What Is the Best VTT for Stars Without Number?
Short answer
The best VTT for Stars Without Number is whichever one already knows what a sector, a faction turn, and a starship are. Foundry with a community module gets you there after setup, Roll20 gets you there by hand, and a purpose built SWN tabletop starts there. Ours runs one game free forever with unlimited players.
There are three realistic options for running Stars Without Number online. Foundry VTT with a community SWN module is the most powerful and the most setup. Roll20 works but you build the sector, the factions, and the ship sheets by hand. A purpose built SWN tabletop like ours knows what a sector is before you type anything. The right answer depends on how much prep time you want to spend.
Foundry VTT plus a community module
Foundry is a one time purchase, self hosted or hosted for you, and there are community built Stars Without Number systems for it. If you already run Foundry for another game, this is the cheapest path in effort terms. The tradeoff is that community modules track the rulebook at whatever pace their maintainer has time for, and when a module goes quiet you inherit it.
Roll20
Roll20 has a free tier and a character sheet you can adapt. It is the fastest way to get a group into a room. It is also the option with the most manual work: a sector is a hex image you annotate, a faction turn is a note you update, and a starship is a page of text fields. Nothing in the tool knows the difference between a planet and a paragraph.
A purpose built Stars Without Number tabletop
This is the approach we took. The sector is an 8 by 10 hex grid because that is what the rules say a sector is. Planets carry atmosphere, temperature, biosphere, population, and tech level as real fields you can filter on, not prose in a note. Factions track assets, goals, and turn order. Starships carry crew, cargo, weapons, and deck plans. The hacking minigame follows the packet and response structure in the book.
The honest tradeoff: a bespoke tool only runs the game it was built for. If your group rotates through five systems a year, a generic VTT is genuinely the better buy. If you are running a long Stars Without Number campaign, the setup you skip adds up fast.
What it costs
Ours is free for one game on one system, forever, with unlimited players. Players never pay and never make an account, they join from a single invite link. There is no card and no expiry. Supporting on Patreon lifts the content caps and adds more systems at once, and your existing content carries over with no migration step.
This product is an independent product compatible with Stars Without Number by Kevin Crawford / Sine Nomine Publishing. Stars Without Number is the property of Sine Nomine Publishing. This product is not affiliated with or endorsed by Sine Nomine Publishing.
Related questions
- Is there a free VTT for Stars Without Number?
- Yes. Roll20 has a free tier you can adapt, and our Stars Without Number tabletop runs one game free forever with unlimited players, no card and no expiry. Foundry VTT is the one option here that requires a purchase before you can run anything.
- Does Foundry VTT support Stars Without Number?
- Not officially. There are community built Stars Without Number systems and modules for Foundry, which work well, but they are maintained by volunteers rather than by the publisher or by Foundry itself.
- Can I run Stars Without Number on Roll20?
- Yes, and plenty of tables do. You will be building the sector map, faction sheets, and starship records yourself, because Roll20 has no built in understanding of Stars Without Number structures.