Encounters are the core mechanic of a tabletop roleplaying game, whether they are friendly encounters, exploration of room, or full on combat. So it’s not surprising that we spend a lot of design energy in making sure that its easy to start, run, and finish an encounter.

There are three distinct ways to start an encounter in Shard: on the fly, random, and planned.

Getting a DM can get up and running quickly on Shard is incredibly important to us, so we decided to dig in even more and streamline the experience. The net result was shifting the focus of the campaign to pivot around the Adventure Mode screen. We just released a number of enhancements that will allow many DMs to prep and run their entire game without ever leaving that screen. As a result, Adventure Mode is now the default landing location when you create a new campaign.

Creating tokens and loading maps just got a whole lot easier with integrated image search.

This week, we added support for random encounter tables both in design mode and in adventure mode. To help you take advantage of these new features, we also added a new book to everyone’s library called Random Encounters. In it, you will find instructions for creating your own random encounter tables and the first in a series of chapters that will added to the book in the coming weeks.