The tap-to-play campaign companion for 5th Edition
My first DM spent years trying to get me to play D&D, and I never bit. Pen and paper didn't make sense to me when we had The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, BioShock and Mass Effect, the juggernauts of their time. So he stopped asking and tried something else. One night he pitched a game he'd "just made up" called DNZ. Dungeons and Zombies. Everyone has a zombie apocalypse plan, and he wanted to put ours to the test. We were hooked before we realized we'd been duped into playing pseudo D&D. Finding out there was a whole tabletop world like Elder Scrolls, with real rules and real lore behind it, was exciting. That was well over ten years ago, and I still hold those first characters near and dear.
Once I knew the rules, I wanted to stretch my creative side and run a story of my own. That's when I learned how big a job DMing really is. It takes a ton of work and forethought to make one session land and set up the next. I'd watched what my first DM did great and where the game slowed down, and running my own table taught me even more about what a DM carries and what it takes to keep a game smooth and engaging.
A lot of what slowed us down had nothing to do with the story. Our table ran on printed character sheets, Excel on a laptop and scratch paper, with nothing tying it together. It was pure DM trust. My DM tracked items on little pieces of paper that got lost, tattered, or stopped matching what anyone remembered. Items got duplicated because a note didn't get updated. A shopping trip could eat two hours while the DM read the same list to every player. And someone was always asking, "What mini is that?"
TokenTap5e is my answer to all of that. It keeps the classic at-the-table experience, with real pieces players can pick up and hold, and puts the digital information inside them. Tap a token with your phone and it's right there. No digging through a wiki, no waiting on a slow page to load, no laptop with five tabs open. A player can read their token faster than anyone can find the page, and what the player sees is exactly what the DM sees, so nothing gets mismatched or lost.
That changes how a session runs. A shop becomes an actual shop: the DM loads up the magic items with prices and lets the party browse, then grabs a drink and takes a breather while the players rummage, stepping back in only to confirm a sale or haggle. Items can carry a status, too: cursed, unidentified, puzzle-locked or stolen. Now a curse can hide until the wrong person attunes, a puzzle can guard a treasure until someone solves it, and casting Identify actually means something. The players get to figure things out on their own instead of the DM tracking it all in their head, and the DM gets to spend their energy on the fun part of DMing.
I spent years as a machinist before I ever wrote a line of code, and on a shop floor parts either fit or they don't. That's how the TokenTab got made. It's designed and 3D printed to carry an NFC tag, with tolerances tight enough to click into an ABS injection molded housing under an acrylic window. Every NFC tag is written, locked and tested by hand before it ships. The boxes are laser engraved in my own shop, and every Campaign Crest is engraved and hand painted.
There's one more reason, and it might be the biggest. Those first campaigns were a long time ago, and the memories aren't as sharp as they used to be. Places, names and moments get a little harder to pull up every year, and since each of us kept our own notes, nobody has the whole story. What a DM and a party put into a campaign is significant. It's a piece of each of them poured into the game, and that story deserves to be read and relived.
I always loved the Book of Brothers in Game of Thrones, where every knight's deeds get written down for good. I wanted that book for our table. That's what the Campaign Chronicle and the Campaign Crest are for. Every hero, every villain and every moment worth remembering stays in one place, ready to relive whenever you want. All you have to do is tap it.
Every pack ships from my shop in Madison. There's no warehouse and no call center. When you contact us, it reaches me, and if something isn't right, I'm the one who makes it right.
TylerSole Founder, Reforged & Refined LLC
Creator of TokenTap5e