Help structuring a topic category
 

I'm starting a campaign this week using the Powered by the Apocalypse game "Monster of the Week." I'm working on setting up a new Realm to cover this game.

I want to define a category to provide an outline for Mysteries (the game's term for specific adventures). I'm trying to set it up with two broad sections - the adventure overview and the "Threats" section.

In the game there are four types of Threats - Monsters, Minions, Locations, and Bystanders. Any given Mystery will have one Monster and generally at least one of each of the other Threat types, although there might be multiple of any of them.

My original plan was to define the category with sub-sections predefined for each of the types of Threats with the idea that I'd add additional subsections as defined if I needed to add additional Threats to the outline. However, the program doesn't work the way that I thought, and it doesn't seem like it will let me add duplicated predefined sub-sections; I can only add custom sub-sections defined on the fly.

I suppose I could define individual Threat categories and have them nested as child topics under the outline topic, but that's messy and needlessly complicated - I'd much rather keep the entirety of the scenario in a single topic. Does anyone have any suggestions about how to approach this? I hope I've described what I'm trying to do well enough - if anyone needs clarification let me know and I'll try to explain more.

Thanks!

Currently you can't do this. I have requested this feature, as well: http://forums.wolflair.com/showthread.php?t=52622

There's some reason having to do with import/export that duplicate identical sections are no longer allowed, I don't know why and have never seen an explanation beyond what I just wrote.

However when I was reading the description of your problem I will say that the first thing that popped up in my head wasn't that you were goingto have issues with duplicate sections but "he's trying to put an entire adventure in a single topic?"

Unless these are very short, very lightly fleshed out adventures I don't think it will work very well to have the whole thing in one topic. For me, and I suspect this is the case for most GM's, an adventure often consumes dozens of topics. Trying to put an entire module into a single topic defeats much of what makes RW valuable.

@kbs666 - one of the selling points of Monster of the Week (at least for me) is that the entire prep for an adventure can fit on just a couple of typed pages. My intention was to consolidate all of the specifics for a session in a topic and use the greater power of Realm Works to organize and keep information about the wider world as the campaign develops. At least that's my theory going into it - this is the first time I'm playing any Powered by the Apocalypse game. :)

I think I can figure out a work around, I was just hoping there was something I was missing. Thanks for the help!

It seems easier to arrange it as one parent topic for the overview, and then one child topic for each threat.

As the party encounter each threat, you can pull up the relevant threat topic which will have all the details for that threat in one topic.

Ok. These are really short. However I'd think, if you're going to make even a single night of it, you're going to need to expand the prepared material beyond two pages. But you may be far batter at improve than I am and your players may not tend to bring up the things you mentioned in previous adventures as often as mine do.

In the end I took a hybrid approach. Trying to add the individual snippets for additional Threats was cumbersome, and the final layout was too hard to read without section breaks for each Threat.

I ended up adding space in the mystery overview topic for text snippets naming each of the Threats, and topic definitions for each of the Threat types which I am creating as child topics contained by the mystery. I think this will also help incorporate any elements that become recurrent in the campaign by allowing them to exist as their own topics outside of the specific mystery.

Thanks to everyone for their ideas and feedback - it really helped me think through what I needed/wanted from the layout.