Tour

Hello adventurer,
My name is Dylan, and I’ll be your guide through TallTale.

TallTale is a browser-based VTT (Virtual TableTop) platform designed to be both as easy to use as possible, and to maximize the fun, the drama, and the anticipation of the dice roll. On this page, you will see how two key sections of TallTale work: the interactive whiteboard/map, and the dice.

The Dice

We wrote one rule on the wall before designing a single die: rolling should never feel like clicking a button that spits out a number. Every roll in TallTale is a moment, something the whole table watches together, something you can feel.

Here’s how a TallTale roll works. Press and hold the die to charge it. Release, and watch it fly. That half-second of suspense before the result lands? That’s intentional. That’s the drama we wanted to give you.

And nobody rolls alone. Every roll plays out live for the entire table. The same tumble, the same bounce, same result, at the same moment – everyone watched it happen together.

Black Room: Clean, Pure, Focused

Sometimes you don’t want atmosphere. You want the game.

The Black Room is TallTale at its most minimal: one crisp die, a dark surface, cool white light, and absolutely nothing else. It’s built for tables that value speed and clarity, or for sessions already tense enough without pyrotechnics. The charge-and-release mechanic still gives every roll its weight; the room simply refuses to get between you and the number.

Flesh Room: Horror Has Never Been This Visceral

The room TallTale was built around — and it shows.

The Flesh Room is a fleshy horror experience. The walls breathe. Growths pulse quietly in the periphery. Spores hang in a dim crimson haze, and the die itself is a deep, fibrous red that lands with unsettling heft.

The reactions are where it truly comes alive. Roll a natural 1 and the room takes notice. Roll a natural 20 and it erupts in a spray of blood, a surge of red energy, and the kind of moment that makes an entire table lean in at once.

On paper it sounds grim. At the table it’s electric. This is the room for groups who want every failure to hurt and every crit to feel earned.

Cyberpunk Room: Roll in the Neon Future

Okay, this one might be a little 80s synthwave.

The Cyberpunk Room sets your dice down in a neon-soaked megacity. Magenta and cyan grid lines glow beneath the die, flying cars slide past in the distance, and everything hums with that electric blue-green light that only exists in futures both beautiful and broken.

Roll well and sparks cascade off the die as it settles. Fumble and the whole system glitches as a corrupted SYSTEM_ERROR overlay rips across the screen, as if the servers themselves couldn’t cope with how badly that went. Crit and, well… you’ll want to see that one yourself.

Sessions in this room run faster, sharper, a little more dangerous. Perfect for a heist, a rebellion, or one long night in a city that wants you dead.

Space Room: Never Tell Me the Odds

Vast. Epic. Awe-inspiring.

The Space Room casts your dice into the void. Asteroids drift lazily through frame, a nebula bathes the scene in deep blues and purples, and every so often an alien craft makes a slow, silent flyby. Even a routine perception check feels consequential out here, because in space, every decision might be your last.

Fumble, and darkness creeps in from the edges, swallowing the scene as if a black hole will swallow you whole. Crit, and a supernova detonates: blinding light, a storm of plasma, and a few seconds of pure spectacle your table will still be talking about next week.

Made for sci-fi campaigns, cosmic horror, and any group that likes its stakes measured in light-years.

Tavern Room: That’s a Pint!

Cozy comfort.

The Tavern Room is where so many great parties meet for the first time. Lantern light dances across worn wooden planks, barrels crowd the bar, and out the window the last of the dusk is sinking behind the pines.

This is the room for session zero, for low-stakes one-shots, and for campaigns that start the way the best ones always do: strangers around a table, and a rumour worth chasing.

The DX Dice: Roll Any Combination You Want

Every room supports a DX dice, a full custom-notation roller for complex expressions. Type 4d6kh3 to roll four d6 and keep the best three. 2d20kl1 for disadvantage. Tack on modifiers like 1d20+5. The dice fly as one satisfying physics object, then the results break out individually. You see each die, which ones were kept, and the final total, all in one clean display.

The Whiteboard / Map Maker

“Open it, start drawing. That’s it. That’s the tutorial.”

