Am I doing it right ?

[Vampyre]

Hello guys,

It's me again with lots of questions concerning Realm Works. Basically, I'm trying to get the grisps on RW, and I started by watching how things were done in the sample tutorial section. I learned lots of stuff there, and I highly like that everything is totally customisable.

The universe in which I plan to develop different campaigns is huge. Or it isn't, depending on how deep you want to go. I love story writing, and therefore, this set gives me endless opportunities, in just the basic canvas of the game. Just to give you a snapshot, in the universe, there are 46 known planets. I let your imagination go wild about what level of details I could go in. Which lead me in my first question :

- How am I supposed to work with RW on that matter ? Do I start by creating a world almanach with known stuff (known families, known planets, capitals, known factions and such), and then using that background to build the campaign using those elements ? Or do I start small, creating what I just need for my campaign and adding layers on top to finally get to my universe ?

- Is there an option somewhere to be able to go multi languages ? I'm not english native, and would love having it in french. I noticed I can translate almost anything in there, but not on the interface. Is there a way I could achieve that (even if it's me translating the shown text) ?

- I was also lurking into HeroLab (I noticed there is the possibility to link with herolabs files, probably characters and such). I would absolutely LOVE having my game in HL, but it won't probably never happen. The only possibility I see, is doing it with the authoring kit. I've looked into the wiki, read the samples and how they adapted the savage worlds settings inside of HL. I have programming skills (I programmed in the past, but I stopped 10 years ago, so yeah, there is a lot of rust there in my brain on that concern). The samples I have seen on the wiki are particularly scary, and it seems, when watching some portion of the code, that you truly need to know what you're doing (like the PRIORITY level code). Knowing that my setting only consist of the player's book (and just recently the game master's book), do you think that is a viable option for me to spend time in coding the whole system into HL ?

- How do you guys do to keep track of the stats for the characters ? I was looking into creating a villain inside of RW, and besides the fact I can write a lot of things on him, I couldn't find how to write down the stats for that NPC. Is there a way to track them inside RW, or is that truly linked with HL ?

Many thanks for your time and answer,

Vampyre

[MaxSupernova]

Originally Posted by Vampyre

The universe in which I plan to develop different campaigns is huge. Or it isn't, depending on how deep you want to go. I love story writing, and therefore, this set gives me endless opportunities, in just the basic canvas of the game. Just to give you a snapshot, in the universe, there are 46 known planets. I let your imagination go wild about what level of details I could go in. Which lead me in my first question :

- How am I supposed to work with RW on that matter ? Do I start by creating a world almanach with known stuff (known families, known planets, capitals, known factions and such), and then using that background to build the campaign using those elements ? Or do I start small, creating what I just need for my campaign and adding layers on top to finally get to my universe ?

I can tell you how I did my almanac for my Star Wars campaign. I have a sector with 20-odd planets. The players are mostly involved with four or five, but I want the others there for later play.

I created topics for every planet with a brief description. I created topics for the specific things that the players were dealing with on the planets that they knew well (like political leaders, major cities, NPCs, criminal organizations, etc).

Many of them are just stubs with a couple of notes, because the PCs haven't run into them yet. The topics that the PCs have encountered, or will likely encounter soon, I have added more detail to.

As I suspect the players will need to encounter more things, I add them as topics or I add more detail to the existing topics.

This helps me keep things in perspective, because I see the large scale of the whole sector, but I only have to prepare what will be used immediately. It also gives me a framework to ad-lib off of if they take a turn where I didn't expect it.

So, to summarize, I roughed out the big picture with large topics like planet names and general politics and such, and I added detail where the PCs are going to be.

Does that help?

[Vampyre]

Yes, it definitely does. I had a doubt in the method I wanted to follow, but your confirmation totally validates my way of thinking.

The universe I'm playing in, is very large, and has a HUGE background (most probably the widest scale I've ever saw in a game). It contains just 5000 years of history, and that's just a part of the background.

I will follow your path in mapping the starmap of the known universe, map all the stargate links and creating more precise places as I require them for my campaign setting. I think that's the most impressive about RW : the level of detail I could dive in. It's a lot of work to start with, but I think it is a huge relief being able to fall back into another path as the players don't always follow the path you draw for them.

