Shard Tabletop
Shard Tabletop is a virtual tabletop focused on streamlining play for Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition and similar games. With the freely available D&D System Reference Document, a vast selection of third-party content, and user-friendly homebrew creation tools, Shard Tabletop is excellent for game masters who run a highly custom game or prep on the fly. Its bustling marketplace of creators, a healthy selection of free content, and its ability to search up images and maps directly from the internet offers GMs a toolbox of adventure creation at their fingertips. Perhaps Shard's greatest assets are its player resources. Automated character sheets, resource tracking, dice rolling, targeting, attack rolls and damage, initiative tracking, and customization options make the player experience smooth. Quickly searchable rules with clickable links, condition trackers, and tools tailored for playing 5e are all readily available to players without the GM needing to set up or program a thing. For game masters who do love to tinker, however, they'll find Shard's tools for building NPCs, monsters, items, custom spells, encounters, even entire classes and subclasses simple and intuitive to use. While Shard is not officially licensed by Wizards of the Coast, it's still a great option for folks who love to explore the third-party ecosystem and build things for themselves, and its focus on a single game system makes it easy to use for that purpose.
Popular RPGs using Shard Tabletop
Tales of the Valiant
Welcome to the Labyrinth, infinite worlds linked by twisting corridors of magic. Here, you find realms like Midgard, Hades, the Dreadful Domains, and homebrew creations tied together by the mysterious will of the Maze. These countless worlds rarely resemble one another on the surface, but share a unifying truth—heroes shape them. The Tales of the Valiant RPG is a Black Flag Roleplaying Game from Kobold Press. This means it keeps all the best parts of D&D 5e and adds a Kobold Press spin to the well-loved game. It combines the Creative Commons foundation of 5th Edition with new elements to create a powerful Kobold-style 5E with teeth.
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Shard Tabletop Quick Start Guide for Gamemasters
Mr. Tarrasque walks you through creating a campaign on Shard Tabletop! Once you've opened a new campaign and given it a name, you can begin with a map. Upload a map you want to use, load one you have access to on Shard (perhaps from a free map pack), or search the web for an image to use as your map. You can set up encounters on the fly directly on the map and add monsters, traps, and treasure, or create them in advance and they won't begin until you activate them. You can also fog your map and create clickable regions to unfog automatically, or clear fog manually with your mouse.
You can then invite players to your campaign, who will see your map. When an encounter starts, you can automatically roll and sort initiative and track whose turn it is. Clicking on a monster pulls up its stat block, from which you can roll its attacks, damage, and saving throws, as well as track the usage of its abilities and resources such as hit points. When the encounter finishes, experience points distribute automatically, and players might even find the associated treasure.
Shard has various other features, including journals, handouts, visual aids, and custom creation tools, but this will be enough to get you going on your first adventure!
Shard Tabletop Quick Start Guide for Players
The first thing almost any player will want to do after getting into Shard Tabletop is make a character. When you open a new character, you'll be able to pick their race, background, class, and abilities like normal, and Shard will automatically update your sheet as you do. With your character complete, you can upload or search the web for a token, which you can customize with a border and background.
Once you're invited to a campaign, you can choose a character to add to it. While on a map, you can click and hold to ping, and click and drag to move your token. Shard automatically displays a measurement of how far your character is moving. You can track your inventory, equipped armor and weapons, hit points, spells, and other resources in your character sheet. And you can roll nearly anything, from attack rolls to damage to skills to saving throws, just by clicking on it. You can then roll with advantage or disadvantage, roll critical hit dice, or reroll dice by clicking on them in the chat log.
For magic spells, you can track spell slots and create custom area of effect tokens, which you can move around on the map to maximize your effectiveness. A rest button allows you to take a short or long rest and automatically resets any resources you'd regain from that rest. And the initiative button adds your character to an encounter's initiative tracker. In combat, you can even target an enemy's token, roll an attack and damage or cast a spell, and Shard can automatically determine if the attack hits, if the monster makes its saving throw, and how much damage it will deal.