Bardic Tools Update - May 2026

Borja Lorente

12 May 2026 • 12 min read

HP is red,
mana is blue,
I'm happier than a goblin,
when I work on Bardic Tools.

Yours Truly, a.k.a. Borja "Shakespeare byt make it Kvothe" Lorente

It's been almost a month since I resumed active development on Bardic Tools, and two things have become clear:

This is a lot of fun, and I wish I could spend all my time thinking about Bardic Tools.
I know I'm going to be very sad when I have to go back to freelancing in about a month.
You all are absolutely awesome! Not only because of all the love and support, but also because even when someone cancels, they come back to me surprisingly often with extremely valuable feedback and/or good wishes :D

Yeah, that's three things, but I just came back from a wedding with 12 total hours of sleep over 3 nights, so I hope you'll forgive me.

Is that going to be the tone for the rest of the update? Probably.

Let's go!

Scene Superpowers, The Pokemon Brainworm, and The Dream

This first section is a bit of context for the real announcement. Feel free to skip it. Also, for the first time ever, footnotes work correctly in this blog post! I may have gone a bit overboard with them.

Stop me if you've heard this before:

Nerd (me) finds some new, interesting thing.
Nerd goes "oh, cool!".
Interesting thing is now infiltrated in Nerd's brain.
Nerd and nerd's brain agree: "Let's learn more about this thing!"
Nerd starts to consume everything they can on that thing. YouTube, articles, any normal conversation with their friends...
Soon, interesting thing is now expanded in Nerd's brain.
Interesting thing is now the only thing in nerd's brain, until new interesting thing appears.

I call it The Pokemon Brainworm, because it explains having ungodly amounts of trouble remembering royal family trees in history class while having fun learning the evolutions of 300-odd Pokemon. I don't know why these obsessions happen, but when they do they're unstoppable.

At least to for me. I can't be the only one, right? Right? Please tell me I'm not the only one.

Anyway, what does this have to do with Bardic Tools?

Well, BT was born of a similar seasonal obsession. When I started GMing years ago, I was very frustrated with the existing audio tools for TTRPGs. For some reason, my brain decided "yup, this is the thing we're going to think about for the next 6 to 12 business weeks". It didn't consult me, the bastard, but somehow it tricked me into transforming my YouTube feed into an endless series of TTRPG tool reviews.

Trying to put that obsession to good use, I sat down to think really hard about what the ideal audio tool would be, and I came up with the three core guiding principles behind the design of Bardic Tools:

The tool should not require more than 1 minute of prep time to get amazing audio.
However, if you do want to spend more time, the tool should reward you for being very particular about which campfire sound you want to play.
Most importantly, once prep is done, the tool should get out of the way during gameplay. A tool that distracts the GM is making the game worse, not better.

So far, I've been working on the first two (premade scenes and the ability to upload your own sounds, for instance). However, the third one was lacking. If you wanted to transition from day to night in game, you still had to manually click and unclick all the different ambiences. And you still had to manage music by hand.

That was rough.

Luckily, you don't have to do it anymore.

Introducing: Presets

Presets are our solution to this problem.

The idea is simple:

During prep, you can capture everything you need to play a scene (the volumes of ambience cards, which music is going to be playing), and give it a recognizable icon. For example, you can capture:
- "Polgara's Tower, but by day when there are birds"
- "Polgara's Tower, but by night when it's quiet"
- "Polgara's Tower, but when they piss off Polgara and now they need to roll initiative"¹.
During the game, you can switch between snapshots with one click, without opening the scene, and the app will transition smoothly from one mood to another.

It's very difficult to convey how awesome this is with just text, so here's a 6 minute video explaining the same thing in more detail. I'd strongly recommend you watch it before reading the rest of this section ²:

0:00

/6:02

I personally find presets kind of magical for my games. With them, I think Bardic Tools scenes are finally the best UI to plan audio in your TTRPG campaign out there.

Don't get me wrong, scenes are not not perfect. Not by a long shot. There is, and always will be, a long list of tweaks and improvements I want to make. But I think this feature brings scenes from "they're pretty good, but they may not work for your use case", to something I'd be proud to recommend as a default to anyone running music for their games³.

