5th Edition Without the ‘D&D’ – Demiplane Launches New 5E Nexus
Demiplane announced a new 5E NEXUS — a digital toolkit for 5th Edition, but one made without partnership from WotC.
Demiplane, a digital toolset for RPGs of all stripes, from Pathfinder 2E to Avatar Legends, has announced a new digital toolset. Called the 5E NEXUS, the new project will forgo any “official D&D” instead allowing space for non-Wizards of the Coast RPGs built on the 5.1 SRD.
What does that mean, exactly? For answers, let’s turn to the announcement trailer.
Demiplane Launches 5E NEXUS – An Independent 5E Toolset
The trailer comes not long after a live stream from Demiplane’s Adam Bradford (formerly of D&D Beyond). During the live stream, Bradford announced the 5E NEXUS, stating that it was all about support for third-party publishers and independent creators. The 5E Nexus is designed to give games an easy way to reference third-party 5E rules and classes and so on, without having to integrate the data across multiple platforms.
If you’ve ever tried to play a character using some of, say, Kobold Press’ 5E content when your campaign uses D&D Beyond, you know the difficulty you can face in bringing books from outside of WotC into your digital toolset. 5E Nexus hopes to change that.
As Bradford put it, in his live stream:
“As the tabletop roleplaying space thrived in recent years, the openness of 5e led to the creation of indispensable expanded content from myriad creators and publishers. Every play group I come across uses third-party content in their games. The challenge still remains to make all that content accessible in a unified and seamless way. 5E NEXUS is a major step in that direction, giving fans the high-quality digital tools they crave without having to leave their favorite toys in the toybox.”
But what does it mean, exactly? For now, it looks like an easy way to launch your 3rd party 5E Content. In the description of its accompanying YouTube trailer, more information was revealed.
Demiplane’s New Nexus Plans
In the accompanying information, Demiplane revealed its plans to roll out the new toolset. The 5E Nexus will launch in three stages.
Stage One: A Pre-Launch phase, available now. This focuses on 5E group creation/group-finding tools, “based on proprietary technology that compares a series of preferences to find the best matches between players and Game Masters.”
Stage Two: Early Access, coming “this spring.” This is where the digital tools for the actual 3rd party books will roll out, ad involves Demiplane’s Digital Reader:
The Digital Reader is a technology that presents all of a game book’s content dynamically formatted for mobile, tablet, and desktop use. To reduce the time it takes to learn and prep, Digital Reader books include integrated tooltips, drill-down sidebars, and cross-references that span a player’s entire digital library.
Stage Three: Planned for later in 2023, this will be where we see 5E games from independent creators and third-party publishers rolled out across their toolset.
Most of this operates off of the 5.1 SRD, now in Creative Commons. And though Bradford said that Demiplan currently has “no intent to be partnered with WotC,” he also said “never say never,” in the same stream.
As far as who exactly has partnered with Demiplane, that information is “coming soon.” So check back for more as the announcements come.
Demiplane’s 5E Nexus can be found here
