13 Vaults Launch Recap and Roadmap
A few days ago, I announced 13 Vaults. I mentioned that there is a lot to come for 13 Vaults and now I am here to lay out the plans ahead! First, though, I do want to recap what the launch was like.
Launching 13 Vaults
I had announced 13 Vaults just before 5pm in my timezone and that’s what that spike of traffic represents. I didn’t have any expectations in terms of number of visitors, but to see 200 new people was very pleasing! I’ll summarize some statistics gathered during the past few days:
- We’ve had 428 unique visitors.
- 48% of the people who visited went visited more pages beyond the announcement post. Marketing people tell me this is a good number!
- Visitors from 32 different countries visited the site.
- 25 of those countries are countries which do not prodominantly speak English.
- 203 visitors most likely came from the 13 Vaults Mastodon Toot I made. I will not put any tracking information in the URLs I share, so we won’t know with certainty.
- My Reddit post accounted for 162 visitors.
- My Facebook post accounted for 66 visitors.
All of these statistics and more are available for public viewing on the 13 Vaults public analytics dashboard. Analytics on 13 Vaults is completely privacy-preserving—something I will not at all compromise on. View more information on what exactly is collected and how to block the analytics script on the 13 Vaults privacy policy page.
What I took from this is something I touched on in the announcement post: multi-language support. Over 100 visitors most likely natively spoke a language other than English—that’s 27%! Similar online tools and sites for the D&D and Pathfinder communities do not support any languages other than English. I can’t change those tools, but for the 13th Age community I will work to make available international-friendly tools.
Which leads me to the next topic…
German Language Support in 13 Vaults
In the announcement post I said that I am working with 13th Age community member Max Hilbrunner to bring German language support to 13 Vaults. Max has previously brought German language support to the D&D 5e Foundry VTT module and is now bringing German language support here to the 13th Age community.
This is no small task, but progress is being made. Several pages have already been translated and more are coming in every day. When we are finished you’ll find out in another post and you’ll see a way to change languages from English to German. Thank you Max and your group of translators for all of the help—the 13th Age community is better because of the effort!
Max, though, is not the only person who has made contributions to the 13 Vaults codebase in the past few days…
Contributors to 13 Vaults
I didn’t know what to expect exactly when I decided to make 13 Vaults free and open-source software. I knew that it would make 13 Vaults better, but I didn’t know how long it would take or how it would impact people. In just the past four days, four other people have decided to contribute to 13 Vaults in a meaningful way.
This may not seem like much and it may not be, but to see that in just four days wasn’t something I expected. It’s a small thing on the face, but as someone who wanted to make the 13th Age community have something we can all build upon to make our games richer, it was definitely cool to see!
You can see all who contribute to the 13 Vaults codebase here: https://github.com/13vaults/13vaults.com/graphs/contributors
There is more work to be done, though…
The 13 Vaults Roadmap
Over the past few days I’ve been planning and laying out the future I want to see with 13 Vaults. You can see what I have come up with here: https://github.com/orgs/13vaults/projects/1
Release Cadence
I intend to update 13 Vaults with changes on a monthly basis, with bugfixes and small things like that being put in as a fix them.
I want to note before I list off the planned updates the following things:
- This is all subject to change.
- I don’t expect to take anything out of these release plans.
- There’s good chance that more things will make it in them.
With all of that said, let’s take a look at the upcoming changes!
The March Update
The big updates coming in March are almost exclusively content updates. I’ll be finishing off the rest of the official content, namely:
- The Occultist class
- The Monk class
- The Druid class
- The Commander class
- The Chaos Mage class
- The Demonologist class
- The Unholy Ones race
- The Twygzog race
- The Lizardman race
- The Beastblooded race
- The Arcanite race
- The Alleykin race
- The Space Corps Explorer race
Additionally, German language support should land in the March update as well.
The April Update
This one seems small on the face, but the encounter builder will be quite a task! It’s the main reason I wanted to build 13 Vaults for in the first place, and it’s a tool that can help every table in some way. If you have any ideas or features you’d like to see, feel free to comment on the issue or create a topic on the 13 Vaults GitHub discussion board!
The guides section is also something I’m extremely excited for. I’ve also marked it as something I want help on. I’m no writer, but I’m sure someone out there has a knack for it! On the issue I’ve included the first two guides I’d like to see, as well as a plethora of additional guides that might be nice to have in the future. Like for the encounter builder, I’d love to hear ideas! If anyone wants to step up and volunteer to write these, please feel free to leave a comment on the issue, or ping me on the 13th Age community Discord (sean#0003), or reach out to me on the 13 Vaults Mastodon account!
Updates Beyond
I haven’t planned much for beyond April other than adding the Monsters section to the compendium.
You will notice on the roadmap board that there are issues that are not associated with a milestone. There are some big ones in there, namely things like more translations and a character creator. I want to temper anyone’s hopes—these things may not happen and if they do, they will either be completely done by somebody other than me (for the languages) or something that will happen in the far future if at all (character creator). With all of that said, I want to express that I want these things in 13 Vaults. I understand a character creator is especially something many people have expressed desire for and I’m with you—it will definitely take a lot of time and planning and coordination. I look forward to when I can start planning for it!
What Would You Like to See in the 13 Vaults?
It’s exciting for me to look at what is ahead for 13 Vaults. There’s lots of new content and features that most of us will be excited to see—myself included! 13 Vaults is something I wished 13th Age had when I first started becoming interested in the game, so I decided to take on the challenge.
I’ve had nothing but great things to hear from so many people since I started working on this project, all with great ideas and requests that I, too, wish to see. If you want to let me know what you’d like to see in 13 Vaults, please get in touch with me!
See you all next time!
– Sean, head curator of the 13 Vaults.
Continue the discussion on GitHub!
GitHub Discussions: https://github.com/orgs/13vaults/discussions
Mastodon: @13vaults@dice.camp
The 13th Age Community Discord
Email: admin@13vaults.com