Now, when I showed this to a few friends there were some initial questions, so here is a preemptive FAQ:

How do you recommend using the presets in my prep?

I recommend the following: Prepare your scene first, as normal, adding all the sounds you want for all the ambiences you want, testing, and tweaking until you're really happy with it.

Then, as the very last step, start saving presets to use in game.

That way, you make sure that every preset you save knows about every card in the scene. Otherwise, you may forget to update a preset when you add a new card, and my end up with a campfire in your daytime exploration mood.

But what about sound effects? Don't we still have to open the scene for those?

Yes, you do, and I think that's okay. Here's my thinking: With ambience sound and music, you want to forget about them, and have them kind of exist in the background of your game.

Effects are different. Effects require timing. They are mostly used for surprise, at specific moments. They're supposed to interrupt the game.

If you're planning on using an effect in a game, you're thinking about having to use the effect already, because you want to play the thunder sound effect at the right time to make your players jump out of their chairs. Therefore, I think it's okay that at least part of your attention is in BT when you play an effect.

Now, I do want you to find your effects easily, without having to read all the cards. The attention you spend finding the effect in the scene is truly wasted. That is still a problem, and something I want to address, but I haven't found a great solution yet. I have a feeling it will involve re-designing the effects cards, maybe to be one big button with an image, using the icons we have for presets, but we'll see in the future.

But what about all the scenes you already have in The Library?

My plan is to migrate all of those to have default presets eventually. Because that kind of work doesn't require that much focus and I can totally do it after a full day of freelancing, I think I'll put off that migration until I resume freelance work, and use these full-time BT months to do deep work on tough features that would be impossible to do while freelancing.

However, if there is a scene you really want to see updated, let me know! I'm more than happy to do it. Or, if you're feeling extremely enthusiastic, I'm also more than happy to integrate your presets into existing library scenes. Just drop me a line at borja@bardic.tools and we'll make it work.

Like most other features in BT, they were born from the community, so I'd like to thank Discord users @Kris for the initial idea, and @Unknown, @Al-Gorre, @spartanicus and @Dr. Garbage (if that's even your real name) for their support and feedback as I was developing it.

Also, thank you so much to Lili (@lili.draws.sometimes on IG) for designing those amazing custom icons to make presets visible at a glance, and @Madkey for all her help finding the initial aesthetic for them and all the feedback. I think the icons rock, and I hope we can have more in the future⁴.

Phew, that was a wall of text! Let's do some lighter updates:

Music Makeover!

The music section got a small makeover.

First, the music cards have a new design – longer, narrower, and, dare I say, sexier😳 ⁵. This design takes less space, it fits the new music playlists features better, and I think it just looks better overall. It does make the music section a little bit more cramped. I think this is fine, because with the new presets feature you're not going to be clicking around the music section that much in game, but if you disagree, you can totally go back to the old design in your profile. Thank you everyone who was so insistent that the music cards took too much space. You were right.

Second, the music playlists loop. If you have "treat music as a playlist" enabled in your scene settings, when the last track on a music section ends, the first one will start. This means that you don't have to manually "rewind" the playlists, adding to the "set it and forget it" nature of it all :D. I'm fairly certain that this is what everyone wants, and everyone I talked to thinks the same, so I didn't even add a way to turn it off. But if you do not want this behavior, please let me know at borja@bardic.tools, we'll figure it out.

Next!

We're Feeling the Call 👀...

... of Cthulhu. Get your mind out of the gutter.

Do you remember that amazing feedback I mentioned at the beginning, the one that people give me when they cancel? This is one of them! A very kind user wrote to me to tell me that they'd love to use the tool, but they were running Call of Cthulhu at the moment, and The Library was... lacking in those sounds.

They were not wrong.

So we did what we do, and brainstormed a long list of sounds that would be really cool to have in that setting, and got to work!

The result? Well, sit down and grab some popcorn, because the movie is about to start:

Old Movie Projector