Realm Works... works?

For anyone reading today... have a happy easter! The one time of the year that I miss chocolate.

The public release of Lone Wolf's Realm Works software finally happened a couple of weeks ago. As a long time user of Hero Lab and Army Builder for manageing my 40k forces and rpg characters, I was interested to see how their new piece of kit works. I missed the kickstarter as, at the time, I wasn't planning on running my own world, but at some point this year I really will get around to starting that Achtung! Cthulhu game I've been muttering about. In preparation for this I thought I'd give it a go. Anyway...

In the past I've tried to use wikis, notebooks, dropbox and evernote to try and organise my thoughts and ideas for various worlds, but nothing has quite... clicked.

Realm Works takes the concept of a wiki and configures it for building scenarios, campaigns and worlds with specific templates and different relationships as well as normal linking and keywords.
Like any good wiki editor, content can be linked to other articles with links in the text. The benefit we have with Realm Works is that if the articles already exist, it will create those links for us automatically. For example, if in a description I said that "London is in the UK" and records exist with for London and UK, it automatically creates links form that text to the relevant pages. They are apparently working on a global update that will scan all articles  to refresh the data and create any new links that it needs.

In addition to links, we can associate items into groups, such as counties in a country, or people into organisations. It took a while to work that one out as I did the usual IT thing and didn't bother with the manual. A good system should be self explanitory and this one *mostly* works the way you would want it to. There are still some areas that I can't work out or could display more effectively, so I will eventually have to resort to the paperwork...

One of the main ideas, besides making it easier for a GM to construct a new adventure, is to eventually allow the players in a game to see any information about their gaming world that they should know. All data is, by default, marked as hidden, but the GM can slowly reveal parts of maps, character descriptions, plots...whatever they create really.

In order to do this successfully, the system syncs it's data to a central server on this here interwebz. It is possible to run Realm Works in offline mode once a realm has initially been created, but by doing so you're missing out on a lot of the purpose. Granted, you do need a subscription to use Cloud service after the first 6 months, but hey. It's not a lot and it is backing up all your hard work as well, so it seems worth it.

Cloud Sync will also eventually have a store to allow you to buy/sell/swap NPCs, plots, worlds and ideas to integrate into your campaigns. If this works, it's perfect for RPG companies to release new modules directly to the GM in a structured format, rather than as a book or pdf. I love the idea of being able to download a new adventure and pick/choose which elements I want to integrate.

First I need to work out the best way to organise my world. There seem to be two suggeste routes so far. Geographic or Character-centric. Given that  this is Cthulhu we're talking about here, character-centric seems rather short sighted. For Geographic, as this is based in the real world I need to weave in enough real data without flooding the thing with useless bits like ever county in the uk; especially if I'm planing on sending them globe-trotting... I'd end up having to fill in everything.


Time to start playing!

Managing data file creation

Over the last couple of evenings I've been implementing what I hope will be a solution to the trickeries of managing the creation of my large Hero Lab data files.

If you've not played with Hero Lab at all, it's a program that allows you to create RPG characters for a number of supported gaming systems, including my preference of Savage Worlds. The data for each setting is contained within separate XML files, one for each setting. If there's only one or two books, creating one of these data files as a single entity is fine... but when you start looking at a large series of books it becomes daunting scrolling up and down this large file trying to work out exactly where you want to place the new entries, or find that annoying bug.

I've decided to try a slightly different approach and split the datafile up into smaller text files, each containing specific things, such as skills or equipment for individual books. For example this is what my current folder structure is like

In order to then recombine these into the one data file we need to use some form of concatenation script to merge it all back together again. My tool of choice for this is Apple's Automator, but linux and windows both have their own ways of doing this. For anyone interested in doing this, here's the workflow I'm going through.

We are prompted to select a starting folder (with the default set). It then scans all the folders and subfolders, building up a list of all the files. The text is pulled out of all these files, added to the clipboard and then run through the final batch script.

the issue I was encountering with this was that there seemed to be no particular order to how it was combining the files. Originally I had the start and end tags in their own files, but these were ending up in random places in the file, so now these pieces of text are being added to the clipboard text before it gets written out as the data file. So far this seems to be working and should make it much easier to add new content as the Achtung! Cthulhu books are released.

Now to work out what that niggly bug was back in April!

The Trellborg Monstrosities

While I was away I started to read the next Achtung! Cthulhu rpg adventure, The Trellborg Monstrosities. This mission is set much later in the war than the previous two and pits the players against Black Sun operatives who have discovered a long forgotten Norse saga and the ruins of an ancient temple that the saga tells was where Odin was hung.