Thank you very much for sharing your experience, and helping figure it out. Many thanks, and good gaming !

[gloranphile]

Out of curiosity, Vampyre, what game system and world are you using?

[Vampyre]

Fair question I use the "Fading Suns" settings, under its revised edition (the second book just came out a few months ago, but no translation into my language yet. I own the english version though so I can go further in preparing the set for my campaign).

The system used is a system just build for Fading Suns (as far as I know), the Victory Points System. All in all, the victory point system is working like this :

The player want to do something, that requires a decision... Let's take a vivid example : The player wants to open a locked door. He decides to lockpick it. Can he do it or not ? The victory point system is then used.

- The player describes what he wants to achieve. Here, he wants to open the door by lockpicking it.
- The GM determines a victory point level : this door is in wood, and has just a normal lock. He determines that to be able to open this door, it needs 10 victory points.
- The GM doesn't need to explain everything about the rules. He can simply ask for a roll of dices, without saying anything else. He asks, for this action, to take dexterity and lockpicking (one capability and one specialisation). This is an amount of numbers. He asks for a roll (a D20). The result is added to the first number.
- If the points are above the victory point level, the door is opened. If not, on the next turn, the player can try again, and it adds to his previous roll.

This is just a description of the rules, but, as in every game, the rules can be bent. You can add to the victory points system a timebase value, for very difficult tasks. There are also rules for when players team together in order to get something done (they try to hack a computer without knowledge). With all the team busy on the task for multiple turns, they could be able to finally hack it, but if the situation is based on time (in two hours, the ship will crash in a station). That could lead into desperate situation where the players, due to their actions, get time pressed. It's quite difficult to explain it all in just a few sentences, but I like very much that system.

And as usual, the GM is always the master, and can take just what he wants in the rules if he finds easier.

Unfortunately for me, the victory point system is not widely used, and Fading Suns is not the most known setting, mainly due to the fact that the licence has been bought and bought and bought again with time. So basically, there is not much to read about (luckily they got the GM book out not long ago), so I can now start building the background.

And to be absolutely complete, here is the idea behind Fading Suns. Fading Suns is a sci-fi settings in the sense that there are ships, planets, aliens, and humans. But due to the politics of that era, the power is in the hands of the Church. It is a medieval society, ruled by five major houses. They all dream of taking the power from the Church.

If you want to get a rough idea, think about a world as dense as the Song of Fire and Ice, the same kind of setting, but in the universe of Dune, mixed together with exploration like in Stargate. Quite a mix, but I personaly like it very much. It can lead to a lot of different situation, and to be able to mix the genres in a very neat way.

Oh BTW, I was trying to get some events in RW, but it seems I can't type a date. I would like to type a rough date (-40 000 BC), in order to write down the big guidelines about the story of the universe. But I can't get it in. Do you have any idea on how to do that ?

For questions about fading suns, feel free to ask

[AEIOU]

I started using RW with just stat blocks. No automation or calculating, just straight text. Some folks have created templates in Word and copy/pasted them over. I found a nice template for townsfolk that focused on personality rather than stats somewhere for NPC's that I used for a while. But now that HL is integrated, it's easier and faster for me to use HL.

As far as entry, I view it as choosing either depth or breadth. I opted for breadth in order to making linking easy. You can also go depth and complete each topic as you go; but then you'll need to refresh previous entries to link them.

First pass I identified all of the terrain features, the major cities, the major NPC's and the adventure areas as simple stubs and no data. Copies a few paragraphs from PDF's but didn't spend much time on anything. I wanted a very rough skeleton.

My second pass fleshed out the terrain features with general information. At this point, topics are linking and interlinking all the time.

My third pass focuses on the current city, adventure areas and immediate NPC's the players will interact with. At this point, I also start putting topics into containers AFTER they are fairly complete. If an NPC is still listed under individuals chances are really good that I haven't touched it yet -- so I have a visual reminder of what still needs to be worked on.

Then it boils down to everything else which I get to as I can. If it's needed for an adventure, it gets done. If it's not needed, it at least links and reminds me that it exists and it's an option for further development. Things like adding an academy to a city that an NPC attended. Slowly add things to containers. Keep adding details and nuances to existing material.