Bardic Tools Update - July 2025

Hey folks!

Borja here, coming from once-again-rainy London. After the sweltering July, everything is right again in Old Blighty.

I honestly thought this month was going to be quiet, and that nothing much would happen in Bardic Tools. I was wrong. So wrong. Here's the tea:

• Two new features (that you've been requesting for a while) just dropped.
• Bardic Tools was nominated to the ENNIES! (there's a cringy video if you read to the end)
• Composer Spotlight: Scott Buckley makes worlds come alive.

New Features!

Last month, I introduced the favorite feature to the library. It was fun, and a quick glance at the backend tells me that you've been using it a lot!

Well, there was still one natural step to make The Library as useful as I would like it to be. Tagging your own sounds.

It's here! You can create your own tags, tag your own sounds, add custom tags to the sounds in The Library, and search the new tags!

How do you do it? Here, watch this:

That's it!

The only thing you can't do is remove our tags from sounds in The Library. Sorry, those stay.

This feature completes the vision I had when we re-designing The Library: You can set it up however you want, with whatever tags make sense to you, so that you find what you want quickly.

I want to thank you for giving your feedback when you could. Even an emoji response in the Discord was very useful to know whether I was on the right track! You also gave me tons of great ideas that are not implemented yet. Don't worry! Those are not forgotten. I'll come back to The Library in time, and make it even better-er.

Moving on!

Let's talk about Discord user @SaintSix_. He and I have been IRL friends for a long time. Last month, he kindly offered to help me trim the ever-growing backlog. As a result, one of the most-requested features is now live in Bardic Tools: Volume sliders for Effects!

I really struggled including this feature, as I love how effect cards only have one button, but the community has spoken, and you definitely want it, so we had to listen! Honestly, I love how they turned out:

Please note that some sound effects might still be too quiet. This is because the effects themselves need to be equalized to bring them to an industry-standard volume. That's on me. I recently created a mechanism to easily update sounds in the backend, so if you find a quiet effect, please let me know the name of it and I'll add it to a batch of effects I'll get to during an evening or a weekend.

That's it for features! Next!

Bardic Tools was nominated for the ENNIES!

So many, many moons ago, I entered Bardic Tools for consideration in the ENNIES, often talked about as "The Oscars of The TTRPG World". Then, I completely forgot about it.

But early last month, I got a lovely email: The judges had loved Bardic Tools, and had nominated it for the "Best Digital Aid" category! We'd be competing with some heavy hitters, like HeroForge's new amazing kitbash functionality, and the wonderful Dungeon Scrawl. Tough competition.

Voting happened later that July (thank you so much if you voted for Bardic Tools!), and last Friday was the awards ceremony. And Bardic Tools...

Did not win.

Oh well.

The victory is decided by popular voting, and our community is wonderful, but also small compared to Dungeon Scrawl. Plus, those are free tools, so more people could try it. I'm honestly beyond happy to be nominated at all!

But!

That's not the important part. What's really exciting is that we had to record an award acceptance speech in case we won the award. I... kind of went overboard.

I dressed up in the costume I use to attend real-life Bridgerton balls (ask me about it on Discord if you want to know more), set a small stage at home and...

Well, see for yourself.

Look. I'm not comfortable on camera. But I am grateful to everybody that made Bardic Tools what it is now, so I thought the least I could do was shout out as many people as possible.

Moving on! (please! I can't look at myself anymore)

Composer Spotlight: Scott Buckley makes worlds come alive

It was about darn time I talked about another titan of internet music: Scott Buckley.

Scott makes these wonderfully evocative tracks that are long, without lyrics, and strongly focused around one core theme, one emotion, and one level of intensity.

By this point you should know why that's perfect for TTRPG music. One level of intensity means that your players notice the song, they sink into it, and then the song stops asking for their attention, and it's just there, in the back of their minds, while they immerse.

Don't believe me? Listen to this:

Although I do have one nit to pick with this man: You make the perfect ambience music. Your tracks can solo-carry the mood for an entire scene by themselves. Incantation up there just shoots "Forest where things go really really wrong" straight to the earholes of my players. That's a sense of place (ambience) and emotion (music).

So where do I put your work? Do I put it in ambience? In music? In both? Why won't your art fit my neat, narrow classification?

(obviously I'm kidding and the answer is "in both". If a piece is so good that it can be used in both, we should honor how good it is)

Anyway, here's my favorite Scott Buckley track that I listen to at least once a week:

Scott was also the second composer that answered my emails (the first being Alexander Nakarada), so I owe him just as much as I owe Alexander.

So Scott, if you're reading this: Thank you. Bardic Tools (and like a third of YouTube videos in the world) wouldn't exist without your music and generosity.

That's it for this month!
See you later!

Borja