Freedom to Choose
We have always believed you should have the ability to choose a digital tool like Shard and the content you love for your game independently. That’s why we focused hard on making it ease for you to create everything from maps to character classes in Shard. It’s also the reason we’ve worked hard to embrace a wide variety of publishers that produce content for 5th edition games.
One to things that has been a constant challenge is that the biggest publisher of 5th edition content does not believe in these principles. A fact they have demonstrated over and over again in the run up to their 2024 rules update. Despite the fact that game mechanics are not subject to copyright law, they continue to withhold their content from all but a select few platforms.
As a result, we can’t offer the complete books in our marketplace. What we can do is offer enough of the game mechanics to allow you to use the Shard character sheet with your favorite character options from the books you already own.
Our previous effort along these lines was to offer the ability to import a character from D&D Beyond. While that worked reasonably well, there were always holes like not being able to distinguish the revised version of various classes from the originals. Beyond’s export format offered no hints. With the advent of the 2024 edition, that problem has gotten far worse. Not only are the classes conflated, but spells and items that were revised are difficult to distinguish from the originals.
An alternative approach is required. To that end we are releasing content packs that reproduce the mechanical game components of each of the books that include character options, starting with the most widely held titles. These content packs will allow you to build characters from the books you already own. Nothing more, nothing less.
Example covers for the content packs.
No need to purchase yet another copy of the content you already own. Just download the content pack that corresponds to the book and build your favorite character. Content packs can be found here.
Long live #OpenDnD.
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