Dev Diary: Spring 2026

Greetings, Guild!

This spring, the feature we've been building toward arrived: Virtual Guilds are now available on OrbRPG. It's an early version, still in beta, and we expect it to grow in features over the coming quarters. Alongside it came several things built around guilds, including community noticeboards and guild chat rooms.

Below is a full tour of everything that landed this quarter on OrbRPG, the platform for tabletop RPG game masters and players.

🏰 Virtual Guilds: Your Home for Tabletop RPG Events

Virtual Guilds are dedicated spaces where tabletop RPG communities can gather, organize their games, and grow together. Each Guild on OrbRPG has its own public page, approved GM list (to publish games), giving both players and game masters a shared home base.

Creating and managing your Guild is straightforward. Owners can set an Identity, promote GMs to post their games, and promote members to manage Guild.

Presence options let you describe where your Guild lives: Country, Address, Online Platform, Timezone or all together.

📋 Guild Noticeboard: Community Bulletin Board

The Noticeboard is an add-on feature that Guild owners can enable in Guild settings.

Every active community needs a place to post announcements, session recaps, and upcoming events. The Guild Noticeboard is exactly that! Consider it as your own blog space.

Currently posts support:

• Orb-flavoured Markdown formatting
• Visibility levels: Public (anyone can see), Members Only, or Unlisted (accessible by direct link).
• Pined notices to keep them at the top
• Dynamic Table of Contents
• Reactions (configured by Guild owners).

Each notice can also display suggested games from the Guild's roster, making it easy to turn an announcement into a sign-up opportunity.

💬 Guild Chats and Game Rooms

Chat on OrbRPG expanded in two directions this spring: toward Guilds and toward individual game tables.

Guild Chats let Guilds receive direct messages as the Guild itself. If you message an OrbRPG Guild, the team sees it, and any unread Guild message shows as a notification badge in the site panel. This makes it practical to handle table inquiries or coordination without mixing personal and Guild conversations.

Game Rooms are persistent chat rooms tied to particular Game. When a GM needs a space to share prep notes or table rules, they can open a Game Room. Players are added automatically when GM adds through booking chat. GMs can also attach a Game Info Message (a short pinned markdown note visible to everyone in the room) to share things like "homerules" or session prep links without it getting buried.

✍️ OrbMarkdown Gets a Visual Editor

Last quarter we introduced OrbMarkdown as a formatting layer. This spring we added a visual editor to make it easier to use.

The new editor toolbar sits above text fields that support markup. It lets you apply formatting with a click instead of typing symbols manually. A live preview button will show the rendered result before you save. The editor also now supports a table of contents generated from headings with smooth scroll For long posts we provide an excerpt cut-line (<!--more-->) for notices and posts that need a summary view.

The editor is now active across game descriptions, player requirements, game info messages, and Guild notice content.

🌐 Fresh Look: New Landing Page and Navigation

OrbRPG has a new front door. The redesigned landing page introduces a games grid, an FAQ section, and a cleaner hero layout that works well on mobile. The overall structure is easier to scan for someone arriving at OrbRPG for the first time and looking to understand what they can do here.

The main navigation also got a redesign. A persistent footer with privacy and terms links was added. Language and theme preferences added to a dedicated personalization page in the account settings too.

🔧 Under the Hood

For our fellow engineers and curious minds.

This quarter we built a lot of infrastructure to support Guilds and to make OrbRPG more robust overall:

• Staging Environment -- A full staging deployment pipeline was introduced using Ansible on AWS, with its own data generation tools. New Guild and game data can be seeded on demand, making it much easier to test changes before they reach OrbRPG.
• Open Graph for Guilds and Notices -- Guild pages and Noticeboard notices now generate proper Open Graph metadata for link previews in Discord, Telegram, and other platforms. Markdown is stripped cleanly for description fields.
• Keycloak Upgrade -- Our authentication server was upgraded, including a fix for login flows broken by new browser restrictions on third-party cookies. Sessions now persist across browser restarts by default.
• Lazy i18n Bundle Splitting -- Translation strings are now split by namespace and loaded on demand, reducing initial bundle size.
• Vite Chunk Reload -- After a production deploy, users occasionally hit 404s on old JavaScript chunks. A new handler detects this and reloads the page once automatically to fetch the updated build.

What's Next

Guilds just entered their public beta, so the next few months will be about listening and polishing. We want to see how communities actually use the Noticeboard and Guild Chats, and we will be fixing gaps and improving the experience based on real use.

On the roadmap: new add-on for Guilds -- "Guild Events" and (I hope) User's Dashboard with personalized info from following GMs and Guilds.

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.