll in the 3d sense, but there’s a die graphic in the chat window with graphic dice that match the game. I will say that this shows one of the things that annoys me about Alchemy in general–needing to click multiple places to accomplish something. Or more simply put, why doesn’t it just roll if you click on the skill? Why instead does it just load the dice roller?
Actions are, well, things that don’t fit anywhere else, and are similar to macros in roll20 or Foundry. Spells in most games would be actions. A backstab that does double damage would be an action. Sometimes a normal weapon attack is an action. It could be a roll on a table. It can be a combination of rolls. It’s pretty flexible, but not infinitely so.
Equipment is a list of equipment and the option as to whether its activated/worn or not. Here’s another interface issue. There’s a very small button that is either filled or a hollow circle depending on whether you’re wearing it, but it’s so small that it really is difficult to see. Whether it’s worn or not is important because you can set up actions so they only appear in the interface if the equipment is equipped. You can double click on equipment and it will pop up a large picture of it and if you scroll down a description. Here again, I question the choices made in the interface. The description is probably what you’re looking for, so why does it require scrolling down from the picture? That’s even more the case when the picture is just a placeholder, which it often is.
When you’re the GM, the interface is a little different. At the top right, you get list of PCs and NPCs. To roll for an NPC, you right click on them and select “play” (or click on them and select play from the center button) and that loads that particular NPC into the standard character window on the lower left. So instead of juggling character sheets, you switch between them.
For NPCs, trackers move to the left, along with skills, actions, and equipment. On the lower right, GMs get Scenes, Story, Tools, and Handouts. Scenes set which scene you’re on. Story has the text associated with the scene. Tools have things like tables to roll on and a second tracker section for trackers that apply to the entire game, not just a single NPC. Handouts are self explanatory and are things like notes, occasionally maps, and things of that sort that players find along the way.
So how does this all come together. Let’s use Dragonbane as an example.
First you need to set initiative. This is done in Dragonbane and Vaesen via a card deck. Particularly for Dragonbane, it’s an important part of the game because you can trade initiatives, which can be tactically important as trading initiatives serves as the game’s version of “hold an action.” This is vitally important because you only get one action in a turn. You can attack or defend, but not both. Foundry has the Year Zero Combat module which automates all of this including multiple initiative cards, and swapping cards. Roll20 has a card deck for players to draw from, but not really anything in the way of automation and we’ve always found cards in roll20 difficult to deal with. Alchemy just doesn’t have anything. The GM can sort characters into an order, but there’s just really no way to generate it in-game. The GM is going to have to have a physical deck of cards and draw for everyone or use dice rolling. But that’s really not a great option because that trading initiative is such a big part of the game.
And Free League’s initiative system is a perfect example of what you want automation to do in a VTT, even for games that are relatively simple like Vaesen. On the tabletop, the whole thing is easy. There’s the deck of cards and everyone pulls one (or two for certain abilities). Want to trade initiative? There’s a human being there and you hand the cards off to each other. It’s a great mechanic in person, and tactically it’s really interesting, but online, it’s a pain in the ass. Foundry handles it well though. Roll20 sort of handles it. And Alchemy just plain fails or more accurately doesn’t try. And remember, these are two of the premiere launch titles. They’ve used both Vaesen and Dragonbane in public demo events. And while I got this as part of a ludicrous $30 for everything deal, games and modules are usually $20 to $30 each.
Let’s move on to combat. To make an attack in Alchemy, you click on your skill, then go to the center and click to roll the skill. It shows you whether or not you succeed in the chat window. If you hit, then click to switch to the actions tab, then click on the item’s damage roller in the actions tab, then click on the center roll button to actually roll the damage. For the roll20 and Foundry, the character sheet has a section for combat. In Foundry, you click on “knife” in the “Weapons” section on the character sheet and it pops up a window that lets you add any banes or boons (bonus/penalty dice), choose any special attacks like disarms, then click to roll the attack, then if it succeeds, there’s a button in the chat for damage. In roll20 you click on “knife” and it offers a box to add any modifiers, then rolls the attack and damage in a single action. It doesn’t tell you whether you succeed, but it shows your skill on the roll so you can figure that out yourself.
There’s, of course, more to combat than just hitting and doing damage. Dragonbane has Dragons (1–it’s a roll low system) which are critical successes and Demons (20) which are critical failures–hence the original Swedish title of Drakar och Demoner. In Foundry, this is all part of the game system. If you roll a Dragon, it will offer you the two options of double damage or a second attack and if you opt for double damage, it will roll that for you automagically. If you roll a Demon, it will pop up a box asking you to roll and automatically give you a result from the appropriate fumble table.
Alchemy will display the dragon and demon graphics on the dice roller, but it won’t alert you otherwise. For demons, you’ll then have to pull up the table as an action. It’s not set up as an action by default though. Each player will have to add it by going to create an action, then find it in the list of premades. To me, the fact that the fumble tables in a combat-centric game aren’t “turned on” by default seems sloppy. My personal theory is the people implementing the game, really don’t play it, and just don’t really know what’s important.
Dragonbane also has “conditions” such as being exhausted which mean you need to roll with a “bane” or penalty die. Foundry will let you pick your bane right from the chat window if you push a roll. It’ll then check it on your character sheet for you and take that into account in the future. Roll20 makes you add it on the character sheet by hand, but accounts for it automatically when you make further rolls. Alchemy has a tracker for conditions, but it doesn’t force further rolls use a bane die and since there’s no functionality for bonus/penalty dice, you just have to attack twice and take the worst one.
