Savage Worlds

Updated Dec. 28
Having created character sheets for Sundered Skies, I decided to go through some of the other character sheets that PEG has available for download for various Savage Worlds settings.
The first one done was mostly just a cut-n-paste of the form fields from the Sundered Skies sheet. The next sheets done were for Weird Wars. Both the Wild Card sheet and the Troop sheet are done. The most recent sheet, Slipstream, took a bit longer due to the way it was laid out. I finished it, both pages worth, this evening.
After a long delay (wow, been two months since I worked on these last) I've finished the Deadlands: Reloaded character sheet. This is essentially the same sheet that is up on PEG's site that is form-fillable, but with the added advantage that it can be saved from Adobe Reader. I was able to make a number of the sections to be multi-line boxes, so text should just flow from one line to the next without having to play with fonts.
The next two completed are for the Solomon Kane setting. A basic character sheet and an ally sheet. The Pirates of the Spanish Main was a simple one to do. Just had to extend features in Adobe Reader so that it could be saved rather than having to retype it each time. Finished up the Rippers Character Sheet tonight. Completed the 50 Fathoms Character sheets.
With the completion of the Tour of Darkness and Evernight sheets from the Pinnacle download area completed, I've finished all of the currently available sheets from the company itself. The Space 1889 Character sheet was recently released by Pinnacle Entertainment. The version on their site is now editable and savable from the free Adobe Reader, so I have removed it from my site to comply with their wishes.
Found that the Explorer's Edition sheet was needing asian fonts installed for Adobe Reader. Changed the text inputs so that they are all Helvetica font. And somehow a few more fields escaped my efforts.
Happy Savaging

A recent posting by another Savage player brought me back to the idea of using GraphViz in gaming. This particular example was in mapping player characters with their in game relationships to people, places, things and ideas to help a GM visualize how they are all interconnected.
I went through the post and created several .gv files that have presets setup to make doing more of these easier should I continue down this path with my own games.
Each relationship has a weight that is colored. Yellow is for weak, green for Normal and red for Strong. The colors can be adjusted for each edge or for each type of edge by changing the parameters either at the top of the given section (changes all of them) or right next to the connection (changes just that edge).
The first gv shows the two initial characters, Grimm and Klovis, and Grimm's connections to his initial choices.

The second gv expands on the first connections file reflecting some new comments and examples from the blog. Grimm's boss now has a name and the relationship shows how Grimm is conflicted about authority figures. No connections were defined for the other example characters, so Klovis doesn't have anywhere to link to still. The nice thing about GraphViz is that it will move nodes out to provide space for the edges that link nodes together.

The last gv adds another connection with the note about it being a negative relationship. This would probably be better represented by a different color edge rather than a note near the edge since each relationship will probably end up with some notes near them. Other links that could be added are the interconnections of the PCs, but those aren't as needed as seeing how the various PCs are connected to the NPCs in a campaign setting.
This idea would make for a great idea for dealing with games of more Political Intrigue, like Shadowrun or Legend of the Five Rings.

Of course once you go this far with mapping relationships and places, then the next step would be to build the entire world in something like a GIS database to actually show where everything and everyone is in relation to each other. A massive undertaking for any single GM, but maybe more possible with the collective masses for a popular world, like the OpenStreetMaps project.

Updated Aug. 7

After doing the data collection for the D6 Probabilities with the presence of the Wild Die I thought I'd take a look at the Savage Worlds system and see how the probabilities show up for the open rolling of a D6 with a second die worked out.

No surprise, the results show a fairly linear falloff for the initial values (up to around 10 or 12 depending on the size of the second die rolled with the D6) with a lessening of the slope after that point (almost a sharp turning inflection point).

I haven't GMed in almost a decade. I was able to get a group of players to try out Savage Worlds due to some time off from a normally running D&D campaign (mix of 1st and 2nd Edition). I put together the basics of the mission in a few days and mostly winged it when it came to the combat stats.
Character creation only took about an hour (players were unfamiliar with the system, so building characters took a little longer plus I gave them advancements after creation so they weren't just basic novices).

An interesting idea was brought up on the Savage Worlds forum about the possibility of adjusting the system so that instead of wild card characters rolling a d6 as the wild die, what if the wild die was the same as the trait die being rolled. This got me thinking, and since I'd already done up the chart and tables for rolling the normal way, how hard could this be.
Turns out, not hard at all. About 15 minutes with excel and voila, here is the chart.

Updated January 10th

"A shattered world. A thousand floating islands. A constant glow of madness. Sundered Skies begins where every other world ends.

The people of the Skies survive, tested by an unimaginable apocalypse, struggling daily against ravenous beasts, sky pirates, and the effects of the inescapable voidglow! But the fate of the Skies is in danger! The magic of the glow is not the only taint in this unforgiving realm. Dark forces conspire to bring the Skies to the brink of an even greater catastrophe. Can you survive long enough to discover the secrets of Sundered Skies?"

The great thing about having a Friendly Local Gaming Store (FLGS) with a decent game room is that other players are willing to come in and Demo various game systems. This weekend I got a chance to try out Savage Worlds (SW), the current game system from Pinnacle Press. The game system is designed to be a generic/universal type gaming system for use in any number of settings from Old West (ala. Deadlands Reloaded) to Pulp-like settings (ala. Slip Stream).