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.
Underground Oracle joins the party
We are extremely pleased to announce that Underground Oracle Publishing (@uopublishing) has joined team Shard as our first content partner.
Dice, dice baby
Digital dice have arrived on Shard Tabletop. As with all things Shard, they are fully integrated and understand 5E rules like advantage, disadvantage, and criticals. Any time you roll a d20, the result window has the ability to add advantage or disadvantage to the roll. Any time you roll damage, the result window has a button to make it a critical.
Names, spells, and more
We just released enhancements to our built-in 5E character sheets.
Fate of Artanga
Chapter 3: Beneath Temple Arcana is available to play now. This adventure for level 3 characters continue the Fate of Artanga campaign arc. Picking up where Chapter 2 ended in the crypts, the characters delve deeper into the secrets of the lost Azumi empire, discovering secrets and magic that have been buried for more than 200 years. New monsters and a long forgotten caretaker await in the depth to challenge them.
Encounters
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.
Create and Share
We just released a set of features that make it even easier for you to create new content (races, classes, backgrounds, …) and share that content with your players.
Smart Fog
This week we added additional tools to DM interface to allow for smoother and more dynamic fog while maintaining ease of use and your ability to just load a map image and go.
Quickstart Revisited
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.
Image Search
Creating tokens and loading maps just got a whole lot easier with integrated image search.