Creating Scenes

Scenes Are Where the Game Happens

A Scene in Foundry is more than a map. It holds the background image, the grid, the walls that block sight and movement, the lights, the sounds, and the hidden triggers that make a location react to the party. Building one makes you architect, set dresser and lighting engineer at once.

Think of each scene as a movie set. A good set doesn't just show a location: it sets the mood, guides movement and creates chances for drama. Your tavern should feel warm. Your dungeon should feel dangerous. Your throne room should feel grand.

The Scene-Building Journey

A Worked Example: The Friendly Flagon

Here is the kind of scene this page builds: a small tavern with a square grid, walls along the stonework, a front door, a secret door into the cellar stairs, a few warm lights, and a Region outside the entrance that sends tokens to the street scene.

Step One: Creating and Configuring Your Scene

Starting Fresh

Open the Scenes tab of the sidebar and click "Create Scene", give it a name, and the scene's configuration window opens. Don't panic at all the options; you only need a few to start. In V14 the window opens on a Basics tab (name, background and the essentials) and has a separate Levels tab for multi-floor scenes, alongside tabs for the grid, lighting and ambience.

Essential Settings

• Scene Name: "Tavern_01" works, but "The Drunken Dragon Inn" tells a story. You can set a separate navigation name if you want players to see something different.
• Background Image: your map file, the foundation of everything. When you pick it, Foundry sizes the scene to the image.
• Grid: type, size in pixels per grid space, and the distance and units each space represents (for example 5 ft).
• Padding: the empty border around the map, so tokens and lights near the edge have room.

Image and Video Formats

Use WebP for still maps and WebM for animated maps and tiles. Both are much smaller than PNG or MP4 at similar quality, so scenes load faster for every player. A huge PNG battle map is the most common cause of a scene that takes ages to appear. Animated WebM backgrounds look great but cost every player's graphics card, so save them for set pieces.

Viewing vs Activating

As GM you can view a scene to prepare it without moving anyone. When you activate a scene, every player is pulled to it. Build and test in private, then activate when the party arrives.

The Grid: Your Invisible Foundation

The grid is like the ruled lines on graph paper. Players may barely notice it, but every measurement, movement ruler and area shape depends on it lining up with the map.

Choosing a Grid Type

• Square: the classic choice for dungeons and buildings.
• Hexagonal: four variants. "Columns" hexes are flat-topped, "Rows" hexes are pointy-topped, and Odd/Even picks which column or row is offset. Pick the one that matches the hexes drawn on your map.
• Gridless: for theatre-of-the-mind maps, overland travel or systems that measure freely.

Pro Tip: Lining Up the Grid

If your map has a grid printed on it, count the squares across the image and divide its width in pixels by that number to get the grid size. Then nudge the grid offset until Foundry's lines sit on top of the map's lines. Check a corner far from where you started: a small error grows across a big map. Drop a token on the scene to confirm the scale feels right.

Walls and Doors: The Invisible Architecture

Walls are invisible barriers that block movement, sight, light and sound. Players never see them, but they define the space. Draw them from the Walls controls in the left toolbar; each wall tool is a preset that sets what the wall blocks, and you can fine-tune any wall afterwards in its configuration window.

Doors and Secret Doors

Any wall can be turned into a Door or a Secret Door. Doors show a small icon that players can click to open or close them (you can also lock a door). A secret door behaves the same, but players don't see its icon until you reveal it by turning it into a normal door, so the wall looks solid until the rogue finds the catch.

Since V13, doors can also animate when they open: Swing, Slide, Swivel, Ascend or Descend. Set the animation in the door's wall configuration window and the door visibly moves instead of simply vanishing.

Wall Drawing Best Practices

• Follow the architecture: trace along the line where wall meets floor, not through the middle of thick walls.
• Connect your lines: gaps between wall endpoints leak vision. Snap endpoints together.
• Chain segments: hold Ctrl while drawing to start each new wall where the last one ended.
• Use the right preset: Window walls for glass, Terrain walls for things you can see over a little (tall grass, rubble), Invisible walls for cliffs and ledges you can see past but not walk through.
• One-way walls: a wall's direction setting lets it block from one side only, handy for illusions and balconies.

