Faster pages, simpler hosting, and a sturdier home for Fog of War and MeG.
There has been quite a lot happening behind the scenes at Tools From Pavis during the last couple of weeks.
The biggest change is one that hopefully you will mostly notice by not noticing it: Tools From Pavis has moved to the Render hosting platform.
The old PythonAnywhere setup served the site well for a long time, but Tools From Pavis has gradually become a rather different beast from the collection of small utilities it started as. MeG has grown, Fog of War now has live player displays and synchronization, and considerably more is happening during an actual gaming session.
The move to Render gives the site a better foundation for all of this. Pages should respond faster, deployment and maintenance are simpler, and I have considerably better tools for seeing what is happening when something goes wrong.
In other words, not the most glamorous feature ever added to Tools From Pavis, but quite possibly one of the more useful ones.
A more reliable Fog of War
A fair amount of the work leading up to the move came from Fog of War.
The Live Player Display introduced a new challenge: the GM can now change something on one device and expect it to appear almost immediately on another. That sounds simple until browsers, networks, hosting services, phones, televisions and embedded Obsidian windows all join the party.
Quite a bit of plumbing has therefore been rebuilt.
Large pieces of tactical data, such as fog masks, are no longer pushed around unnecessarily with every synchronization message. The live display has become better at retaining its session identity, and several problems involving HTTPS proxies and generated links have been fixed.
There are also some useful new GM controls.
You can now switch between revealing and hiding areas of the map, and the active mode is much clearer. There is an emergency Black Out Players command for those occasions when the players really should not be looking at the map at all.
And if things aren’t behaving, pressing S opens the Sync Monitor, which provides a quick view of whether the GM, server and player display are still talking to each other.
Players also have their own local measuring ruler. They can check distances without filling the GM’s display with measurement lines.
MeG remembers its history
The other substantial piece of work has been less visible during play, but important for the long-term creature library.
MeG now keeps a permanent monthly history of the creature catalog.
I have restored and checked the available history back to May 2026, and comparisons can now look back over the previous twelve months rather than just a few recent releases.
This means the release notes can show more reliably how the catalog has changed over time: what has appeared, what has changed, and how the collection has grown.
There are also automatic checks intended to make sure that months don’t mysteriously disappear from that history in the future.
It is perhaps a slightly archaeological feature, but then catalog archaeology is surprisingly entertaining when you have accumulated enough creatures.
Lots of smaller things
As usual, a number of smaller improvements arrived while all this was happening.
Browsers should now pick up updated styles and scripts without requiring ritual cache-clearing ceremonies. Live tactical links have a cleaner lifecycle and expire after 24 hours. Various production errors and broken links have been fixed, and the diagnostic tools behind the site have improved considerably.
Most of these aren’t features you should have to think about.
That is rather the point.
A new home
So this update is less about adding another shiny button and more about giving Tools From Pavis a stronger foundation.
PythonAnywhere → Render
The aim is simple: faster response, easier maintenance, better diagnostics, and a more reliable platform for the increasingly live and interconnected parts of Tools From Pavis.
There will undoubtedly still be bugs lurking in dark corners. This is software, after all. But at least I now have a better lantern for finding them.
You can see the smaller changes on the What’s New page, and MeG’s expanded history in the MeG Release Notes.
And now that the plumbing has had some attention, perhaps I can get back to the important business of creating creatures and hiding them behind the fog.
You can find toolsfrompavis here like always https://toolsfrompavis.com














