Shadowrun, GURPS, D6 System, D20 System, HERO, Savage Worlds, Accessories

Stalker, from the Shadowrun Forums has created an interesting utility for Gamemasters. It is an Initiative Tracker that includes the ability to roll and sort the initiatives of PCs and NPCs alike. This utility can be downloaded to your local computer so that the javascript can be edited so that the PCs of the party are automatically inserted into the list of people in the fight, saving the GM some time. Currently it does all the rolling for every character placed in the initiative tracker, but Stalker is considering a way to allow Players to roll their own initiative with dice and that result just entered in for the character and sorting them into the order along with the NPCs.
This should be a great utility for most GMs to help deal with larger numbers of NPCs and since it can be downloaded to your system, doesn't require a connection to the Net to be able to use at ones gaming table. Plus it should work on tablets and other systems that support Javascript in their browsers.

Nostalgia: a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition; also: something that evokes nostalgia

Remember those days when getting together with friends and running the latest adventure meant brightly colored maps in nice, neat hexagons? You know the ones. A few bright colors, with each terrain type fitting so nicely into each little area. Well, I stumbled across a site, Mystara.thorf.co.uk that resurrected or recreated quite a few of the old maps from the old D&D modules and campaigns.

On top of the color maps, the site also has a FAQ on the various fonts that were used to produce the modules and boxed sets from the TSR days. So, if you’ve ever wanted to produce your own adventures in a similar looking fashion to the old TSR modules, check out the fonts section to mimic the look of the old settings.

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 Dec. 6
It's been a while since I last had something to write. Part of that is because I've been busy in a few new games. One of those is a campaign that is taking us through a very old module for D&D, The Temple of Elemental Evil. We're not even halfway through the Temple and our party has already suffered major losses and replacements within the party. I've been taking advantage of the shear scope of this dungeon to slowly improve my minuscule Lightwave Modeling skills. The GM has been nice enough to allow me to use what I draw in Lightwave in the game as a map in my character's head. So far I've gotten the floor plan down for the main floor and the sub-floors have been expanded slowly as the group has moved through the various parts of the dungeon. The height between the floors isn't well known from the descriptions read aloud from the module, so the separations are just current best guesses to make the various discovered stairways line up. The stairs were created using LWCAD for the straight steps and plugin that I found that does spiral staircases, MK ScalaChiocciola. Once I have more of the whole dungeon mapped out I'll start adding walls and other details to help flesh out the look and feel of the dungeon (walls, torches, etc...).

Now this is an interesting find, especially given the current playtesting our gaming group is currently running through. The Pathfinder Random Treasure Generator V3.0. It offers lots of options for controlling the kinds of treasure given out. Magic can be set to low to reduce the appearance of magical treasures, or increased to make them more common. Do you want to give out more coins? or would you rather the party found gems and other items instead? How hard was the fight the party faced? What is the average level?
Multiple lists can easily and quickly be made as they each appear below the last one on the page or can be appended together. It all just depends on the options selected.

I decided to bone up on some of my D6 knowledge by working my way through creating a nice, big spell list. I got a few spells done (about halfway through the A's) and decided to share the beginnings of it. Half the list of A's are placeholder sections to help me speed up a bit when it comes to creating the spells. In some ways it would be nice to have a little program to help handle the basic calculations (less prone to minor mistakes creeping in if the computer does the addition, subtraction, etc...). I did refind one little, well, wouldn't call it a gem, but a definite diamond in the rough, the D6 System - Wizard's Little Apprentice. This had been a little html/javascript based page that had been up on the old West End Games (which has since died) site, but don't appear to have survived the conversion.

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).

Another "Blast From the Past" that I recently ran across thanks to some gamer forums I read.

Wildspace - A TSR Ad for something that looks like either a predecessor to Spelljammer.

So, a quick bit of google searching and this review from the Board Game Geek.

Now where might the full 30 minute video be for this ghost of a game...

OK, this isn't the video for WildSpace, but it is from the same series.

One interesting problem I’ve occasionally encountered when doing stuff for various games is visualizing the paths through the game. The simplest one would be the path from one adventure to another for a party. A more complicated one would be an entire campaign with various adventures broken down by either level or some other gauge of experience for the game system.
One good example of the latter was posted to the Triple Ace Games site about the game setting Sundered Skies (a Savage Worlds setting). This graph was laid out in something like Visio by hand. Each of the adventures was clustered and linked to the next adventure in the series or Plot Point.