Bardic Tools Update - April 2026
In the words of Vecna, the immortal lich who haunts games all across the Forgotten Realms and beyond...
We are so back
Hello everyone, this is Borja, and contrary to what the Discord suggests, I'm not dead.
Although I kind of feel like it. It's been a grueling 3 months of pulling more overtime than I've done in years, but I've finally managed to park the freelance projects in a corner, to let every client know that I'll be unavailable for a while, and switch back on to full time Bardic Tools for two glorious months[1].
I hope to be more active on the Discord, make a dent in the long list of features that we need to have to get out of Early Access, and maybe work in a surprise or two.
I couldn't be more excited, or more thankful for your patience. Part of me expected Bardic Tools to die a swift death if I disappeared for 3 months, but it's honestly kept up pretty well!
Thank you all. Let's build great things together.
Speaking of great things...
Starter Kits: This could be a great mistake
Look. I don't love that Bardic Tools is pay to play. I like being able to afford the servers and offer cool features like uploading your own music, but I don't love that someone new to GMing has to spend money on yet another subscription to feel like they're doing a good job. Everyone should be able to run most fantasy TTRPG starter adventures for free with Bardic Tools.
I figured: What if we offer a limited version of Bardic Tools for free?
The key question was how to limit it. I want this limited version to be genuinely useful -- it should offer quite a few scenes, covering the most common fantasy locations: Your haunted woods, your desert towns, your non-desert towns, your creepy caves. You know what I'm talking about.
So with the help of the fine folks in our Discord community we made a list of 10 scenes that should cover most common locations.
And today, it's my great pleasure to announce the first, free-for-as-long-as-I-can-keep-it-free, Bardic Tools starter kit: bardic.tools/start/starter-kit
It has none of the features that cost the most server money; no saving boards, no uploading your own sounds. But I really hope this can be useful for people.
Will this be a great mistake? Maybe.
Maybe a lot of you cancel the subscription because you can just have it for free. If so, that's great! If the starter kit is enough for you, then honestly you're not getting the subscription's worth of value anyway.
Maybe people will abuse it, and it will break everything. I don't think this is likely (we'd need a lot of traffic, like 10.000x what we have now), but if it happens we'll have learned something.
I think it's worth giving it a shot.
Please let me know what you think! And if you know someone who is just starting, send them a link! It might be useful for them.
That's great Borja, but what about the current users?
I have stuff for you too!
Here, have a disgusting mushroom man spitting spores at you:
Oh, you don't want that? Too icky? How about a big corrupted ent stomping you flat?
What's that? You want to dodge it? Roll Dexterity.
...
... what do you mean, "natural 20"? Fine!
You dodge the tree's foot by a hair's breadth. In the same movement, you take out Omaetsugi, the knife that your father gave you in his deathbed, and fling it at the glowing green core of the ent's power. It slides through the branches in a whisper of a whistle. A subtle clink tells you -- you've hit your target.
The ent has barely enough time to turn its gnarly face towards you before the light leaves his eyes, his legs grow stiff, and gravity finally claims the beast that shouldn't have moved.
Cool, huh? These are some of the 56 new sounds we've added since the last update. As you can see, they mostly focus on plants and plant people.
Why, you ask? Well, let me tell you about...
The Daggerheart Experiment
The amazing Discord user @kalelkenobi pointed me to the Daggerheart community a long time ago. Our play group has dabbled with it, and I really like the system, but since I've never GM'd it, it was not really on my radar.
Turns out, it's growing fast! And the core game comes with super cool, unique expansions called campaign frames. A campaign frame is hard to define, but I'd say it is a very barebones setting, plus a central world conflict to build stories around. When I say barebones, I mean barebones. The free Whiterwild frame has fewer than ten pages, and it can easily keep you busy for six months of weekly sessions.
After deciding to create Starter Kits, I figured it would be a great idea to create starter kits for Daggerheart campaign frames. I asked the community which campaign frames they wanted to see: Reddit Post. The community weighed in, we got really cool ideas, and everything was good.
And then, a month ago, we sat down to actually create scenes for the Witherwild.
It didn't go well.
Here's the problem: Campaign frames are designed to give you, the GM, the tools you need to build your own adventures in that world. There are no descriptions of places, no boxed text, no more than two sentences per location. This is great for GMs. It gives you just enough guardrails to accomplish a great mood and make cool adventures without overwhelming you with a 300-page tome about a vampire simping for a girl that died hundreds of years ago[2].
But it's not great for premade scenes.
We found ourselves making up how a lot of the locations would feel, what the characters would hear in them, and what mood they would have.
Take for example, the big city of Haven. The only official things we know about them are that it's big, it's a little bit busy, and it's fighting against the jungle to get their hands on a cure for a plague they have. That's it. What is the climate? Dunno. What animals are there? Dunno either. So we had to make it up, and that's not good.
At the end of the day, your Haven may be completely different from our Haven.
Once we realized that, Nayla and I made the tough decision to pause production of Daggerheart scenes until the community converges on a more prescriptive set of adventures.
But hey, not all is lost! We have 56 new sounds, and 3 new scenes! And if your Witherwild happens to match the Witherwild we were imagining, I'm sure you'll enjoy these three beauties that Nayla put together:
(Also I put them in another starter pack for free, because why not: bardic.tools/start/witherwild. I may post it in the Daggerheart subreddit in case someone finds it useful.)
That's it!
That's it for this update.
I'm really looking forward to the next one. If everything goes well, the next update will have so many things to announce that you'll need multiple visits to the toilet to read it[3].
Again, thank you for your patience, from the bottom of my heart.
I can't believe we've made it this far, and I can't wait to see where we go.
-Borja
- And more, if the app grows enough, but I'm not going to give myself false hope↩︎
- If you know you know, and if you don't I'm talking about Curse of Strahd. It's a great campaign, but it's a big world with a lot of things to keep in your head, and if you're doing it right you're going to toss away half the book anyway.↩︎
- I can't be the only one who reads their favorite blogs there, right? Right!?↩︎