Shard Tabletop is a virtual tabletop and character sheet dedicated to the 5th Edition of the World's Greatest Roleplaying Game. Our focus is ease of use, seamless multi-device support, powerful homebrew tools, and providing high quality pre-packaged content.

Shard, as a shared moniker for collaborative work, has existed since Darren Shakib and Hal Howard met in high school in 1982. Two things that interested them both at the time were software design and Dungeons & Dragons.

One of the first programs they wrote was a dungeon crawler. While that project didn’t go anywhere, they both went on to successful careers in software development and design careers. Both spent over 20 years each at Microsoft developing products that are used by tens of millions of people everyday.

Through it all, the love of Dungeons & Dragons never faded. While individual campaigns came and went, the game endured and many friends were made at the table. It became a family pastime that embraced spouses, kids, siblings, and friends.

So now, they revisit the game to create tools for tabletop gamers by tabletop gamers. Tools that don’t require a degree in computer science to operate. Tools that are not confused about the difference between video games and making the tabletop experience better.

Shard Tabletop started with the development of a few tools for personal use and grew organically to a full virtual tabletop and character sheet dedicated to 5th edition rules. Friends started asking to use it for their games. Then friends of friends started asking and a simple idea turned into a shared project to bring these tools to the world.

The first public version was made available in May of 2020. Thanks to the feedback of thousands of users, significant new features and improvements have been added to the software every week since then. In January 2021, Shard officially launched a Kickstarter campaign, and with the help of 730 backers, we more than quadrupled our funding goal. Since then, we've continued to partner with several incredible content creators and are adding new features to the site on a constant basis.

Thank you for using Shard and for making a dream that started almost 40 years ago come true.