The whiteboard was designed around one principle: GMs already have enough to think about. Three sessions deep into a campaign, the last thing you need is homework. TallTale’s whiteboard is live the second your room opens, and every tool does exactly what its icon suggests.

Demo Whiteboard

Getting Started Takes Ten Seconds

Enter your room as GM and the board is already waiting. The top bar is for drawing on the map. Left is for moving, and deleting objects. Right toolbar contains the powerful GM only tools.

There is no import step, no layer management, no document to save. The board auto-saves as you work and syncs to every player in the room in real time. Your players see what you draw the moment you draw it (unless drawing in fog).

Multiple Game Boards

One board is rarely enough for a real campaign, so every room now holds up to six. Prep the tavern on board one, the forest road on board two, the dungeon on board three — then, when the party kicks the door in, simply select the board you want and it loads instantly for every player at the table.

Scene changes stop being “give me ten minutes to redraw everything” and become a single click. Your prep survives between encounters, between sessions, between plot twists.

The Drawing Tools

The toolbar gives you everything you need without drowning you in options:

• Free Draw — sketch terrain, scrawl notes, trace the party’s route. Fluid, fast, forgiving.
• Line — precise borders, roads, and sight lines.
• Rectangle — rooms, buildings, zones of control. Draw the outline; the fill takes care of itself.
• Circle — AoE templates, auras, blast radii.
• Text — label anything, anywhere on the board.
• Terrain — basic terrain brush for rivers, lava, trees, and mountains.
• Move — select and reposition any object (free-draw strokes excepted). Handles appear on selection so you can resize and rotate with a single drag — no mode-switching, no sub-menus.
• Eraser — brush away anything that no longer belongs.
• Undo/Redo — every change is tracked. One click fixes a mistake.
• Clear — wipe the slate between encounters.

Stroke and fill colours live in one simple picker with two swatches — outline and fill. Your choices apply to new shapes, or to anything you’ve selected and want to restyle.

Terrain Brushes

Sometimes a rectangle labelled “mountain” doesn’t quite set the scene. The Terrain Brushes paint living landscape straight onto the board: Trees, Mountains, Rivers, and Lava, each with gorgeous animations of its own. Tree canopies sway, water flows, and lava, well lava hot. Each type also has custom token interactions to add a bit of spice to the maps.

The Ruler Tool

“Am I in range?” The four most-asked words in tabletop history, answered without argument. The Ruler measures the distance between any two points on the board, calculated from your grid size. Click, drag, read the number. Use to calculate movement, spell ranges, and thrown objects in seconds.

Grid Snap

For GMs who like their battlefields tidy, Grid Snap can be toggled on at any time. Once enabled, tokens, characters, NPCs, and shapes all click neatly into the grid as they’re placed or moved. Perfect alignment for tactical combat; toggle it off again for freeform theatre-of-the-mind sketching. Your board, your rules.

Fog of War: Your Secret Weapon

The most powerful tool on the board.

Flip on Fog Mode with one click, and everything you draw or place while it’s active is invisible to your players. Then use the Reveal Area tool to drag away the darkness as the story demands. The room the party just entered, the corridor they dare to peek down, the clearing that resolves out of the mist.

No layers, no exports, no prep ritual. Draw in the dark, reveal in the light, move on.

Character Tokens and NPC Placement

Every player in the room appears on the board automatically as a token bearing their character’s name and portrait. Drag a token and every screen updates instantly. Players always control their own character’s position.

As GM, the NPC panel lets you name a character, upload a portrait (auto-cropped into a clean token), and drop them onto the board with a click. Flag an NPC as an enemy and they’re visually distinct from allies. You can even hand an NPC over to a player to run: henchmen, familiars, and expendable minions welcome.

Each NPC also has hidden notes just for the GM. This way you can easily keep track of anything related to them.

Emoticons

Not every reaction needs a die roll. Players can interact with their own character token to broadcast emoticons to the whole table. Offer a grin during the negotiation, a grimace when the rogue starts improvising, a heart for the bard’s big moment. It’s a small thing that keeps the table feeling alive during conversations and roleplay, especially for groups playing without cameras.

