What’s the old saying? April showers bring May flowers…and sinister horrors lurking in the shadows, secretly preying on humanity. I’m sure it’s something like that.
Either way, instead of May flowers the April showers outside our offices have brought you a World of Darkness NEXUS update. Since we announced the upcoming World of Darkness toolset on Demiplane last November, our teams have been hard at work behind the scenes bringing the Early Access NEXUS to life.
What’s a NEXUS?
On Demiplane, it’s the home for World of Darkness (starting with Vampire: The Masquerade) digital tools and game content–all the things you need to make playing the tabletop game faster and even more enjoyable whether you’re gathering in person with friends or playing remotely.
What’s included in Early Access?
During Early Access, we keep things pretty simple. The NEXUS will include two initial tools, the Digital Reader and the Compendium. The Digital Reader lets you dive into digital versions of Vampire: The Masquerade’s books, enhanced with interactive tooltips, search, and comprehensive links. The Compendium sorts, categorizes, and provides fast access to the rules you and your coterie are most likely to need while you’re playing the game.
What about content?
The Early Access NEXUS we’ll have a set of free content to introduce new players to the game, as well as the Corebook, Anarch Sourcebook and Camarilla Sourcebook available for purchase. When you purchase any content on the NEXUS, it becomes available in the Digital Reader and Compendium for you, as well as the character management tools as they are released (more on that below).
Are we there yet?
There’s good news: our developers are putting the finishing touches on the Digital Reader and Compendium tools as I write this update, and the digital editions of the books are nearly complete as well. Once we hit those milestones, our partners on the World of Darkness team will review them and provide feedback. After we’ve made any updates needed from that step, we’ll be ready to go live with Early Access!
What’s next?
There are two major milestones we’re tackling to take us from Early Access to full NEXUS release–character management and the filling out the rest of the content library. Character management will include a guided character creation system, interactive character sheet, and character advancement and update features. For the content library, we will be digitizing all the other Vampire: The Masquerade sourcebooks and chronicles to give your playgroup even more content to use and stories to experience. When these two elements are complete, Early Access will come to a close and the toolset will move into full release. While we can’t be specific about dates and timelines can change, we are still on target for the full release this year.
So there you have it, in a few short weeks Demiplane will Embrace the World of Darkness in Early Access form, then we will continue on the path to bring the full release to (un)life. Thanks for joining us on the journey so far, and don’t forget to join our Dev Update streams for even more news, live on Twitch every Tuesday at 9 am Pacific Time (GMT -7).
I’ll leave you with a little sneak peek at some Corebook pages that are coming together in the Digital Reader, and I’ll provide another update soon!
