I don't know of any app that can apply fog of war to pdfs natively, especially on mac.
My suggestion would be to export the maps as images then upload them to roll20 (or any other VTT of choice). Have one browser window signed in as GM (on your mac) and another on the TV as a player.
You'll then be able to control fog of war from the DM view and it'll update on the player view. This is how I did it for running Tomb of Horrors on my tv as a map
Having bought a new TV for the fammily i plan to convert my old 48” TV into a digital mobile map for our gaming table.
i plan to use my macbook to controll the TV.
i would love some advise for a program that allows me to use pdf maps in combination with realtime controlled fog of war..
what software would you advise?
also looking for a good tools to create my own maps in pdf..
all advise is welcome
You are probably looking for dungeonfog if you want easiest to use solution that offers fog of war, public maps you can use from other creators (helps when players go off on a tangent), lots of assets and ease of creating maps. It does have a VTT mode you can use.
Higher quality would be to use dungeondraft and then use their VTT integrations to port the map you make (foundary VTT, Arkenforge and Fantasy Grounds to name a few).
If you want to go higher end, than try Talespire. Looks good, but will likely require more time to create the maps. Full 3D maps and tile based system.
I've been using Tableplop for this, but I'm still on the hunt for a better solution. However, Tableplop has some fantastic advantages:
It's incredibly simple to import an image to use as the background and set up fog of war
Browser based
Free
Registration is optional
But then the disadvantages:
Positioning the map on the TV at the right scale is a little tricky (some of the other tools I've seen, like Arkenforge, have native support for this where you tell it how big your TV is)
Since it's in a web browser, you lose a bit of screen real estate if you don't manually put it in full screen and hide the toolbar
There are some tool windows that need to be hidden every time you change to a new map and a small toolbar that can't be hidden at all (I may just write some javascript to paste into the developer tools to hide everything the next time we play, but that might be more of a hassle than clicking to hide as much as I can)
One thing to note on the fog of war is that you can either outline all of the rooms on your map ahead of time or do it on the fly as needed. If you do it ahead of time, it's a single click on the DM's screen to unhide an individual room/portion of a room. The drawing tools are rectangles, circles, polygons, and a freehand mode where you draw an outline. There's no paintbrush-ish thing.
Oh, one other tip if you decide to try it is that you'll want to open the DM's view in a regular browser window, but open a private tab for the TV's window.
Having bought a new TV for the fammily i plan to convert my old 48” TV into a digital mobile map for our gaming table.
i plan to use my macbook to controll the TV.
i would love some advise for a program that allows me to use pdf maps in combination with realtime controlled fog of war..
what software would you advise?
also looking for a good tools to create my own maps in pdf..
all advise is welcome
I don't know of any app that can apply fog of war to pdfs natively, especially on mac.
My suggestion would be to export the maps as images then upload them to roll20 (or any other VTT of choice). Have one browser window signed in as GM (on your mac) and another on the TV as a player.
You'll then be able to control fog of war from the DM view and it'll update on the player view. This is how I did it for running Tomb of Horrors on my tv as a map
Find my D&D Beyond articles here
You are probably looking for dungeonfog if you want easiest to use solution that offers fog of war, public maps you can use from other creators (helps when players go off on a tangent), lots of assets and ease of creating maps. It does have a VTT mode you can use.
Higher quality would be to use dungeondraft and then use their VTT integrations to port the map you make (foundary VTT, Arkenforge and Fantasy Grounds to name a few).
If you want to go higher end, than try Talespire. Looks good, but will likely require more time to create the maps. Full 3D maps and tile based system.
I've been using Tableplop for this, but I'm still on the hunt for a better solution. However, Tableplop has some fantastic advantages:
But then the disadvantages:
One thing to note on the fog of war is that you can either outline all of the rooms on your map ahead of time or do it on the fly as needed. If you do it ahead of time, it's a single click on the DM's screen to unhide an individual room/portion of a room. The drawing tools are rectangles, circles, polygons, and a freehand mode where you draw an outline. There's no paintbrush-ish thing.
Oh, one other tip if you decide to try it is that you'll want to open the DM's view in a regular browser window, but open a private tab for the TV's window.
Found a great tool that does do everything i need, and is browser based
Owlbear Rodeo
did some testing and it works great.. just need to convert my PDF maps.