As usual, the adventure is well formatted with some nice maps and accompanying illustrations. Having said that, this time I'm not quite as keen on some of the images, but that's more of a clash of styles (mine and the artist's) than it being truly awful... unlike the artwork in Westwind's Secrets of the Third Reich books.

So far, it's quite good and seems to offer a few different ways of getting the party to where you need them to be, depending on your party's ability to be sneaky. You've also got the added bonus of getting a novelisation of the adventure in the Drivethrurpg download. The adventure book references pages in the book for additional ideas or tips on how to run certain situations, which I thought was a nice touch. I've yet to read the story, so I'll have to come back to that later.

The one thing that this has reminded me of though is that I never did finish the Hero Lab files for the first two books... I can't even remember now why I had to stop writing them. I suspect it was something to do with the inability to create one of the NPCs with the valid ruleset. There was one character who had been given a combination of things that isn't (as far as I could work out) actually legal with the Savage Worlds rules. With everything now in boxes, I seem to have some time on my hands to go back and try to work out the best way to approach the issue.

We should be getting the first of the core setting books for Achtung! Cthulhu sometime soon too, so I may be better off waiting for that to arrive before getting too far into things.

An Arcane whatnow?

Over the last few days I've been playing around with Hero Lab a bit more, trying to squeeze in the last few elements of the first Achtung! Cthulhu book, Three Kings. It's been a bit nightmarish as some elements on characters do not conform to the Savage Worlds standards, for example Mythos spells.

In Savage Worlds you need to have an Arcane Background in order to cast spells... in Achtung! Cthulhu and Realms of Cthulhu you don't; spells are cast using your Knowledge (Mythos) and have modifiers to the roll instead of power points. The way the Savage Worlds data file has been written doesn't allow you to bypass this in any way, which is awkward.

I'd love to be able to create a proper Mythos Arcane background that doesn't actually do anything other than allowing new spells to be assigned, but this causes problems with the validation as you're only ever allowed 1 Arcane Background in Savage Worlds. In most A!C games that probably won't be an issue, but if someone actually needs to use one of the other Backgrounds for anything, such as Weird powers or Superpowers for the Godlike crossover we'll be in trouble.

The Go To workaround for anything that adjusts a character post-creation seems to be to create things as Hindrances as these can be added at any time and do not require any advances. There's something about this method that really bugs me... If anyone can work out a better solution I'd love to know!

 

Hero Lab night three

Big thanks to TatteredKing on the WolfLair forums for sending me his work on the Realms of Cthulhu Hero Lab files, it's been really useful to see what he's been doing and check if I'm doing things right.... Judging from the various datafiles that I've had a poke through so far, there really is no way to create new equipment titles. That makes me much happier with the progress on the A!C file so far. The only thing left to do is clean up the equipment list a bit as the Three Kings adventure book doesn't contain loads of the equipment information, like ammo types, weight and costs. Ammo is easy enough to fix with this here interwebz and we can mark the cost for everything as Military to get around that one... this leaves weight. I'll probably best guess this one and then check with Modiphius to see if they have any better ideas.

Thinking about some other equipment limitations that I could put in place.

1) Adding equipment sources for Allied and German would allow us to filter out German weapons when creating an allied character (and the other way around)

2) Trying to ad an option in that hides more modern equipment...  I just need to work out if I can hide anything that is Modern, but not in one of the Achtung Cthulhu sources... that should be possible as I've seen lines of code to hide skills and spells.

The most recent thing I've learned tonight is that if you hand code the data file, you can add comments in. If you use the built in editor it strips them all out again.... *Grrrrr*

While I was fiddling around with scripts, I added one item from Heroes of the Sea. In here, it adds the free skill Dreaming to everyone's character. For now I've set this up as a global bootstrap (add-on) so that every Achtung! Cthulhu character gets Dreaming at d4 for free if they have the Heroes of the Sea book selected as a valid source. If it becomes a global skill for all A!C books, or at least for some, I can add more usersources, or change it to the global Achtung! Cthulhu grouping so that any book allows it.

To add the skill for free, first we need to create our new skill, either through the admin interface, or in the .user file.

   <thing id="skACDream" name="Dreaming" description=" Brief description..." compset="Skill">
    <usesource source="ACHotS"/>
    <link linkage="attribute" thing="attrSpi"/>
    </thing>

We need to give it a unique ID, as usual, along with the name and description. Simple enough so far. The compset defines this as a skill and with the <link linkage... /> item we're assigning this to Spirit for now. The adventure doesn't specify, but the editor seems to want it linked to an attribute and Spirit seemed to make most sense. This one needs double checking with Modiphius at some point.

