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Call Familiar: The digital tabletop that feels like magic
by Call Familiar
Join the party early! Follow the project now to unlock an exclusive Discord role, giving you access to upcoming Alpha Playtesting, and a direct line to us, the creators.
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Imagine: A low growl from your monster — the voice you've struggled to nail in the past flows easily now. Your players lean in, sweat and anticipation on their faces. No hunting for the right tab or herding everyone in for the cinematic moment. The table just comes alive, and the story carries everyone with it.
If you've ever run a session online, you know what stands between you and that moment: video chat in one window, a VTT in another, music in a third, coordinating with everyone like you're the game's IT. Managing stacking subscriptions, tools that don't talk, and dropping important story beats with tab-switching.
We didn't want another VTT in that pile. We wanted an ecosystem, an all-in-one, a single app that acts as a platform where every piece of the table can be crafted, shared, and used by everyone.
So we built it.
Built for:
The overwhelmed GM who wants to stop fighting their tools, and get back to running their fights.
The tabletop newbie still finding their voice, and eager to step into story.
The grizzled tabletop vet who doesn't want to run tangled chains of cloud services.
Aspects are the building blocks of everything in Call Familiar. Built with images, particle effects, sound emitters, and other resources - you can stack them, nest them, and wire them together with events. Use Aspects to create encounter canvases, control your video chat ui, create animated characters and much more.
With ARI, every surface of Call Familiar is open to you. Your battle maps, your video chat, your entire table - all Aspects, all yours to compose.
The best tool doesn't ask you to think about it. In Call Familiar, we help the table come alive and the story carry everyone with it - the tool fades into the background so the cinematic moments flow on their own.
When creating an Aspect, it's as easy as dragon-dropping whatever effect or visual you want, and then tweaking the values to taste.
Cinematic video chat where the table is the stage. Place player tiles around a scene you designed. Spatial audio puts voices where the characters are. Aspect events - lightning, rain, scene transitions - fire when the story calls for them.
Battle maps that breathe.Time-of-day shaders cycle the same map through dawn, noon, and dusk - author once, replay everywhere. Sounds are placed inside the world. The rushing river is in the river, not in your speakers.
Map art by Astargon - dynamic Time of Day rendered live in Call Familiar
Control what everyone hears sees. Manage the idle view of the battle map, switch the video chat layout to something that better suits the mood, manage background music and background audio effects. Find the perfect battle map in seconds. Drop it in. Drawing your avatar taking you a long time? See what professional artists have cooked up already, just for you.
Because Aspects are so easy to create, the marketplace can sell anything: backgrounds, encounter maps, music beds, particle effects, character avatars, even entire chat canvases. Creators publish; you drop it in; the table changes.
Human-only artists. Aspects (and there contents) are made by people, sold by people, paid for by people. No LLM bot "art" will be allowed.
If you're a Patreon creator, link your account and create a marketplace stall for your Patreon. You can then publish to your Call Familiar Patrons directly - a simpler distribution channel that pays alongside your existing supporters, free of charge. However, if you want exclusivity so that only your patrons can access your content - you can set that up too - with your Patreon distribution, you only pay for exclusivity.
The platform is the same. The way you show up is yours.
We charge for: infrastructure cost and platform access. Not for features.
Astralborne users are the few, the dedicated, the ones that want to further support Call Familiar and what we're trying to build. While there will be some pretty sweet cosmetics only available to the Astralborne, we vow to not gate any of the real features, or the crunchy bits of tech - Call Familiar is for everyone - the Astralborne just get a few additional perks.
Supporting large and professional groups costs us more in backend costs, development, and support. We charge for Astralit tables to keep the Lanternlit tables free!
Creators keep 85%, and 15% goes to us. No AI. No exclusivity required. Free Patreon integration.
We're early. You'd be at the table from the start.
Follow this campaign to hear from us at each milestone. Courteney and I live together in our haunted house, with our gaggle of children, pets, and projects.
I'm AJ, and I lead engineering and product design. I've spent 16+ years in the games industry on engines, gameplay, and tools, and almost 12 years tinkering with tech for Call Familiar.
Courteney is co-founder and art lead. She is the reason this is a company and not a side project.
You'll see Courteney in most of our media utilizing her various in-app avatars in a lot of our material - partly because the avatar tech is good and we want to show it, and partly because that's how she prefers to be on camera. Both are valid ways to show up at the table! Why will you be charging for groups over five?
A primary objective we have is to keep Call Familiar free for the most number of groups possible. However, the system has to work harder the bigger the group. So remote groups of 5-and-under staying free was the balance we struck, because most importantly we NEVER want to paywall features.
What game systems do you support?
All of them, and none of them. Call Familiar is system-agnostic. This means we have no built-in character sheets to migrate, no rules engine to fight. Use D&D Beyond, Pathfinder tools, Foundry modules, or homebrew alongside CF however you like.
Do I need internet?
For remote tables, yes. For LAN or in-person play, no - and in-person/LAN play is free at any group size.
What platforms?
Windows desktop at v1 launch. Mac, Linux, and mobile come in later releases.
Join the party early! Follow the project now to unlock an exclusive Discord role, giving you access to upcoming Alpha Playtesting, and a direct line to us, the creators.
Join 58 other
people!
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