D&D encounter builder

Build the fight tonight. Run it at the table.

An encounter builder for D&D 5e that finishes the job: a full SRD bestiary, live difficulty math, and one-click deployment to your party.

Pick monsters, watch the difficulty meter, attach the loot. When the swords come out, deploy: initiative rolls itself, your players see the fight the way their characters would, and the treasure lands the moment it ends.

Start free Browse encounter templates
Full SRD bestiary
plus your own monsters
Initiative rolls itself
set the moment you deploy
Loot drops on end
the attached hoard lands
Encounter builder with live difficulty meter
An encounter taking shape for The Lantern Company: monsters on the roster and the difficulty meter reading the party live, from easy to deadly.

Sound familiar?

The math lives in another tab

An encounter calculator in one tab, monster stats in another, your party's levels in your head. None of it is connected to the campaign you run.

Initiative on a sticky note

You rolled for nine monsters by hand, and now the turn order lives in the margin of your notes next to their hit points.

The loot is an afterthought

The fight ends, everyone looks at you, and the hoard is whatever you can improvise at ten at night.

ScryRPG's answer: build the fight where the campaign lives, and let the tool carry the math, the order, and the loot.

How your table runs it

Four steps from bestiary to loot drop.

Build it, balance it, deploy it, and run it to the loot drop, all inside the campaign your party plays in.

The ScryRPG bestiary browser: SRD monsters filtered by challenge rating and type, ready to add to an encounter
1

Pick from the bestiary

The full SRD bestiary, searchable by challenge rating, type, and edition. Add your own monsters alongside it, or give a lore NPC a stat block and let your villain step onto the field.

SRD plus your own monsters

The ScryRPG encounter builder with monsters on the roster and the difficulty meter reading the party live
2

Balance it while you build

The difficulty meter reads your party's size and level and does the math live, from easy to deadly. You always know where the fight sits before anyone rolls.

Easy to deadly, computed live

A live encounter from the GM side in ScryRPG, with initiative order and monster hit points in view
3

Deploy when the swords come out

One click and the encounter goes live for your party: variants roll, initiative rolls, the order sets itself.

One click, the order sets itself

Loot table deploy modal with party selection in ScryRPG
4

Run it, end it, loot it

Track hit points as the fight unfolds and reveal it when the party walks in. When it ends, the attached hoard drops and the battle writes itself into your campaign's timeline.

Logged in the campaign timeline

Two views of one fight

Your table sees the fight the way their characters do

Encounters are invisible to players until you reveal them. When you do, everyone sees the same fight at the right fidelity, enforced by the server, not the honor system.

The GM view of a live encounter in ScryRPG, with full stat blocks and exact hit points for every monster

The GM view

You see everything: stat blocks, exact hit points, your tactics notes.

The player view of the same encounter in ScryRPG, showing initiative order and health bands instead of numbers

The player view

They see the fight: names, initiative order, and how hurt everything looks. Healthy, wounded, critical, down. No numbers, no spoilers.

Start free

Connected to the rest of the campaign

The fight doesn't stand alone.

Encounters read from the same campaign your lore, loot, and party live in, so the fight stays part of the story.

Your villains have stats now

Give a lore NPC a stat block and it can join any fight. When the battle ends, the timeline remembers who was there.

Lore that connects

One command puts it on the battlemap

If your table plays in Foundry, the module, currently in closed beta, sends actors, tokens carrying your creatures' art, and a rolled initiative order straight to the table on deploy. ScryRPG preps the fight; Foundry plays it out.

See the Foundry integration

Also in Discord

The fight shows up where your party talks.

/encounter shows your server the fight: initiative order and health bands, filtered to what each player's character knows.

See the Discord integration

Bring it to the table

Print the whole encounter as cards.

Send the encounter overview, every authorized unique creature, and its attached loot into one Card Deck. Table Reference keeps each creature concise; choose Full Rules when complete stat blocks should continue across numbered faces.

See printable encounter and monster cards

Encounter FAQ

Quick answers.

Is this a virtual tabletop?

No. ScryRPG preps and deploys the encounter. Your table runs the battle wherever it likes: theater of the mind, a VTT, or graph paper. We keep the campaign; the battlemap is yours.

Where do the monsters come from?

The bestiary ships with the D&D 5e SRD under the Creative Commons license (CC-BY-4.0), with attribution kept on every creature and every fork. You can add your own monsters alongside them, private or shared.

Which systems does it support?

Encounter building with full stat blocks and difficulty math is D&D 5e first. Characters from any supported system can join a fight as combatants, and more systems are on the way.

Can my players see monster hit points?

They see health bands: healthy, wounded, critical, down. You see the numbers. And until you reveal an encounter, players don't see it at all.

When the fight ends, the attached hoard drops into the loot flow and every claim lands in party inventory. More questions? Read the full FAQ.

From the blog

Go deeper

Balancing D&D Encounters

Why the CR math is a starting point, not a promise, and how to read what your party can take.

How Many Magic Items Should I Give My Players?

A practical take on pacing magic-item rewards so power growth stays satisfying instead of runaway.

The Psychology of Loot at the Table

Why a reward that fits the moment lands harder than a bigger pile, and how to use that at your table.

Build the next fight tonight.

Start free. Pick the monsters, watch the meter, and deploy when the swords come out.

Start free See the whole campaign