The Bazaar is The Forge’s repository of Systems, Modules, Worlds, Assets, and more.
The primary purpose of the Bazaar is to allow you to easily browse for existing packages to install directly into your games, while showing a more rich interface, with screenshots, install statistics, reviews, detailed search and more.
That user interface is not yet ready, but the Bazaar’s core functionality is already available through the Foundry installers for worlds, systems and modules, directly from the setup page.
The Bazaar will also allow content creators to sell assets or pre-made adventures to you.
The second purpose of The Bazaar is to provide some performance improvements and to reduce unnecessary duplication of files. These additional features and advantages of the Bazaar are available now :
- Any systems or modules installed through the Bazaar will not be using your Data Quota allocation
- All systems and modules are optimized to make use of the Assets Library features and our worldwide network of servers to increase performance and make your games load much faster, wherever you are located
- Installing a system or module through the Bazaar is instantaneous and skips the Download and Install phase that Foundry usually needs.
To update all your systems and modules to use the Bazaar, simply click on the “Update All” button in the Systems and Modules section of Foundry’s Setup page :
and all the packages will be re-installed from the Bazaar.
To use the Bazaar and install new packages from it, simply use the “Install World”, “Install System” or “Install Module” button in Foundry’s Setup page
You will then see the regular Foundry installer. The packages available are automatically retrieved from the Bazaar and when you install a package, the Bazaar version will be used.
Do note however, that if a system or a module has compendium packs, those packs will need to be copied to your data folder and will count towards your Data Quota. As an example, the D&D 5e system will use 6MB instead of 70MB and WFRP system will use 3MB instead of 197MB. The PF1 and PF2e systems include a very large set of compendiums so they will use respectively 16MB and 39MB of Data.
Note also that if you wish to install a specific package without using the optimized Bazaar version, you can do so by using its Manifest URL and adding ?bazaar=disabled to the URL.