Characters

Six clients open, and one of them is dying. See which one without alt-tabbing.

What it’s for

Running several characters means several VellumFE windows, and the one that needs you is always the one you are not looking at. The Characters window puts a card on screen for every other VellumFE running on this machine — health, roundtime, status, room — so a health bar dropping in another client is something you see rather than something you find.

It also answers the other multi-account question: who is with whom. Grouped characters share an enclosing frame with the leader listed first, and solo characters stand alone. When the roster behind a frame is a guess rather than a parsed group reply, the window says roster unconfirmed instead of presenting the guess as fact.

Nothing to turn on. Every VellumFE registers itself when it starts, and each one finds its siblings on its own. Add the window and the cards appear.

Set it up

Common setups

A trouble strip above your main window

Add the window, set it about 12 rows by 46 columns, and leave the default rows on: roundtime with the status icons beside it, vitals, and the injury doll. Turn Your own card off in Edit Window… so the strip is only other people, and drag it to the top of the screen.

You’ll see: a row of narrow cards where a red health bar or an X glyph is visible from across the room, and your own client’s vitals aren’t duplicated in it.

Doll on the left, numbers on the right

In Edit Window… set Card columns to 2, set the Size weights to 1 and 1.4, then use the per-row column buttons to send Injury doll to column 1 and leave everything else in column 2. Raise Card width to about 240 px.

You’ll see: each card becomes a wide tile with a figure on the left and the bars stacked beside it, rather than a tall column you scroll.

Shape the card

Edit Window… ▸ Card contents offers:

The ten rows are Roundtime, Status icons, Vitals, Hands / casting, Debuffs & cooldowns, Mind state, Stance, Field experience, Encumbrance, and Injury doll. Vitals and Injury doll never share a line — put things beside them with columns instead.

Reading a card

Status glyphs

Status is a strip of single characters, borrowed from Lich’s groupbar: with six cards on screen, width is the scarce resource. Hover any glyph for its name. If you have a skin installed, its icon art replaces the letter.

Standing is deliberately not drawn — a glyph on every card at all times carries no information. Any other condition the game reports without a glyph of its own still appears, as its first letter.

Frames and headers

• Gold border, name in gold, (you) — your own card, the reference point.
• Red border, red room number — that character is in a different room from you.
• Shared frame around several cards — the game has these characters grouped.
• ⚑ Name above a frame — the group’s leader, listed first. ⚑ Name (not yours) means the leader is someone else’s character.
• ⚑ grouped with no name — the game says these are grouped but no roster has been parsed. Type group in that character’s client to confirm.
• roster unconfirmed in amber — one of these characters joined a group without seeing the full roster, so membership may be incomplete.

When a card goes uncertain

A card that is connected is current, however quiet it has been — updates arrive on change, so an AFK character’s silence means nothing changed, not that the data aged.

When a sibling’s connection drops, its card dims and keeps its last known values rather than vanishing, with an amber ● beside the name. Hover it for “Disconnected — last known values” (or “No update recently”). After two minutes with no reconnect, the card is dropped.

Values a character has never reported read as unknown rather than zero: an unreported stance shows Stance — with “Not reported by this character yet” on hover, because “Stance 0%” would read as fully offensive, which is a lie.

The Characters wall in a browser

The same wall exists as a web page at /characters, served by the built-in web server. Any running instance serves it, and the page dials every registered session itself, so it works from whichever port you reach.

1. Turn the phone server on: Settings ▸ Web ▸ Web Server (it is separate from the Characters window, which needs no setup of its own).
2. Type .webinfo. It prints a Web session URL with the pairing token in it.
3. Open that URL, then follow All characters at a glance →.

The page has its own ⚙ display panel for which rows to draw; those choices are stored in that browser and do not touch your desktop window.

⚠️ .webinfo warns you if bind = "127.0.0.1" — that is this PC only. Set bind = "0.0.0.0" under [web] so phones on your LAN can reach it, and use Tailscale or WireGuard off-LAN. Never expose the port to the open internet.

Tips & gotchas

⚠️ Same machine only. Discovery reads ~/.vellum-fe/web-sessions/, a directory on this computer, and dials each sibling over loopback. Characters running on a second PC never appear, however they are connected.

The window shows nothing until a second VellumFE is running. One client alone gets your own card and the “No other VellumFE sessions on this machine.” note. New clients take up to five seconds to appear — discovery re-reads the registry on that interval.

Turning this off is a Settings toggle, not a window action. Settings ▸ Web ▸ Multi-Account Status controls both halves: switch it off and this session stops publishing its status and stops reading anyone else’s. Deleting the window changes nothing about what is shared.

⚠️ This never opens you to the network. With the phone server off, the sidecar binds 127.0.0.1 regardless of what bind says, so enabling multi-account status cannot expose a session to the LAN even if bind was left at 0.0.0.0 from an earlier phone setup.

Injury dolls use your art, not theirs. Peers send a wound map, not artwork, so a character running custom doll art appears on the doll you have installed.

Debuffs and cooldowns are the default effect categories. Active spells and buffs are long lists that would bury a 150 px card. Add them in the TOML appendix’s effect_categories if you want them, and lean on the filter box.

Recoloring a condition needs a restart to reach these cards. They honor your [[indicator_template]] colors, but read them once per session.

The self card is always first. It sorts ahead of every sibling under Group order, so it is a fixed reference point rather than something to hunt for.

See also

• Injury Display — the full-size version of the card’s doll row
• Progress Bars — the dedicated bars for your own character
• Active Effects — the unfiltered view of the effects a card caps
• Web Client — the phone server behind the /characters wall

[[windows]]
name = "characters"
widget_type = "multiaccount"
title = "Characters"
row = 0
col = 0
rows = 12
cols = 46
show_self = false
card_width = 240.0
card_column_weights = [1.0, 1.4]
sort_by = "group"

[windows.card_row_columns]
injuries = 0
vitals = 1
rt = 1

[web]
multiaccount = true