Let the NERDS rule!

Recently got back into to table top role playing games, think Dungeons and Dragons, and I wanted to include a friend from the America. Having done a bit of remote table top games in college I was familiar with an online platform called Roll20. But before I jumped back on there I look on YouTube to see what the kids are using these days and discovered Foundry Virtual Table Top / VTT. Woh it looked way more epic then Roll20.

Down the rabbit hole of purchasing the software and finding a way to host it I went.

Setting up Foundry VTT via Fly.io

Having players from Munich and Wisconsin connect to a server running on my laptop didn’t seem like a good idea. No Wrath of Network Lag is going to kill my game session! So I searched for a server I could use. Being in tech industry I opted not to use a fully managed hosting solution but rather spin up something on my own; something that could be easily spon down when we are not playing.

A start up running light weight containers in the cloud, Fly.io, with it’s ease of use and ability to config location sounded perfect.

I ended up open sourcing my solution and posting it to the Foundry VTT wiki.

My Foundry VTT + Fly.io Code Repository Here

Picking a server location

Got the server configs ready but where should I host it? How does the internet work?!? Oh yeah, undersea cables. Check out this cool map I found, https://www.submarinecablemap.com/.

under sea cables

Who knows which of those lines would most quickly connect Wisconsin, USA and Munich, Germany though. Time to turn to a ping tool and find the lowest latency between our locations.

ping tool table

network map

Turns out we can both connect with under 100ms of latency to London, UK. So now just as my friend wakes up in Wisconsin, already late after noon here in Munich, a server in London turns on. We all join and the game begins!