Lighting and Darkness

Lighting is where a flat map becomes a living place. Foundry lighting has two parts: the scene's overall environment (how dark it is) and individual light sources that you place on the map.

Scene Environment

The Darkness Level sets how dark the whole scene is, from full daylight to deep night. Global Illumination lights the whole scene so every token can see without a light source; its threshold turns it off automatically once the darkness level rises past a value you choose. That means one slider can move a scene from noon to midnight.

Light Sources

Choose the Lighting controls and click-drag on the map to draw a light: the drag sets its radius. Then open the light's configuration to set bright and dim radius, colour, intensity and an animation such as a torch flicker. Tokens can carry their own light too (a character with a torch), set in the token's configuration.

Darkness Sources

Since V12, a light can be switched to a Darkness Source. Instead of brightening an area it makes it mechanically dark, so tokens without the right senses can't see inside it even at midday. That is how you build a cloud of magical darkness or a cursed room that swallows torchlight. (Before V12 this was faked with "negative" lights.)

Creating Atmospheric Lighting

• Warm orange torches: a cozy, medieval feeling.
• Cool blue magic: mystery and power.
• Flickering animation: life and movement.
• Dim corners: hide secrets and build tension.

Since V13 lights also have a priority setting that decides which light wins where they overlap, and lights can react to sound, pulsing with music or ambience.

Vision, Detection and Fog of War

Lights only matter if tokens can see them. With the scene's token vision setting on, each player sees only what their own tokens can see, cut off by walls.

Vision Modes and Detection Modes

In a token's configuration, its vision settings pick one vision mode, which decides how the world looks to that token: Basic, Darkvision (sees in the dark, usually in greyscale), Tremorsense, Light Amplification and others your game system adds. On top of that, a token can have several detection modes, which decide what it can notice: Basic Sight, See Invisibility, Feel Tremor and so on. A creature with tremorsense might "see" a hidden enemy's outline without seeing the room around it.

Many game systems set these up for you from the character's senses, so check your system's sheet before configuring tokens by hand.

Fog of War

With fog exploration turned on for a scene, areas a player has seen stay visible as a dimmed memory after they move away, while unexplored areas stay black. You can reset a scene's fog when the party returns to a dungeon that has changed.

New in V14, fog exploration can be shared: instead of each player remembering only what their own tokens saw, the party builds one map together. That is ideal for groups that split up, or for a single player running several characters.

Ambient Sound: The Hidden Dimension

Sound turns a silent picture into a place. A crackling fireplace, rain on the windows or tavern chatter makes players feel present.

Choose the Sounds controls and click-drag on the map to draw an ambient sound; the drag sets its radius, and you pick an audio file (OGG is a good choice). You can also drag a sound from a playlist onto the canvas. A player hears it while one of their tokens is inside the radius. Each player can turn ambient sound up or down with the ambient volume slider in the Playlists tab.

Sound Design Tips

• Layer your sounds: one quiet background loop for the room plus a few local effects.
• Use easing: let the volume fade toward the edge of the radius so sounds don't cut off abruptly.
• Mind the walls: walls can block sound, so the chatter stays inside the tavern.
• Local vs scene-wide: use ambient sounds for things that come from a place, and a playlist for music that everyone should hear.

Tiles, Drawings and Notes

The other placeable objects each have their own controls in the left toolbar. In V14 the scene controls are Tokens, Tiles, Drawings, Walls, Lighting, Sounds, Regions and Notes.

• Tiles: images placed on top of the map, such as furniture, a roof that fades when a token walks underneath, or a door image to animate. WebM tiles can be animated (a flickering brazier, a waterfall). V14 adds a tile Alpha Threshold setting for how the transparent parts of a tile image are treated.
• Drawings: shapes, freehand lines and text drawn directly on the scene. Great for quick sketches mid-session, labels, or a hastily drawn cave when the players go somewhere unexpected. Trusted Players can draw too.
• Notes: map pins linked to journal entries. A note on a building can open its description; a note on a dungeon room can hold your read-aloud text. Players only see notes for journal entries they are allowed to view.

V14 also makes everyday editing easier. Lights, sounds and notes can now be selected, copied and pasted like any other object. Every layer except Tokens gets a Placeables Palette button for editing many objects at once, and the new Placeables sidebar tab lists and filters every object on the current layer, so you can find that one misplaced light without hunting across the map.