Ok, so now anyone can pick the skill, but we want everyone to get it for free. As far as I can work out (and someone please correct me if I'm wrong) I need to create a setting adjustment

    <evalrule phase="Initialize" message="Free Dreamer skill"><![CDATA[
if (hero.tagis[source.ACHotS] <> 0) then
perform #resspent[resSkill,-,1,"Free Dreamer"]
endif]]>
</evalrule>

In this setting adjustment we're adding a bootstrap line of skACDream, which is out Dreamer skill (skACDream) we created earlier. This will only apply to the character if we're in the Heroes of the Sea setting as the skill only exists here.  The evaluation rule then checks to see if we're using the Heroes of the Sea options. If we are, we reduce the  spent skill points by 1 to counteract us having just added a skill to the character upon creation. *TaDa!* Free skill only for someone using the source ACHotS.

Hero Lab - Sanity

As I mentioned yesterday, I've got Sanity working in my data files now too, thanks to the Tour of Darkness data files!

I know that, technically, I could have left the Sanity field to Hero Lab to deal with it, but that assumes the Horror Companion license is enabled and I wasn't happy assuming that everyone playing Achtung! Cthulhu was going to shell out the additional license costs... I'd like this one to run on the base Savage Worlds install and assume complete ignorance of everything else.

Sanity is calculated from a base value of 2, plus half of your Spirit.

First thing I had to do was add a Sanity thing to the data file. In the editor, these can be added under the Derived Trait tab. When writing the evaluation script we need to be aware that the dice values for the user's attributes are stored as half of the dice value, so d4 = 2, d6 = 3 etc. which gives us a range of 2-6. This also means we don't need to go dividing the dice value of Spirit when calculating Sanity, we can simply add it directly to the initial value of 2.

  <thing id="trACSanity" name="Sanity" description="Those who face the twisted horrors of the Mythos tend not to remain sane for very long. The Sanity statistic is a trait that lets you monitor your character&#146;s mental health. " compset="Trait" uniqueness="unique">
    <fieldval field="trtAbbrev" value="San"/>
    <fieldval field="trtBonus" value="2"/>
    <usesource source="sepActCth"/>
    <tag group="DashTacCon" tag="Basics" name="Basics" abbrev="Basics"/>
    <tag group="DashTacCon" tag="Traits" name="Traits" abbrev="Traits"/>
    <tag group="explicit" tag="3"/>
    <eval phase="Traits" priority="4000" name="Calc Derived Bonus"><![CDATA[
      ~Note: We must also handle an overage beyond d12 on a +1 per 2 full points basis.
      ~Note: We ADD the amount in case other effects have already applied adjustments.
      var bonus as number
      bonus = #trait[attrSpi]
      if (bonus >= 6) then
        bonus = 6 + round(hero.child[attrSpi].field[trtRoll].value / 2,0,-1)
        endif
      perform field[trtBonus].modify[+,bonus,"Half Spirit"]]]>
      <before name="Derived trtFinal"/>
      <after name="Calc trtFinal"/>
      </eval>
    </thing>

In the evaluation script we can see that we're looking at the attribute Spirit and assigning it to the bonus variable. If this value is 6 or more, i.e. we have a skill that improves our chances with additions to our Spirit rolls, then we need to work out what that new value of bonus would be. In order to work out the new value of bonus we need to divide the roll bonus by 2, rounding down and ignoring any decimal places and then add this to the new value of Bonus.

If the value of Bonus is less than 6, then we directly add the value of bonus to the field trtBonus. Tada! There's our rather faff worthy Sanity bonus. I wouldn't have thought of skills affecting the value enough to take it over D12... so thanks to the ToD team!

Now I've got to allow people to lose sanity points, otherwise we've no way of tracking these things.  I know Realms of Cthulhu have added another field in to track this and we may need to switch over to it later, but the A!C pre-gens don't have this listed... so I'm assuming they use a different method of tracking insanity. I'm sure there are other ways to do this, but I figure losing sanity is as close to an injury as you're going to get, so why not track it in the same manner?

Three Kings has one of the characters afflicted with a Special Ability called Fragile Mind, so this was my first injury.
  <thing id="injACFMind" name="Fragile Mind" description="The investigator has had a close brush with the Mythos and has suffered a -2 Sanity" compset="Injury">
    <usesource source="sepActCth"/>
    <eval phase="PreTraits" priority="5000"><![CDATA[perform #traitadjust[trACSanity,-,2,"Fragile Mind"]]]>
      <before name="Calc trtFinal"/>
      </eval>
    </thing>



In here you can see that when the injury is added, it modifies our Sanity trait trACSanity, reducing it by 2. When we remove the injury, their sanity levels return to normal.

