Link Magic
Shard has long supported hyperlinks to things like monsters, items, and even custom types in the text of books and tables within those books. The text editor even suggests words that correspond to those types to help you create links. When you are reading a book inside or outside of a campaign, clicking on a link to one of these types brings up the associated monster stat block, item description or custom type.
Until today, that’s as far as it went. Links were simply helpful references. Today, that changed. Now the dialog that pops up with the relevant information has contextual actions depending on where you activate the link that allow you to do things like add the monster to the current encounter or a planned encounter or grant an item as treasure directly to shared treasure or add it and a treasure token to a planned encounter. Furthermore, the software examines the text before the link and looks for numbers or dice roll expressions and adds those to the action as well.
Adventure Text (from Empire of the Ghouls by Kobold Press)
Clicking on the beggar ghouls link shown in the adventure text above while in adventure mode brings up the monster stat block for those ghouls with an Add to Encounter button at the bottom (shown below). Clicking that button pops up a dialog that automatically rolls the 1d4 with options to reroll or adjust the number manually or add them directly to your current map/encounter (also shown below).
Monster Details dialog with contextual action for Add to Encounter
and the pop-up Add to Encounter dialog shown.
If that’s not magical enough, it gets even better for linked objects in tables. If a table row contains a link to any of the supported types (including custom types), then a dragon icon is inserted at the beginning of the row (shown below). Clicking on the dragon icon will automatically add all the items in the row to the current map if you are in adventure mode or to the encounter you are editing if you have an encounter edit dialog open. This makes it very possible to generate an entire adventure from a set of random tables. Just choose your map and start rolling.
One of many random trap tables from Treacherous Traps by Nord Games
We hope you enjoy all these enhancements. As always, feedback is welcomed. For the eagle eyed among you, you may also realize from the screenshots above that we made some significant enhancements to the die roller. That will be the subject of my next post.
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Addendum: we have created some learning articles on using these links.
Link Actions