First look at Paragon Campaign Dashboard (Patreon)

Hello DMs,

I hope you've all been well! We've had a busy month moving into a new house. We've been faring alright in these crazy times. While working from home is a real privilege, my motivation to do extra moonlighting has taken a hit.

Despite that, I've been working hard on a new suite of tools that I hope you'll find useful. Paragon Campaign Dashboard is an app that is designed to act like a virtual pinboard, or a customizable GM screen. It is designed for general use rather than for a particular RPG, although I had more improv-heavy systems like Apocalypse World or other PbtA games in mind when designing this.

Like Improved Initiative, it is intended for use while you're DMing a game on your laptop or tablet, and will also work well for your online games. It's not combat focused, so it's a great companion app for II during the rest of your game.

The very first version of the app is launching with four card types:

Random Table Cards will roll on a random table that you provide. When editing, it accepts the commonly used markdown format used in places like /r/dndbehindthetables, such as this table used in the demo above.

Article Cards can contain markdown-formatted text. Useful for characters, locations, read-aloud text, game rules, et cetera

Image Cards show an image. Right now it only supports image URLs, and you can drag an image from another tab straight onto an image card.

Clock Cards are inspired by the Clock mechanic of various PbtA games. They can be used for tracking progress toward a goal or event, for example.

Paragon Campaign Dashboard is pretty bare-bones right now but you might find it useful in your game right away, especially if you take advantage of the Random Table Cards.

You can try it now at paragondashboard.com

I have a list of features that I'd like to continue adding to the app, such as Dice Cards and a Player View. If there is interest in it, I'd like to start focusing on this new project. Improved Initiative is more or less "feature-complete" at this point, although I will still fix bugs, and I may add in-demand features. Working on a fresh codebase is a motivating project for me that I'd like to spend my free time on, and of course it's always easier to add new features to a newer codebase. The plan is to eventually add some premium Paragon Campaign Dashboard features to the existing Patreon tiers that you already have.

Oh, and of course it's open source. The project is up on GitHub.

Your support is important to me- I'd love to hear your thoughts about this project, and I'll also understand if you have concerns about the future of the Improved Initiative app.