Greetings, adventurers!

As we close the tome on 2025 and prep a fresh character sheet for the quests ahead, it feels like we just wrapped a multi-arc campaign — the kind where the party grows stronger, stories deepen, and side quests turn into things you still talk about later.

Let’s recap The Forge’s 2025: a year of leveling up, powering up, teaming up, and sometimes laughing our way through chaotic mini-games.

Pull up a chair. The fire’s warm, and the story’s good.

⚔️ Chapter I: The Year We Reinforced the World (Literally)

January was about quiet fortifications.

Many upgrades happened behind the DM screen (new infrastructure layers, sturdier services, better load balancing), but their effects rippled everywhere: faster world launches, snappier asset handling, crisper Bazaar previews, and smoother campaigns.

We polished core systems, refined installation feedback, and overhauled small but mighty workflows in the UI. Players got long-requested boons like the Notification Drawer, a sleek quest log for your account to keep alerts, updates, and messages neatly in one place.

During our 5th Anniversary Livestream, we revealed the Bazaar Card Redesign — a visual and structural upgrade making browsing packages feel like flipping through magic-item cards: clearer visuals, cleaner info, sharper organization.

It wasn’t glamorous work — more like a patient wizard perfecting spells, but it set the foundation for everything that followed.

🗺️ Chapter II: New Features & Workflow Improvements

By spring, those foundational runes began to glow.

The Bazaar got a significant overhaul: faster browsing, improved sorting that better surfaced both long-time favorites and lesser-known creators, clearer install feedback, and better media previews.

Alongside this, a steady stream of Bazaar-focused bug fixes throughout the year helped make browsing, purchasing, and installing content more reliable and predictable. Your marketplace became cleaner, friendlier, and simply more enjoyable to use.

We added improvements to asset management and bulk downloads too, turning tedious tasks into single-action convenience.

These weren’t just features; they were quality-of-life improvements across the Forge experience.

🎲 Chapter III: Foundry V13 — The Big Upgrade, Now Supported

With the release of Foundry V13, we took on one of our largest technical quests yet: full platform support.

V13 introduced significant architectural changes and stricter module requirements, and we treated it exactly as it deserved — not as a routine update, but as a major system migration. We reinforced deployment and compatibility layers, ran extensive real-world testing, smoothed out edge-case issues, and guided creators with clear, practical upgrade advice.

Only once we were confident in its stability did we officially recommend Foundry V13 on The Forge.

Forge users gained a reliable, well-tested path to V13 — an upgrade that felt polished rather than perilous. It was a big lift, but one that strengthened the platform’s foundations and prepared The Forge for smoother performance and even more powerful adventures ahead.

🎉 Chapter IV: Five Years of Forging — And We’re Just Getting Started

Spring ushered in a milestone: The Forge turned five years old!

We celebrated with a livestream packed with insights, updates, roadmap reveals, and lookbacks at how far we’ve come since our humble beginnings. And of course… we didn’t forget the loot. The anniversary sale delivered treasure chests of content for everyone.

It was a joyful reminder that this platform was built by a team but shaped, fueled, and uplifted by the community surrounding it.

🌟 Chapter V: Stars of the VTT Galaxy

Our Stars of the VTT Galaxy series shone brightly in 2025.

We interviewed:

• Renflowergrapx, whose illustrated maps and tokens spark instant joy
• David North, a creature-token virtuoso
• Domille's Wondrous Works, the creator of atmospheric and richly detailed environments
• KaKaRoTo, who made two appearances to share deep insights into development, creativity, and the future of VTTs

These stories weren’t just spotlights.
They were reminders of why this community thrives: because it’s full of imaginative, passionate creators who care deeply about their craft.

🎮 Chapter VI: Mini-Games, Mischief & Community Challenges

2025 wasn’t just about tools & features — it was also about play.

This year introduced a trio of bite-sized Forge-exclusive diversions:

🃏 Dungeon Solitaire — card-crawling strategy with addictive charm.
🕸️ Spider Solitaire — spooky, patient, seasonal fun.
🎄 Naughty & Nice — our very first multiplayer holiday mini-game, filled with festive chaos.

