Borja here. Another month, another batch of really cool stuff to share with you! I've added amazing new features (thank you everyone in the Discord for your inspiration bardic.tools/discord!), and I'm so happy to announce our first partnership with a D&D publisher!

So, what's new?

Any Effect As An Ambiance

The name is a work in progress, I'll grant you that. But the feature is one of the coolest I've worked on.

It wasn't my idea (thank you @Al-Gorre and @Kris on the Discord), but boy-oh-boy is it cool.

So, let's say you're building a sound for a thunderstorm. You want some rain, for sure for sure, but also, like, thunder. But you don't want the thunders to come on loop, one after the other. You want to stagger them so that they come... say... every 5 to 10 seconds?

Well, now you can!

This means that you can layer one-shot sound effects to create ambiences. I can't tell you how much I like this feature... but I can show you! Keep reading ;)

This feature is still experimental, but it will be on by default when I'm sure all the bugs have been squashed.

Anyway, moving on.

Scene Volume Controls!

Sometimes, you want to turn all the sound down a bit. Maybe your players are whispering to each other, maybe you want them to focus on your description.

Before, the only way to do that was to either stop the scene, or to lower the volume of every individual sound. What a pain.

No more!

Introducing, the scene-wide volume control.

It's... a volume control, that works for every sound in the scene. It works exactly as you would expect.

Cool! What more?

Library Search Just Got Better-er

Remember the preview player we added last update? Well, it's really cool and all, but it can be even cooler-er.

You see: I'm a busy GM (and, I'm willing to bet, so are you). I have one, maybe two hours to prep music for a session if that. If I listen to a 10 minute track from beginning to end to see whether I like it, there's no way in heck I'll finish in time.

Instead, I like to listen to 4 or 5 points along the track, to get a good idea of how it will sound throughout.

"But Borja," I hear you say. "You can't do that in Bardic Tools!"

To which I answer... "Oh, reeeeeeally?" (picture my face grinning) "can't you?"

"Pa-chow!"

Now you can! And you get a nice waveform to boot, so that you don't even need to click to figure out when the music swells up.

Plus, you get to control the volume.

You're welcome.

Now, if you'll allow me, I'll keep this smug face for a bit as I go into all the new content.

New Content!

I've been working on fun ways to add more content to The Library, and today I'm finally able to announce the most fun of all:

Bloodwood Collab!

So, a year ago, we met the fine folks at Crow & Crown, a D&D supplement publisher, at Dragonmeet (a UK RPG convention). Immediately, their Bloodwood adventure caught our eye.

Fast-forward to a couple of months ago. We get to talking again, and we decide that "Man, Bloodwood has a bunch of really cool locations. It would be really cool to have scenes for them".

Fast-forward again, and...

We have introduced 5 new scenes, all from the Bloodwood campaign. They're creepy, tense, and honestly the best scenes in Bardic Tools at the moment.

Remember when I said I'd show you the new "Any Effect is an Ambience" feature? Well, the Bloodwood scenes make extensive use of that.

Here's my face explaining it:

Head on over to bardic.tools/bloodwood for all the details, and use code BLOODWOOD for 15% off your purchases for a limited time.

But, you already might have a subscription. If that's the case, what can you use that sweet, sweet 15% off on?

Well...

Gift Bardic Tools

That's right! Do you have DM in your life that deserves a nice gift? Do you want to nudge that one player in your group to DM for once so that you can take a break?

You can now buy Bardic Tools subscriptions for other people!

I've had a lot of people reach out asking to buy Bardic Tools for their DMs, and it seemed like the logical thing to do.

To purchase a subscription as a gift, you can click on any of the links in the pricing page:

This article will explain how to redeem the gift card, whether or not they already have an active subscription.

We're almost done!

What else?

As you may know, we run giveaways on Reddit from time to time. We give out Bardic Tool subscriptions, but also some really cool dice to sweeten the deal.

This weekend, the Dragonmeet happened: One of UK's biggest RPG expos. Of course, there were tons of cool vendors there... and of course we had to buy some dice.

These beauties will be given away in Reddit giveaways over the year. We'll announce every giveaway in the Discord, because I'll shout out every giveaway there. I'd love to give them away to a member of the community!

That's it for now!
I wish you a wonderful December, and I'll be back with more news next year!