About Volvelle

Volvelle is a web-based virtual tabletop (VTT) for tabletop RPGs. It's a real-time battle map and an interactive character sheet that you can play with from your phone. Right now it ships with D&D 5e SRD content out of the box, but the framework underneath is designed to host any system (whether it truly can is something I'm still testing!)

It's free and it's open source. The core game - character creation, map building, combat, multiplayer - is free forever, and that's a written commitment.

Hi there, I'm Marta Strzelec (Spheniscidine), and I'm the creator of Volvelle.

My work is in cyber security, but I've been a Game Master for 20 years. I've played and ran games in a dozen TTRPG systems over the years. My current table has been meeting for over 10 years.

I started this project in a weekend hackathon. I used AI to create an encounter management app for myself before, and was missing a battle map. After the hackathon, Volvelle skeleton was born and I kept going because it was the tool I wanted to use myself.

Most virtual tabletops were built for the long-form, prepared-for-weeks campaign, where the GM spends time hand-crafting encounters. That's powerful, but the setup tax is real, and it doesn't help me when my players go rogue in the middle of a four-hour game. That's the GM portion of VTTs, the thing I bounced off of when trying other ones. Each tool you have to spend time learning, and by the time you've drawn the map, placed the walls, rigged the lighting, and built the encounter, the spontaneity is gone. It does not work as well as throwing down a sheet of millimeter paper and using boardgame meeples, and I wanted something that did, so much.

Volvelle bets on the other side of that tradeoff. Run a session in ten minutes. I wanted something I could put up mid-session, tell my players "you've stumbled into an encounter I haven't prepared a map for, give me a moment" and draw a map with tokens right then and there. Phone in your pocket, browser tab open, party joins with a code, you're playing. An app that surfaces all attacks available where I can see them, minds the attack range, and helps my players (also busy adults) remember what's on their sheet after a three-week hiatus.

Three bets, in order of conviction:

• Time-to-table is the metric that matters. How fast you can go from "let's play" to actually playing. Everything else is in service of that number, including how much of the rules you want the app enforcing.
• Systems are content, not code. This one's about software architecture, but hear me out - I built an engine for Volvelle that helps me implement new systems quickly. My table changes systems every campaign! I can't be rewriting the app every time I want to add a new one.
• The artisan path is real. Volvelle isn't venture-funded and isn't trying to be the next unicorn TTRPG platform. It's free-default, a web app you can also self-host, supported by people who like it. Working in cyber, I have a set of values I want to uphold here too, it's what lets the no-ads, no-surveillance pledge stay real.

I'll say the real aspiration plainly, because I want it on the record.

Every VTT I've used treats one game system as the whole world. Volvelle is built the other way around: the rules of a game - how a turn works, what an attack does, what a spell costs, how a condition behaves - live in a manifest the engine reads, rather than baked into the app. Today that manifest describes D&D 5e. The point is that it could describe almost anything - your homebrew, a small indie game, a system nobody has written yet.

What I'm really building toward is a universal rule language for tabletop RPGs: a declarative way to encode any system as content, that the engine then runs. The architecture I'm building right now is the foundation that language sits on top of. It's early, and being D&D-first absolutely shapes it, but that is the direction every design decision points at.

I'm writing this down, dated, on purpose. Volvelle is open source under the AGPL, so I can't (and wouldn't want to) stop anyone from building on the code. But the idea - a universal engine that lets one person teach a computer a whole tabletop system in an afternoon - is the thing I set out to make. I'm planting a flag: it's what I'm working on, in the open, from June 2026 onward.