Sound has arrived
Gamemasters can now enhance their Shard campaigns with audio without ever leaving the application. Whether you like mood setting background music, voice over descriptions of key locations, or sound effects for traps and spells, Shard has you covered. All of these audio clip types are now supported in campaigns and in books.
Audio Clips
Audio Clips are a new entry type for Shard. You can upload audio files for play in your campaigns.
Background Mood/Music: use these to play music or sounds designed to create a mood for a campaign setting or encounter. These sounds will loop until you stop them.
Sound Effects: use these to highlight a sound during play: trigger a trap, cast a spell, or just let players know that something interesting happened.
Voice-over: use these when you have a prerecorded voice to play: a villain or ally telling the players something or just a quick response from a character or monster.
You can also group sounds together to combine sounds in interesting ways.
Play all: play the sounds at the same time: combine rain and village noises together, or play intense music with your voice-over.
Random: pick one of a set of audio clips so that you don’t get the same sound every time for instance multiple different beast growls.
Books
Use books to organize sounds. Add audio clips to books. Audio clips can show as thumbnails or in a list format and can be played directly from the book. With the new support of creating multiple book tabs, gamemasters can organize sounds to make them easy to find an play just the right piece of music.
Books can also include links to audio clips. Audio links will show a special audio icon to make them easy to find and also allow play and stop directly from the link. This can work great to have audio clips to use for encounters or box text directly in books so that sound can easily be integrated into adventures.
Gamemaster Audio Tab
When audio clips are available gamemasters will see a new Audio tab to organize music. The audio tab allows gamemasters to control everything that is heard for the campaign.
See what is currently playing and control the volume of what everyone hears for each track playing.
Control the volume of what they are hearing.
See what has recently played to replay recent or frequently used sounds.
Search the entire audio selection to find an appropriate sound.
Volume Control
We know that people have different levels of sensitivity to sounds and may find different types of sounds more important than others when playing in a campaign. To help that each player can control the volume of sound independently. Additionally sounds are grouped to make it easy emphasize or de-emphasize different types of sounds.
Sounds grouping:
Background Mood/Music
Sound Effects
Voice-over
Dice
Gamemasters can control the different sound levels directly in the audio tab and players can control the volume using the new volume tool in player campaigns.
Gamemaster Volume controls
Player Volume Controls
For people using multiple browser windows or tabs there is also a master mute option so that keeps Shard from playing sounds through all of the windows at the same time.
Look for new options in the marketplace as we work with publishers to add audio options.