Aethera VTT How-to Guide

Step-by-step walkthroughs for running and playing your first sessions.

Aethera VTT docs

Tabletop · How-to

Aethera VTT how-to guide

Practical, task-by-task walkthroughs: spin up your first campaign, build a playable scene, bring players in, add live voice, run combat, and find your feet as a player. For the full feature reference, see the Aethera VTT docs.

Launch VTT Open the demo world

Before you start

Aethera VTT runs entirely in your browser — there’s nothing to download or install. You only need two things to begin:

  • An Aethera account (the same one you use for the rest of Aethera.TV).
  • A modern browser. Maps render the same scale and wall layout for everyone, so a steady connection helps — especially for animated maps.

There are two roles at the table. The host (GM) creates and owns the world, its scenes, and its assets, and needs a plan only if they want more storage or larger uploads. Players simply join from an invite link and never need their own plan.

Just want to look around first? Open /app/vtt/demo-world to explore a ready-made world with no setup.

Run your first session (GM)

This is the end-to-end path from an empty account to a live table. Open the launcher at /app/vtt and sign in, then follow these steps.

  1. Create the campaign. Choose Create world to open the setup wizard. Work through its steps in order — Rules & Content, Scene Defaults, Player Access, Invites, and Review. Setup is only marked complete once your world settings and scene defaults are saved, so finish the wizard before moving on.
  2. Set your world basics. Give the world a name, pick its system, choose your safety tools, and set visibility. You can also set defaults now — grid size and units, lighting tier, and theme (light, dark, or high contrast).
  3. Add a map. Keep the starter scene the wizard created, or upload your own map after launch. Either way, your default grid, lighting, fog, and scene behavior are saved with the scene. (See Build a scene for the details.)
  4. Add tokens. Seed the starter compendium packs, open the Actors panel, and drag a character or creature onto the scene. Then confirm which tokens your players are allowed to control.
  5. Invite your players. Use the wizard’s invite step or the campaign Invites panel to generate a player link. Share the link, send an invite email, or have a player paste an invite token into the launcher. (More in Invite players & set roles.)
  6. Start the session. Launch the campaign and confirm the active scene. Open the right sidebar and use the Voice Link panel to bring everyone into voice. Activating a scene pulls all connected players to it.

If setup stalls

You can pick up where you left off: resume an incomplete campaign from the launcher, recreate invite links, and refresh the Voice link at any time. If something in the runtime misbehaves, use Report a bug → Copy diagnostics bundle and attach the bundle to a support request so the team has the context they need.

Build a scene

A scene is one playable map with its grid, walls, lighting, and fog. Here’s how to take one from a blank background to table-ready.

  1. Upload a background and set the scene’s dimensions and padding so the playable area matches your art. Turn on snap-to-grid so tokens and walls align cleanly.
  2. Block out the map. Place walls to define rooms and barriers, drop lights where you want illumination, and add tiles, notes, and sounds to bring the space to life.
  3. Tune vision and fog. Vision and fog respect ownership — players reveal only what their tokens can actually see, and anyone in an Observer role sees only the areas you’ve already revealed. Experiment freely: the History panel lets you undo and redo wall and fog edits.
  4. Benchmark before you go live. Open the Performance overlay to check the scene under realistic conditions, and drop the lighting tier if the frame rate dips. There’s no hard light cap, but treat around 300 active lights as a caution threshold.
  5. Activate the scene when it’s ready. Activating pulls every connected player onto it; inactive scenes stay hidden until you switch to them, so you can prep upcoming maps without spoiling them.

In Scene Config you can switch a map between Still image and Animated video without changing its scale. Use still maps for combat-heavy sessions and animated maps for exploration; animated maps need more bandwidth (roughly 8–15 Mbps per player at 1080p). See the map & media requirements for the full numbers.

Invite players & set roles

You can invite players from the setup wizard’s invite step or, later, from the campaign Invites panel.

  1. Generate an invite. Create a player link to share directly, send an invite email, or hand a player an invite token to paste into the launcher.
  2. Pick a role. Assign one of the role presets — Player, Trusted Player, or Assistant GM — to match how much control each person should have.
  3. Fine-tune permissions. Each role carries permissions for drawing, token control, playlist management, and module actions. For document-level access, use the ownership matrix to grant or restrict actors, items, journals, and scenes per person. Overrides are enforced on both the client and the server.
  4. Manage invites over time. Revoke or regenerate invite links from the Members tab whenever your roster changes.

New players will appreciate a guided start — turn on onboarding tours from Settings → Tour Management, and they can press ? in the table to open the in-app Controls reference at any time.

Add voice to your table

Aethera Voice stays linked to your campaign, so you can run live voice without leaving the table.

  1. Open the Voice Link panel. Launch the campaign, then open the right sidebar and select Voice Link.
  2. Bring voice in. Use the panel to refresh the link, open Voice, and return to the table. The panel shows room status, bridge diagnostics, the return path, and recovery actions if anything needs a nudge.
  3. Players join voice from the table. Voice and video use presence status — each player mutes or unmutes from their own avatar badge.

If the link drops, reopen the Voice Link panel and refresh it. Aethera Premium includes an Aethera Voice Plus entitlement for the host account.

Run combat

Encounters run from the Combat tracker, with templates and a pause control to keep things orderly.

  1. Add combatants. Add the tokens involved to the Combat tracker.
  2. Roll initiative for the encounter, then advance turns as play moves around the table.
  3. Apply effects. Use the built-in effects — such as prone, stunned, poisoned, and inspired — to track conditions on tokens.
  4. Measure areas of effect. Drop templates and drawings for quick AOEs, and right-click to convert a template into a persistent one when you want it to stick around.
  5. Control the pace. Use Pause/Resume to freeze player input during setup or narration; the Pause overlay blocks player moves while it’s active.

Player quick-start

Invited to a game? Here’s everything you need for your first five minutes.

  1. Join. Open the invite link from your GM and sign in with your Aethera account. Select the world and, if prompted, choose your assigned character.
  2. Get your bearings. Press ? to open the Controls reference (the authoritative list) or to start the in-app tour.
  3. Move your token. Single-click to select it, drag to move, hold Shift to constrain movement, and press Esc to clear your selection. Press R for the Measure tool, and double-click a token to center the camera on it.
  4. Target and roll. Use the Target icon in the Action Palette to mark a target, then roll by typing /roll 1d20+5 or using the roll buttons on your sheet — results post to chat with your targets.
  5. Talk to the table. Switch chat channels with IC (in-character), OOC (out-of-character), and GM (private to the GM). Run assigned macros from the macro bar (keys 1–0 by default).

The keys above are defaults — bindings can vary by preset and be remapped in Settings. The in-app ? Controls reference is always the authoritative source.

Fix common problems

  • The board is blank. Use the Scene selector to re-sync, or press Recenter in the canvas controls.
  • Your token won’t move. Make sure the GM has unpaused the game, and check that your token isn’t locked.
  • Performance is dropping. Open the Performance overlay and switch to a lower tier. GMs can also reduce the scene’s lighting tier.
  • Something’s broken. Report it from the Help panel and include the timestamp and scene name. GMs can attach a diagnostics bundle via Report a bug → Copy diagnostics bundle.

Next steps