Dev Diary: Summer 2026

Greetings, Guild!

Last quarter Virtual Guilds arrived on OrbRPG, the platform for tabletop RPG game masters and players. A guild needs a reason to gather, so this summer we built Guild Events: pick a date, invite your community, watch the seats fill.

Along the way notifications learned to reach your inbox, Guild Posts learned to hold pictures, and the game form stopped hiding what it wants from you. Here is the tour.

🗓️ Guild Events: Plan Gatherings for Your Tabletop Community

Think of it as Meetup.com for your game community, except it lives next to your games and your players, and it is free.

Guild Events let owners and managers schedule anything the community needs: a quest night, a board game evening, a campaign kickoff, an online strategy session. If your venue seats twelve, say so: the event tracks how many spots are left and stops taking sign ups when it is full, so you never have to count heads in a chat thread. Times are shown in each reader's own timezone, which matters when half your guild plays from another country.

The part we like most: a stranger who finds your public guild page gets one button, Join Guild & Attend. One click joins the guild and reserves the seat. No account juggling, no "message me to sign up".

Events also travel well. Attendees add them to Google Calendar or download them for Apple and Outlook, share them by link, and get a reminder 24 hours before the start. Like Guild Posts, Guild Events are an add-on that owners switch on per guild.

🔔 Email Notifications and Full Control Over Them

Not everyone lives in Telegram. Email is now a first-class channel on OrbRPG, and your address syncs on its own, so there is nothing to connect by hand.

The better half of this is the switchboard. Account settings gained an Event preferences grid: notification types down one side, channels across the other. Unread chats, new games from GMs you follow, game requests and reviews, Guild Events and their reminders. Keep the urgent ones in Telegram, send the slow ones to your inbox, silence the rest.

A few important messages always arrive on at least one channel, and the grid tells you which in plain words rather than greying out a switch and leaving you guessing.

🖼️ Guild Posts Get Images

A session recap deserves pictures, so Guild Posts now take them. Upload your images to a post, then click a thumbnail to drop it into the text at your cursor. Pin the panel to the bottom of the screen and it follows you down a long article. Covers got the same care: see how yours looks on desktop and mobile before you publish it, not after.

None of this was possible until OrbMarkdown learned to render images, which it now does in around twenty places across OrbRPG, not just posts. Write ![alt](url) for a picture, or ![alt](url){maxWidth=400} when it should be smaller.

Read more in the Guild Posts guide.

✅ Announcing a Game: Fewer Surprises

Announcing a game used to end in a small argument with the form: save, one complaint, fix it, save again, the next complaint. Now it checks everything before you save and lists every problem at once, whether that is a missing city, a price with no currency, or a session with no date.

Location fields also became one component across the whole platform, with autocomplete and many more countries. And the warnings turned a gentler color, because a blank field is not a crash and should not look like one.

🔧 Under the Hood

For our fellow engineers and curious minds.

Summer was our annual full stack update, so most of the work below is foundations:

• Java 25 and Micronaut 5. The backend jumped eight Java versions at once, and moved up to Micronaut 5 and Gradle 9 while it was there. Our Go services now run govulncheck in CI too, so a known vulnerability reaches us before it reaches you. Boring work, but it keeps OrbRPG quick and means a security fix takes an afternoon instead of a sprint.
• The frontend got the same treatment. Vite 7, React Router 7, React 19.2 and MUI 9, mostly to close security advisories.
• Fewer hops. The legacy gateway layer is gone (web routes reach service controllers directly) and ingress moved from nginx to Caddy. Local development now runs over real HTTPS too, so browser features that demand a secure context behave the same on a laptop as in production.
• Fair-use limits. OrbRPG now meters more than storage: the images a guild keeps, how many games a GM has open at once, how quickly new guilds appear. Most of you will never meet a limit, and when one stands in the way of something real you are running, tell us and we will lift it for your account.

What's Next

If one evening can be an event, why not a whole convention? We have started building ConMode, so a TTRPG convention can live on OrbRPG as a single event with dozens of tables running at once, one coordinator behind them all, and players browsing every open seat and booking the table they want, online or offline.

It grows out of Guild Events rather than sitting beside them, which is exactly why we built events the way we did. Meanwhile we are watching how guilds really use Events, and smoothing the corners you find.

Thank you for being part of this journey. Join us in Discord, follow us on Instagram, and let's keep building together.

Welcome to the Guild.