Scene Regions and Region Behaviors

Regions (V12 and later) are areas you draw on a scene that can do things when tokens enter, leave or move inside them. Choose the Regions controls and draw a rectangle, ellipse or polygon; you can cut holes in a shape. V14 adds cone, ray and grid-cell shapes, shapes that stop at walls, and regions that can be attached to a token and move with it.

Common Region Behaviors

Many things that used to need a module (scene-to-scene doors, simple traps, difficult terrain) can now be done with core Regions. Monk's Active Tile Triggers is still worth knowing for more elaborate trigger chains.

Measured Templates Are Gone: Areas Are Regions Now

Scene Levels: Multi-Floor Maps (V14)

Before V14, a three-storey tower meant three separate scenes (or a community module). V14's flagship feature, Scene Levels, lets one scene hold several images stacked at defined elevations: the cellar, the ground floor and the upper floor of the Friendly Flagon, all in one place. Vision, movement and combat work across levels, so an archer on the balcony can see and shoot the brawl below.

• Set up levels in the scene configuration's Levels tab: add a level, give it an image and an elevation.
• Connect them with Regions: the Change Level behavior on a staircase moves tokens up or down, and Define Surface marks where a floor is.
• Keep it simple at first: two levels and one staircase is plenty for your first building. Test with a token before the session.

Separate scenes linked by Teleport Token regions still work well when floors are far apart or very different (a sewer under a city, a dream realm). Use levels when the floors share the same footprint and players will look between them.

Weather and Scene Transitions

Weather Effects

Core Foundry includes weather effects such as rain and snow, set in the scene's ambience options. Imagine the party entering a village as snow begins to fall. Use a Suppress Weather region so it doesn't rain inside the inn. If you want more effects than core offers, FXMaster (verified for Version 14 in October 2026) adds weather and screen effects, and its version 8 works with Scene Levels.

Moving Between Scenes

Link scenes together like a choose-your-own-adventure book. A Teleport Token region on a doorway or cave mouth sends tokens to a matching region on another scene. V14 also adds transition animations when the view changes scene, so the jump feels less abrupt.

Try It in Foundry: Build Your First Scene

Common Scene Creation Pitfalls

The Perfectionist Trap

Don't spend six hours on walls for a five-minute scene. Focus on what players will actually experience. A "good enough" scene played is better than a perfect scene never used.

The Light Pollution Problem

Too many light sources wash out a scene and make it slower to render. A few well-placed lights create better atmosphere than flooding everything with brightness.

The Scale Mistake

Always test your scale with tokens. That grand throne room might be a closet if your grid is wrong. Place a token and drag it: the movement ruler should show sensible distances.

The Old-Guide Trap

If a guide or video tells you to use the Measured Templates tool, or a module for basic multi-floor maps or teleporting between scenes, it was written before V14. Look for the Regions and Levels way of doing it instead.

Ideas From the Table

The Dynamic Dungeon

Make torches go out behind the party: put a region in each corridor with an Execute Macro behavior that turns off the light the party just passed. The creeping darkness behind them makes players genuinely nervous to backtrack.

The Living City

Give each district of a city its own ambient sounds: market chatter, temple bells, dock workers. Players can almost navigate by sound alone.

The Weather Storyteller

Use weather and darkness to reflect the story's mood: clear skies for victories, gathering storms as danger approaches, snow falling during an emotional reunion.

Scene Creation Resources

Where to Find Maps

• Buy: map makers' Patreons and storefronts such as DriveThruRPG; official Foundry adventure modules come with scenes already walled and lit.
• Free: the r/battlemaps community and asset sites such as CartographyAssets.
• Make your own: Dungeondraft for battle maps, Wonderdraft for world maps, or even a simple paint program.

Sound Libraries

• Freesound.org: thousands of free effects (check each file's licence).
• Tabletop Audio: ambience made for tabletop games.

What's Next?

You can now turn a blank canvas into a living place, with walls, doors, lights, sound, regions that react to the party and, in V14, several floors in one scene. These are stages where stories unfold.

Next, Actor Management fills these scenes with characters, monsters and NPCs. When your scenes start to feel slow, Performance covers image sizes, lighting cost and Performance Mode.