I'm sure in future books there will be more sanity calculations, but for now we'll stick at this.

Hero lab - New TimePeriods

The more I look through the data files, the more I find I don't know about Hero Lab... Tonight I managed to workout a few kinks in the Three Kings dataset, so it now has the equipment added to a WW2 filter so you can hide Modern equipment and just see the WW2 items if you really want to, it's own Sanity value so you're not reliant upon the Horror expansion and some injuries that reduce sanity.

Adding the new time periods turns out to be pretty easy, just not all that clearly detailed as far as I can see...

In your .1st file add the following block of code and update the id, name and description fields. This will add another check box onto the Character Configuration screen allowing you to choose which time periods you want to enable for your game.

<source
  id="ACTimeWW2"
  name="WW2"
  parent="TimePeriod"
  sortorder="2"
  default="yes"
  description="Enables the availability of equipment from the WW2 time period">
  </source>

You can see from the parent field that we're extending the existing Savage Worlds setting TimePeriod source. The sort order of 2 puts it in the second position, equal to Black Powder weapons. Thankfully, alphabetical sorting kicks in after that and places WW2 below Black Powder so that it appears to be in the 3rd position, just before Modern. We've now got a filter that we can drop our equipment into...

As we want our new pieces of equipment to still be in use for Modern settings (and I've not worked out how to add new titles into the equipment lists yet) we're going to add our new equipment into the existing Equipment and Weapon categories, but in the XML view we're going to add an additional line to say that this needs our new ACTimeWW2 source. Here's an example of a new pistol from Three Kings as an example:

  <thing id="wpM1911" name="Browning M1911" compset="Ranged">
    <fieldval field="wpDamage" value="2d6+1"/>
    <fieldval field="wpShort" value="12"/>
    <fieldval field="wpMedium" value="24"/>
    <fieldval field="wpLong" value="48"/>
    <fieldval field="wpShots" value="7"/>
    <fieldval field="wpPiercing" value="1"/>
    <usesource source="ACTKing"/>
    <usesource source="ACTimeWW2"/>    
    <tag group="Weapon" tag="SemiAuto"/>
    <tag group="WeaponType" tag="ModPistol"/>
    </thing>

By adding a usesource of ACTimeWW2 we're (as far as I can work out) saying that as long as we are allowing the use of ACTimeWW2 in the Equipment timezones, this will show up. My current issue is that if I hide the WW2 period, it doesn't vanish, but if I hide the Modern period it is all that remains... so it's sort-of working. If I remove or replace the WeaponType group, it responds properly, but then isn't grouped by anything. Creating new weapon groups in the admin console doesn't appear to work as expected and the Hero Lab forums seem to suggest you need to hijack one of the existing items and replace the title, which seems a bit daft! I need to come back to this one again before I move onto the next Achtung! Cthulhu book.

I'll detail Sanity tomorrow as it's past my bedtime...

 

Hero Lab - Getting started

In preparation for eventually getting our game going, I've been having a play with a character creation application from Lone Wolf called Hero Lab. It comes with the ability to plug in a number of different rpg systems with all the skills, equipment and attributes needed to create new characters quickly and easily. Savage Worlds is one of the officially supported systems and it seems to do a pretty good job so far. The one limitation I've currently got with it is the selection of equipment isn't relevant for the time period... it's either got medieval weaponry for fantasy games, or modern day/futuristic weapons. None of those are particularly useful when you need to equip a British Commando behind German lines... much as my player would love to be toting miniguns and plasma guns. If they can stick with it until the Dust book arrives they may get a nice surprise!

Tonight I wanted to see how simple it is to add in new pieces of equipment from Modiphius' Three Kings campaign book. The answer? Pretty damn simple so far. I've not had to venture into anything that adjusts statistics yet though, so we'll see how that all pans out next September when the Achtung! Cthulhu core books start turning up. Tomorrow I'm going to have a go at adding in everything from the Heroes of the Sea book so we've got everything in once place.

After that I want to try recreating a few of the pre-gen characters to make sure everything is working properly so I can balance any new characters I create for them. It'll also help if the villains escape and come back as recurring characters as I can level them up at the same time. It'd certainly be interesting to see Herr Doktor Kammerstein escape and continue his experiments on a grander scale somewhere else...

Before you ask, I'm not distributing these files unless Modiphius says it's ok. There will be a separate post if that happens.