We also celebrated International GM’s Day with a heartfelt (and often hilarious) community contest that showcased just how much love GMs bring to our tables.

If 2025 proved anything, it’s that The Forge can be both powerful and playful.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Chapter VII: New Party Members Join the Campaign

Every expanding kingdom needs strong adventurers, and 2025 was a year of party-building.

We started the year by welcoming three incredible reinforcements: Joe and Valdemar, experienced developers diving into fresh features and future content, and Sebastian, a DevOps specialist whose early infrastructure work already strengthened our back-end and update systems.

Later, we welcomed new party members: developers, designers, support heroes, and creative voices like Arijan, Andie, Adrian, Julicorne, Josh, and Ticiano, among others. Their contributions quickly made their way into features, fixes, support responses, UI polish, and countless behind-the-scenes improvements.

The Forge grows stronger when our team does — and this year, our roster truly leveled up.

📜 Chapter VIII: Hard Topics, Honest Conversations

Not every quest is glamorous.

In 2025, we rolled out an important Terms of Service update regarding international sanctions — a necessary compliance and moral step, handled with care and responsibility. We followed this with a detailed Q&A post to ensure clarity for those impacted.

And while we strengthened policies and compliance, we also made a significant communication choice: we officially left X/Twitter. The platform is no longer aligned with the experience we want for our community, so we moved on, focusing our energy on spaces where conversations, creators, and adventurers thrive.

🐉 Chapter IX: Tales Beyond Code — Humor, Heart & Halloween

Side-quests remind us why we love adventuring.

❤️ Love at First Roll shared personal stories from the team about how TTRPGs changed their lives.
😂 Taking Immersion Too Far poked fun at our own enthusiasm.
🎃 Rolling for Fear blended Halloween chills with Bazaar highlights.

These were moments of laughter and warmth — proof that The Forge is built by people who love games just as much as the community does.

💚 Chapter X: Closing the Tome on 2025 — Our Thanks

As we wrap this year’s chronicle, we’d like to thank you: our players, creators, GMs, supporters, and friends.

Thank you for every world built, story told, bug report submitted, package purchased, laugh shared, and adventure played on our platform.

The Forge exists because of you, and it keeps growing because of you.

Here’s to the quests we completed together in 2025, and to all the unforgettable journeys waiting in the year ahead.

🔮 Chapter XI: A Sneak Peek at 2026

While 2025 focused on strengthening foundations, 2026 is shaping up to be a year of refinement and rethinking how The Forge feels to use, and how flexibly it supports games.

A refined Forge experience is on the horizon.

We’re working toward a more streamlined interface with fewer clicks, clearer paths, and faster access to what matters most when prepping or playing. A refreshed visual design is coming too, with full Light/Dark mode support that automatically adapts to system settings, along with a cleaner, more modern look across the platform.

Accessibility and responsiveness are core to this redesign. The Forge is moving toward WCAG 2.2 standards, bringing improved contrast, color-blind friendly options, better readability, and stronger support for keyboard navigation and screen readers. At the same time, the experience is being optimized to feel just as smooth on phones as it does on wide-screen setups.

We’re also rethinking how The Forge supports multiple games and Foundry versions.

Game Manager will continue to support running different Foundry versions per game, but on much stronger foundations. Users will be able to install different versions of systems and modules for each game. Even when multiple games share the same Foundry version, each can run its own set of module versions. This removes a long-standing source of friction and makes managing parallel campaigns far more predictable.

Behind the scenes, this flexibility requires a significant overhaul of The Forge’s back-end infrastructure. The goal is to deliver all of this in true Forge fashion: powerful, reliable, and as close to no-hassle as possible, while keeping data usage efficient.

More details soon, but the dice are already rolling.

🎄 Chapter XII: Happy Holidays

All in all,
2025 was a year of steady leveling — not just one spell, but a full spellbook.

Together, we refined systems, unlocked new features, empowered creators, and forged a stronger, more vibrant community. Every update, story, adventure, and surprise added another page to this shared chronicle.

Here’s to rolling high, exploring new worlds, and telling the kind of stories that linger long after the session ends.

Until Next Time, Adventurers…

Happy gaming, happy holidays, and see you in 2026! 🎲🥂