Adventure Awaits
One of our primary goals at Shard Tabletop is to make tabletop role playing accessible to a wider audience. Lots of people would love to learn the game and start their own group, but have no idea where to start. Running your first game without ever having played can be intimidating.
We were thrilled to find the crew at Tabletale Games shared that mindset and we a thrilled to be partnering with them to advance that goal. Tabletale is a group of professional gamemasters with a strong background in acting and writing. They love the game as much as we do and provide an incredibly valuable service for those that want to learn to play.
Character Visibility
Shard Game Masters have asked for a way to set the visibility and edit-ability of character sheets and now they can. This option is now one of several that you can select on the new Campaign Settings dialog.
The campaign menu (accessed by clicking on the campaign name in the main adventure screen) now has a new Settings entry that consolidated some of the old menu options and added a few new ones. The Campaign Settings dialog is shown here and each option is explained below.
Friday Night Lights
The live stream community around Shard is growing. The newest entrant is Dessica Nuvell’s Lier. It airs on Twitch every Friday night at https://www.twitch.tv/dessicanuvell. The first episode is available on demand. A sneak peak at the way they used Shard to build out the shared world of Lier is also posted on the channel.
I caught up with Dessica to ask a few questions.
Ping and Measure
What’s that over there? Is that monster in range? How far to there? New pointing and measuring tools have arrived. Today, we released two new tools that can be used together or separately.
All the pretty dice
Players and game masters alike often add a little personality to their game with the dice they choose. Some players have a separate set for each character they play. I personally have a collection of dice I use to GM and a separate collection I use when I play. Never shall they meet.
Supermodels update
Over the past 48 hours, we have deployed a major set of software and content changes to the site. These changes allow the modeling of a number of things that were missing and introduce additional flexibility to some that were already there. The major changes are outlined in brief below.
Wild Shape
Today, I’m writing about a feature that’s been in the product for several months, but consistently generates a wow response when users discover it. One of the defining features of the druid class is wild shape. It’s a lengthy and complex feature by comparison to many others.
Visual Indicators and More Tokens
The latest release includes some new eye candy in the form of visual indicators for various health states and conditions. Each one is shown in this picture.
Conditions and Hero Abilities
Today’s update to Shard brings new tools to the table top.
Conditions: We expanded the modeling of conditions and now allow players or GMs to set them directly on the character sheet. Conditions have always allowed built in things like unconscious, prone, and stunned to be set from the initiative tracker and have a duration. Now you can set them directly on the character sheet by clicking the character name and selecting Add Condition.
Maps, Maps, Glorious Maps
We are incredibly proud to announce our latest content partnership. Domille’s Wondrous Works is joining forces with Shard Tabletop to bring GMs a wide and growing array of glorious maps. Just looking at them makes me want to go build encounters.