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 to play and will eventually be open source: the battle map is free, and the whole app is free to self-host under the AGPL. You can read exactly what I commit to in the pledge.

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.

I know, I know. Let me explain.

I've never been able to find a VTT that did things like I wanted to do things. I mean, the setup tax alone! I wanted to have an encounter management app. Easy enough - but then, I also wanted to be able to put a mpa together while my players strategized before charging the goblin camp I had to improvise because they went off track. And I wanted the map pretty. And I wanted it to track the turn order. And I wanted it to remind me what cool powers I gave my villains. And...

You see where I' going with this.

The list got so long, building my own was the logical choice. And once it was real, sharing it on the off chance other GMs have the same issues was a natural follow-up.

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.