More magic…

Spells are a huge part of playing the game. Game Masters have had the ability to add tokens to the map representing spell areas of effect almost from the beginning of Shard and now players can too.

As part of this change, we created a token type called Spell Token. Spell Tokens come in all the standard shapes (cone, cube, cylinder, line, rectangle, and sphere). They can be created on the fly by selecting a shape, size, and color or by uploading an image and sizing it. You can give your token a name that will be remembered and associated with your character. Once it’s on the map, you can move it or rotate it to represent the area of effect of your spell.

There are two ways for a player to access this new functionality while playing the game. The first is directly from the spell details shown above, note Add Spell Token circled in red. Pressing that button invokes the Spell Token Dialog shown below. Note, that Shard is smart enough to parse the text of the spell and pick the correct shape and size, in this case: 15 ft Cone. You create a token by simply selecting the color and pressing ok.

For a few spells, we have also added sample spell tokens with images to the Shard Player’s Handbook. When you click Add Spell Token of one of those spells, you will all get the choice to use the pre-defined sample. Burning Hands actually has such a token. It’s shown below on the map. In addition to the three very unhappy goblins, note the rotation handle that allow you to position the direction of attack as needed.

The second way to access or create Spell Tokens while playing is a new button that is been added to the player toolbar. The Magic Wand Icon will drop down a list of your most recently used tokens and an option for creating a new one as shown here.

Viola! Two ways to add spell tokens to the board and add a little more magic to your game.

To make Spell Tokens even more exciting an encourage artists to create them, you can create new spell tokens as Artwork and package them up for sharing and eventually for sale in the marketplace. Each Spell Token has a name which should be unique to the artist or publisher that created them and a set of keywords that correspond to the spell or spells that they are designed to represent. If you open the properties of the Sample Entangle token that comes with the Shard Player’s Handbook, you’ll see the following properties.

Adding keywords to list for any spell or spells this token could be used to represent. The keywords provide Shard the necessary information make the tokens automatically show up in the pick list on the spell details card. So if, for example you acquired a pack of Druid Spell Tokens and the entangle token was called Jake’s Fancy Entangle, you would see that name and the Sample Entangle name in the pick list when you open the spell card to add a token to the map. because both had the keyword Entangle listed in their properties.
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