June 11, 2025

The Locale of the Group

It’s all about holding your mouth right — or at least getting your head around what’s going on under the hood. Foundry can be a bit of a mystery at times, and that’s exactly how it felt when I was trying to save Groups to a compendium. They’d save just fine, but when you imported the compendium later… the creatures in the group simply wouldn’t load. While Locales aren’t a major focus in our adventures, they do add depth. We’ve found it’s good to provide encounters that aren’t combat-focused — but when you’re giving your players a battle map of a store or toyshop, things can escalate quickly! Locales let us define those spaces with just the right amount of structure. So not being able to save and load them reliably was a real frustration.

After a lot of trial and error, here are the three key mistakes I was making:

Don’t save the Actors in the same compendium as the Groups.
They can be in the same module, but not in the same compendium.
Always load the Actors into the world before loading the Groups.
If the referenced actors aren’t there yet, the group will fail.
Keep the IDs consistent through the whole process.
If anything changes, Foundry can’t find the link and your groups won’t work.

Locales now load properly — and they’ll be included in our next adventure.
It’s a small win, but it makes a big difference!

DialogV2

Moving my macros over to use the new DialogV2 and other updated V2 apps has been an ongoing task — but today I finally switched the Lights macro across.

It’s always the formatting that takes the most time.

The updated version still works from a single-token selection and now uses a styled DialogV2 interface to let the player choose from a list of light sources (torch, lamp, candle, lanterns, and even a custom option). I added icons, accessible labels, and control over brightness, dim range, animation type, and light color — all in one clean interface.

There’s also a little flair: if the light is already on, the macro turns it off and posts a small message in chat to let the group know. It’s a small touch, but it makes the table feel alive.

I’ll share the full macro soon, but for now — that’s another V2 migration done.