Handouts

Every GM knows the moment: the party finds the letter, the map, the mysterious email and suddenly you’re pasting text into Discord. Not anymore.

The new Handouts tool opens a dedicated panel where the GM can prepare up to 50 handouts per room. Each one takes a title, a body of text, and an optional image upload — a map, a portrait, a wax-sealed threat. Handouts come in two designs, Letter or Email, so the prop matches the fiction.

Then comes the fun part. Whenever the moment is right, hit Show, and the handout animates onto every player’s screen at once. And when a player dismisses it, the handout files itself away in the Other tab of their character sheet. This way three sessions later, when someone asks “wait, what did that letter say?”, the answer is one click away instead of a scroll through chat history.

Prep your reveals in advance. Deliver them with drama. Never lose them again.

The Initiative Tracker

When steel is drawn, click the Initiative button to open the tracker. Hit Start Initiative and every player receives a prompt to roll their d20 (or DX dice) right in the dice panel. No side-channel wrangling. Results stream in live, and the tracker shows who’s rolled and who’s still deliberating.

Once everyone’s in, drop the order directly onto the whiteboard as a visual initiative list: sorted, visible, and ready for the whole encounter.

Want to raise the stakes? Entering Initiative Mode darkens every player’s screen with a jolt of screenshake, letting the table know it’s time to roll and that things just got serious.

Pings and Player Board Control

Need to point at something? The Ping tool drops an animated marker anywhere on the map, visible to everyone at once before it fades. No more “no, the other door” — just click. Every player has this one.

Want your players drawing too? Enable Player Board Control in room settings to grant them the basic kit: free draw, lines, and shapes. Great for collaborative mapping, or letting the party sketch out their heist plan. The GM-only tools: fog, NPCs, initiative, etc stay firmly in your hands.

Zoom, Pan, and a Board That Stays Out of Your Way

Zoom scales smoothly with the on-screen buttons, and panning is a middle-click drag away (or a two-finger scroll on touch devices). No hard jumps, no lost bearings. The board remembers where you were, so you can switch tools and land right back at your spot.

Everything auto-saves, always. When a player returns next week, the board is exactly as the party left it.

Character Sheets — Everything at the Table, Nothing in the Way

Character sheets in TallTale live inside the room. No second tab, no PDF spelunking, no “hang on, let me find my sheet.” Everything a player needs sits one click from the board.

For Players

Each player builds and maintains their own sheet across your sessions, organised into clean, single-purpose tabs:

• Character Name — the name shown when you ping or roll
• Character Icon — your portrait, doubling as your whiteboard token
• Stats — core attributes (Strength, Dexterity, HP, Grit, etc)
• Skills — proficiencies, ratings, training, or any custom fields your table uses
• Spells — spells and abilities
• Equipment — weapons, armour, and gear
• Items — everything else: consumables, treasure, quest items
• Conditions — active status effects, at a glance
• Other — anything else. Also where dismissed Handouts are stored for later reference
• Notes — character / session notes, plot threads, and hunches in your own words

You never scroll past four sections hunting for your hit points. You click the tab that has what you need, and it’s there.

For GMs

As GM, any character sheet is a click away: select the character/NPC tool, click a token, and the sheet opens in a panel. It’s a small detail that transforms the flow of a session — no more “what’s your Strength modifier?” mid-scene. You look it up in one second and keep the story moving.

During NPC interactions, contested checks, and rules questions, you have full read access to the relevant sheet without anyone narrating stats aloud or fishing through Discord.

Portraits and Tokens

Every sheet carries a portrait. Upload your character art and it’s automatically cropped into a crisp circular token, named, placed, and synced to every player the moment it hits the board.

That portrait carries your identity everywhere: your name in the roll history, your face on the map, your sheet behind the token. One character, one simple system.

For Your Players

Players joining a TallTale room don’t need a tutorial. They see the dice, they see the board, and within a minute they understand both. The toolbar only appears for those with drawing access, and every tool they do have explains itself. Click it, use it, move on.

The best interface is the one nobody has to think about. That’s what TallTale is designed to be — for GMs and players alike.

Ready to run a session? Your board is waiting.

FAQ