Display Story Almanac topics in World Almanac

[Dr_Automaton]

Currently, the topics in the Story Almanac are excluded from the World Almanac. I wonder if there would be any value in adding the option in in the World Almanac to include Story Almanac topics to give the user a comprehensive list of topics.

[Nikmal]

I was wondering what the Almanac serves as a purpose. I click on it but there is not much to do but see the topics as a whole which the Story tab already does along with the actual data they contain.

[Maidhc O Casain]

My understanding is that the World Almanac is meant to contain everything about your Realm. In order to pare down the information you have to sift through in a particular session or game, you'd move only the information relevant to that session or game to the Story Almanac.

[Joe]

I'll be writing up a more detailed explanation and perhaps making a video for it, but in short:

Campaign worlds are huge. Many have far off kingdoms and all sorts of content the players aren't likely to interact with for many months of real world time. To keep your topics list from getting insanely cluttered, we opted to have a separation between what's currently relevant to the story and what's in the broader world.

The UI currently forces a binary choice between them (Story Almanac or World Almanac), but underneath I believe they are really all in one unified data set and differentiated by a simple flag. In the future we may change the presentation to show them in a combined view where you could toggle whether you want one, the other, or both. However, no promises in the short term.

[Rabulias]

Perhaps in starting a campaign I enter far-off nations as brief sketch entries in the World Almanac. Later, as the adventures carry the players to the other side of the continent, those nations are now the focus. Do you see GMs being able to move those World Almanac entries into the Story Almanac (and vice versa) as the campaign's focus shifts?

[zarlor]

Originally Posted by Rabulias

Perhaps in starting a campaign I enter far-off nations as brief sketch entries in the World Almanac. Later, as the adventures carry the players to the other side of the continent, those nations are now the focus. Do you see GMs being able to move those World Almanac entries into the Story Almanac (and vice versa) as the campaign's focus shifts?

I think that is EXACTLY what he's saying we'll be doing.

[Silveras]

Yes, the moving of topics back and forth as needed has been mentioned previously. Think of it this way.. there's ONE Almanac, really. Topics are either "currently active"/ "in the foreground" (in the Story Almanac section) or "NOT currently active"/ "in the background" (in the World Almanac section).

[Joe]

That's exactly the intent here. Both directions of movement are viable: story to world for something going out of focus and world to story for something coming in to focus.

Also viable are more and less fleshed out topics sitting in the World Almanac out of focus. If you're making your own campaign, feel free to namedrop far off kingdoms and whatnot in your story. Those can link to World Topics that have little more than a name defined, which you can flesh out later. Alternatively, you could have an entire continent and all its people and places predefined, either something you created yourself or as part of a piece of published content. In this way, the World Topic is ready to go when you want it to become part of your current story, waiting for you to take it off the shelf like a book at a library.

[Prince of Morgoth]

what about if say I'm running two different campaigns both set in Greyhawk for example.

I would hope that I could build one world almanac for Greyhawk with say The Village of Hommlet as a place. And then be able to copy (rather then move) the village of Hommlet place to either or both 'realms'/campaigns story almanac as either story dictates, if the players end up in that location for example

Furthermore I'd expect that as each campaign evolves differently I could make changes in one (say Ostler the innkeeper has a tragic accident) which would not effect the other campaign. And if I updated the original source in the 'world almanac', it would push changes down to both campaigns (perhaps optionally).

Currently as far as I'm aware if I run two separate campaign I have to duplicate content between the two realms.. lot of copy and paste and needless duplication. Or I could try to manage content all in one realm for both groups but that seems like a massive management headache.

Is there plans for a wold almanac that you could use as a reference and base multiple stories(realms) from as I've described above?

p.s. I run 4 different campaigns in 2 different worlds so having a 'master' world almanac for each world that i could reference independently and multiple times for multiple realms would be awesome!

[Silveras]

I think this is where a lot of people are getting hung up... seeing what is there now, and how you have to use it now, compared to how it will be later.

Right now, yes, to run 2 campaigns in the same world, you have to enter the same world date twice. IF you need it. I am not bothering with any more of that than I absolutely need, because of what is coming in the future (as I understand it, anyway).

The key is the Repository feature that is not in place yet.

What is coming is that you could create a REALM (not a World Almanac specifically, although all of the content may be in the World Almanac) where all of the content is nations, history (setting guidebook material). Then you could copy/share that from the Repository to two separate group-specific REALMS, one for each campaign. Changes in each would indeed be independent, so if Ostler in Hommlet "A" dies, Ostler in Hommlet "B" is fine.

What is not as clear is whether updating the "parent" Realm would cascade those changes to the other realms. The last description I saw made it sound like "no", but it is far from final and that was far from specifically stated.

The Repository is the same mechanism that publishers will use to distribute paid-for data packages (as I understand the planned setup). What is also not clear to me is how they will use piecemeal updates. Paizo, for example, often drops a name in one product, and may follow up a year or more later with a more detailed write up (ex. the City of Magnimar got a small gazetteer in the early days, then a full book of its own later; the Gods of Golarion have had several iterations now.. 1-column in one book, 2-columns in another, 8 pages in a full article, and now there's a new book in the spring updating them all). Assuming that the publishers mirror their books in their data package releases, it is not at all clear that these separate articles would be merged .. and I don't look forward to managing 6-7 versions of the same Topic made available through different sources. So that's one piece of this I will be watching keenly for more updates.

I am sure Rob or someone from LoneWolf will be along shortly to clarify, anyway