Art and Tokens
This week’s release includes a variety of new options for adding art to your creations. While the player experience may not be visibly very different, in the coming weeks, players should expect to see differences as creators, including us, adopt these new abilities.
Having great art really helps to pull people in and help tell great stories and we have had many requests for including more places for art within Shard. This release adds artwork to many of our entry types. Not only did we add support for art, but also now allow for a variety of images to give different perspectives. Here are the entries that now support artwork:
Classes/Subclasses: Artwork in the class details and card views.
Races: Artwork in the race details and card views.
Items: Artwork in the item details
Custom Types: Artwork in the details. Tokens that can be placed on maps (see more below).
By clicking on artwork, you can view a full list of artwork and scroll through it. Additionally, now when you click on artwork in a book for a campaign, the art will display in a dialog where you can browse through the art and select one to show as a handout.
We are taking money from our Kickstarter to commission artwork for all of our classes and races. This will roll out as soon as that art is completed.
Map Tokens for Custom Types
We have consistently received feedback (and found in our own games) that there are times where you want to have something on the map that has stats or participates in initiative order, but that isn’t really a monster or a character, for example: traps, vehicles, or buildings. Typically we have suggested using a monster or map token but neither really fully worked satisfactorily. To address this, we have extended the uses of custom types, as well as changed how map tokens can work in combat.
Custom types can now have a default token attached as part of the artwork. Any custom type that has instances with default tokens can now be added directly when adding a token to a map. Tokens created in this fashion will show the custom type in the creatures section when selected, similar to how clicking on a monster or character show their details. This displays information on the abilities of the token, and allows it to make dice rolls. To support these cases where custom types don’t really have character features, custom types now support a generic description field.
There are also new options to allow these tokens to participate more easily in combat. The map token includes two new options:
Show as token: normally map tokens are treated as part of the background and only move when the map is in object selection mode. Selecting “Show as token” causes the map tokens to move like monster or character tokens. Note: You can only rotate if in object selection mode.
Include in combat: normally map tokens can’t participate in initiative turn order. Selecting “Include in combat” allows map tokens to have an initiative and participate in turn order like any monster or character.
Additionally, map tokens can now have hit point and AC values. All of these settings can be configured on the fly or preconfigured in encounters, and should provide a plethora of combinations to handle a wide variety of uses.
We have lots of great content that will be coming out in the upcoming weeks that use these new capabilities. Hopefully, these capabilities will allow you to customize and make your own amazing creations as well.
Meet other members of our community and let us know what you think about these new features on Discord, Reddit or Facebook or follow us on Twitter @shardtabletop for regular updates.