The Role Gate Migration

The Next Chapter for Role Gate

When Hedron acquired Role Gate, we worked hard to address the concerns that the community had, launching a campaign to fix bugs and add new features. What we quickly realized is that Role Gate’s backend is a mess. We began exploring our options for rebuilding the app from the ground up, since maintaining it in its current state would be too costly. That brings us to today…
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The State of Role Gate

On April 14th we were made aware of a security vulnerability with Role Gate that left user data like emails and passwords unprotected, and while there isn’t any evidence that this data was accessed, it highlights the headaches we were already dealing with behind the scenes.
After fixing the vulnerability, we hired a third-party digital security firm to audit Role Gate and here’s what they found:

The Role Gate app had several security vulnerabilities that could have given attackers full access to sensitive assets, including source code, app secrets, and database credentials. Fortunately, no malicious activity was detected, and the Hedron team resolved the issues before any harm occurred. Still, the risk was serious.

We believe these issues stemmed from insufficient security practices rather than intent.

Security is hard. Even small missteps can lead to massive consequences. But by offloading the most sensitive parts of the stack to purpose-built security platforms meaningfully reduces risk and helps establish long-term trust.

Today, we kept your data safe because we happened to notice a vulnerability before malicious actors did. But the story could have been so easily different. And the original developer unfortunately just didn't communicate this to us. It makes us wonder: "What other dangerous practices are lurking?"

In other words: It’s time to make a change.

Over the last few months, we have been building play-by-post functionality on Hedron, where we can support a stable and secure roleplaying experience that will allow us to more quickly fix bugs and add new features. Beta testers in the Hedron mobile app are helping us accomplish this more quickly than we had hoped!

Our goal is now to deliver an even better roleplaying experience on Hedron, and the platform is nearly ready for everyone to move over. We can solve pain points that Role Gate users have wanted fixed and provide even more functionality in the future, without the risk of old security issues coming back to haunt us.

In order to take advantage of all that Hedron has to offer, Role Gate users will have to migrate their data to Hedron (if you want to keep playing existing active games). We’re working through all of the details, but want to share an initial glimpse of what that process and timeline will look like so you know what to expect.

We plan to begin this migration process in May, allowing several months for you to move your games over to Hedron before a cut-off in late Summer.

As this process continues, we’ll keep this page up-to-date, with migration details and an FAQ.

FAQs

If I had a Role Gate account, is my data secure?

We do not believe your data was accessed, but you should probably go change your password on any other apps or sites that might have used the same login information out of an abundance of caution. It’s internet best practice to change your password periodically anyways, so now is a good time to do it.

Will Hedron offer a mobile app in addition to a web app?

Yes! The Hedron mobile app is currently available to beta users on iOS and Android devices and will have a full launch in the coming months.

Will I still be able to access my Role Gate account after the migration?

No. We are going to sunset Role Gate and focus our development efforts on providing an even better play by post experience on Hedron. You will have ample time to move your game data over and save anything you want from Role Gate, but once the migration is over, Role Gate will no longer be accessible.

How does the play-by-post experience on Hedron compare to Role Gate?

There's some very noticeable differences between Role Gate and Hedron. Most notably, Hedron was designed to be a fully-automatable VTT. Role Gate was just designed to be a TTRPG-tailored chat app. What does that mean for you as a user?

After moving to Hedron, you'll still have all the features you're used to in Role Gate. But you'll also get:

  • Fully Automation Support
  • Battle Map Support
  • Frequent Updates and Bug Fixes
  • A cleaner and faster app overall

Today: Where We Are

Last Updated: April 25, 2025

Now, we're not forgetting the past. We tried to give a timeline in late 2024 that didn't work out. That time, we underestimated what we needed to deliver you the experience you deserve. But this time, we're going into it with more experience, more knowledge, and a deeper connection with folks like you.

This time, we feel pretty good about the path below. And we feel even better about it because we see this as one of our highest priorities -- if not the highest. You deserve a great platform. And we will make it happen.

The Live Timeline

App Beta Testing

Completion Progress: ~35%

The Hedron App is out for testing! And with the most recent app release, we should have the main bugs fixed and it should now be feasible to play a game via the app.

The Transition Starts

Once the App is considered "good" (judged by you! Not us.), then we're going to give you a button to move your RG stuff to Hedron. You can do this whenever you'd like or wait. And we'll keep putting out more updates to make things even better.

The Sunset

After some time has passed and folks have had a chance to move their content, we'll make an announcement in the RG app that the app is closing down and it's time to move to Hedron. At this point, the RG app will be made inoperable, but your data is still preserved.

The End

Some number of months or years after the Sunset has concluded, we'll delete and purge any old data from RG.

Active Work

Ongoing Tasks

Resolving Critical Bugs

2024.04.02 made a lot of changes to really make Hedron better and easier. But some of these changes aren't backwards compatible, so the app probably needs an update fairly badly to work as expected. This is our first priority!

Complete Macro Support

We almost have Macros fully operable in the app. There's a lot of moving pieces because everything from Spells to Abilities to Gear to Classes operate on Macros -- and we want to make sure we get it right.

Ad-hoc Systems

We're working on a clean way to build Rule Systems without much automation to help folks get into the game and spend less time configuring. This will resemble the Role Gate way of doing things.

Next Tasks
Data Ingestion

This is the first step to making a smooth flow for folks to move RG data to Hedron -- it starts with ingesting the data from RG and then transforming it into a format that Hedron can use.

Character Building

The app needs a way to build characters. There's actually a website functionality we specifically wanted to introduce before we introduce Character Creation to the app -- so expect that first.