April 2023 Progress Update

Updates on April Content

Howdy! It’s the 13th of April and that means one thing: It’s my birthday! It also means we update you on the content coming into 13 Vaults this month!

We’ve added the following missing rules pages from the SRD:

Additionally, we’ve been improving the overall experience of the website:

  • We’ve fixed some internationalization issues on several pages
  • Improved readability by removing justified text in most places
  • Added a “back” button in the compendium pages to make it easier to navigate around
  • Improved internationalization support by automatically detecting your browser’s language and automatically using that language if we support it (right now it’s just German)

We’ve also added the Monk and my personal favorite, Commander, classes.

Notably missing from the list of added classes are the Occultist, Druid, and Chaos Mage. This isn’t a mistake, unfortunately, but when initially creating how class pages are displayed as well as abilities, I didn’t understand how complex these classes are. The biggest obstacle was those classes requiring monster stat blocks, which I will need be working on getting support for. As 13 Vaults continues to get more features, such as having monster stat blocks, then these classes will be completed and then we’ll be done with the classes!

What’s Left?

There are a few small UI updates I am planning on bringing in April. Specifically, having a section on the home page dedicated to highlighting new blog posts so new visitors can see the updates we are bringing and new content from the community we are highlighting here. I also plan on tidying up the navigation bars to be able to handle more items and just be more interesting in general so people who visit can see what 13th Age and the community has to offer them.

I initially planned the encounter builder to be done in April, but some other things have taken precedence over that work for the time being. One thing that I have noticed as more and more new game masters and players find themselves becoming interested in 13th Age, I hear one question being repeated a lot. Even with existing players, I hear the same question. That question is: Is there a character builder for 13th Age?

Unfortunately, for players coming from Pathfinder 2e or D&D 5e where tools like Pathbuilder or D&D Beyond are the norm, we don’t have something quite to those standards in the 13th Age community—our answer is “No.” One of the reasons I created 13 Vaults, though, was to be an easy-to-use and helpful online resource for the 13th Age community. I also didn’t want it to be “owned” by anyone, so I made it Free and Open Source Software. One of the things I think 13 Vaults should do is make it so we can say “Yes” to probably the most frequently asked question—we should have a state-of-the-art character builder.

In other words, I’m going to start building one. I’ve been building web-based applications for over a decade now (I got my first job as a web app developer when I was 20)—I know what I’m saying when I say this will be challenge. It’ll take much time and effort, but I think everyone can agree that it will be worth it for the long haul.

I’ve been brainstorming a character builder since I first started 13 Vaults and there’s a lot of potential with it. I think I’ll tackle that and along the way, build out the preliminary features that necessary for the character builder to be great, such as having user accounts.

This will also be an iterative process. The first version will be just usable enough to create entire characters, and then we will iterate on that to get more robustness. In the end, though, will be a character builder people in the 13th Age community can easily point to when people start looking into 13th Age.

A Call for Guide Contributions

In order to keep content flowing in while working on the really complex software parts, I do humbly ask for help regarding guides. If you are willing to write up some guides on the following topics, it would be much appreciated:

  • New Player’s Guide
  • New Gamemaster’s Guide

The basic gist of these will be they are places we can point to, as a community, for new people to the 13th Age system where they can easily have their most asked questions answered, as well as any sage advice that should be helpful to most people.

You don’t have to know how to use git or have any kind programming knowledge, I’m more than willing to work with you while you write it however you wish. Heck, you can write it all down on a piece of paper, take a picture of it on your phone, and I can manually transcribe it—just getting new players this information I think will be helpful to the community as a whole.

There are other guides that would be helpful for the community, as well. I’ve listed quite a few example guide ideas here if you want to take a look and see what interests you there.

The only thing I really require is that the guides you write be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. This is to satisfy a few things:

  • Less legal complexity. Having all guide content on 13 Vaults be one single license is much more easier to manage for the community than having different licenses for each guide individually.
  • More freedom for the community. The CC-BY-4.0 license is what is considered to be a “liberal” license, meaning there is a lot of freedom afforded to people. It’s what the D&D 5.1 SRD was released under and that kind of freedom should be the norm, in my opinion.
  • Keeping 13 Vaults Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). In order to keep 13 Vaults FOSS, all content it redistributes must be compatible with FOSS principles. The CC-BY-4.0 license is perfectly compatible with the license 13 Vaults is released under (AGPLv3) and that means 13 Vaults will continue to be able to be Free and Open Source Software.

Closing

So, new content and general fixes have been published here on the 13 Vaults, and new big features are being planned and coming soon! We are also going to be working on a state-of-the-art character builder for 13th Age! If you are familiar with Pathbuilder or D&D Beyond then you should have a good idea of the character builder we want to create.

Tomorrow I’ll be releasing another blog post highlighting the works of the 13th Age community and general 13th Age news—so check in for that!

Until next time!

– Sean, head curator of the 13 Vaults.

Continue the discussion on GitHub!

GitHub Discussions: https://github.com/orgs/13vaults/discussions
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Email: admin@13vaults.com