One of the biggest features of Dragonbane is that monsters don’t have regular attacks and don’t roll to hit. You roll a die and it determines what kind of attack happens and it’s always a sort of special effect. It’s meant to be terrifying to players because, well, they’re monsters! (Some players don’t like this, but it is what it is and irrelevant to the VTT aspect.) Both Foundry and Roll20 have this built in. It rolls and shows you a description of the effect. Alchemy just plain doesn’t have the functionality. You have to do a manual roll, then right click on the monster and select view to see the character sheet with the table. Note that you cannot make a roll of any kind while that character sheet is open. Once you know what kind of attack the monster is doing, if it does damage, the damage rolls are available in Alchemy’s actions tab. But most of these have secondary effects, so you’re really going to need to have that table open. There seems no reason to me that they couldn’t add these tables in the “Tools” section, but they haven’t. This is a really critical failing. If a GM can only roll attacks by rolling a die manually and looking at a table, why are we paying for a VTT implementation anyway? And how does having to flip around in different windows accentuate the “theater of the mind” experience?
If the system implementation in Alchemy is lacking, their implementation of the various scenarios is even worse. For Vaesen, a book of adventures is one “scene” per adventure along with all the NPCs for the entire adventure. Tactical maps are available as handouts, but the tactical mode is kind of random and not really what you need to play. For example, in Silver of the Sea, there’s the town, an inn, a mansion that the leading family of the island owns, an isolated home of an NPC, and a isolated natural location where the finale probably will happen. These are all what I’d consider scenes. They each have a different feel and it seems like each should have their own splash screen, but they don’t. The areas that probably would benefit from a tactical map are the inn, the town, and the mansion–all because they have areas that aren’t fully visible and may feature exploration or possibly a fight. The only way to get those maps is as a handout. Since there’s one scene, you only get one tactical map and that’s just an overview of the entire region and not something you would ever use tactically. Again, the people implementing these have not really taken any time to look at what you really need to run them. They’re just putting in the bare minimum effort.
For Dragonbane, adventures will have multiple scenes, and the tactical maps are there, but there’s no fog of war and the NPCs aren’t placed on the tactical map. You’ll also need to add more NPCs because a scene with three scout goblins will only have one scout goblin set up. The text of the adventure is available, but really who cares? Reading and learning the scenarios is somewhere between “extremely inconvenient” and “downright impossible” within a VTT. What I’m looking for in buying the VTT version of a scenario is having all the stuff set up for me ahead of time. And that’s exactly what’s done for adventures in both the Roll20 and Foundry VTT versions. It’s exactly what’s not done in Alchemy.
While I’ve concentrated on Dragonbane and Vaesen, I should comment on some of the other Alchemy implementations I own. For Mutant Year Zero, the tactical maps are set up, and the text of the adventures is there, but NPCs aren’t set up at all. In Forbidden Lands nothing is set up at all. No maps. No NPCs. The text of the story isn’t even there. It’s just a set of splash screens. $19.95 on the Alchemy store. A bargain! When I pointed this out to the company, they blamed an “ingest” issue and said it would be fixed. It hasn’t been and the module has been available at full price for months.
One of the constants when I’ve brought this sort of thing up is that the response back from the company and its fans tends to be met with an attitude that “it’s the children that are wrong.” Seemingly taking a position that there’s nothing wrong with the software, instead there’s something wrong with me for not understanding its genius. IMHO, and this is a subjective opinion, this a very bad position for a company to take, particularly in a market that is already mature. If Alchemy was the first into the market, a lot of my feelings about it would be very different. But it’s not. It’s competing against two very established VTTs, and one of them, roll20, can be used without any cost.
If you dig past pure fanboyism, you tend to get statements that the software is still in “V1” and that if we just wait, more features will be added. But that’s a weird stance when you are collecting a subscription and you have a marketplace with dozens if not hundreds of games and scenarios available for sale at what really aren’t discounted prices. As said, I lucked into this ludicrous deal where I got all of the Free League content for $30, but the retail is hundreds of dollars. And again, I’m playing Free League materials which as near as I can tell are as good as it gets. They’re marked as “released” on the timeline and they’ve been the focus for heavy marketing by Alchemy, including multiple weekend “learn to play” events. If this is as good as it gets, and that seems to be the message they’re sending, it’s just not very good.
So why are so many companies signing on with Alchemy? Well, the answer to that is simple. Alchemy will implement your game and adventure for the company at no cost other than a smaller cut of the royalties from sales. This has it’s own pitfall that I referred to above: the people implementing the game or adventure may have only a passing familiarity with it. And looking at various decisions they’ve made in implementing the Free League games, I think that’s probably why you have some odd decisions like a tactical map that would never be used tactically. Or a splash screen that gives away the conclusion of the adventure. Or not realizing what a big deal it is to not be able to add bonus/penalty dice. But table-top roleplaying is not exactly a lucrative industry and having someone willing to take the burden of work off your hands for no up-front cost has been very attractive to a lot of companies.
I suppose that at some point they might be able to pull something better together, but in the six months since I bought the Free League systems for Alchemy, not much has changed. They continue to grind out new systems, which I can only assume are as unfinished and half baked as the Free League offerings. But there’s only so long you can overlook some really dire issues when they’re collecting full retail prices for the product.