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.
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.