Pushing the boundaries - Hero Lab Does it!

[DaggerdaleDM]

I was dusting off my old notes for a Nyambe campaign (d20 pseudo african mythology) and came across a fun NPC that I thought was going to be a nightmare to stat up.

In previous games the PCs had defeated a terrible evil which had "awakened" animals near its dark temple. Some of these animals did not or could not go to the temple so were never converted into evil followers but were left "awakened".

One such animal was an elephant. Previous encounters had shown that these animals could have class levels.

Well, with a few clicks, Hero Lab let me create an "awakened" elephant/barbarian (1st level). Have your games ever included an elephant, an elephant on ramapage, an elephant on rapage and raging?! Ah what fun.

Thank you for creating a product with such flexibility!

[Colen]

DaggerdaleDM wrote:
>
>
> I was dusting off my old notes for a Nyambe campaign (d20 pseudo african
> mythology) and came across a fun NPC that I thought was going to be a
> nightmare to stat up.
>
> In previous games the PCs had defeated a terrible evil which had
> "awakened" animals near its dark temple. Some of these animals did not
> or could not go to the temple so were never converted into evil
> followers but were left "awakened".
>
> One such animal was an elephant. Previous encounters had shown that
> these animals could have class levels.
>
> Well, with a few clicks, Hero Lab let me create an "awakened"
> elephant/barbarian (1st level). Have your games ever included an
> elephant, an elephant on ramapage, an elephant on rapage and raging?! Ah
> what fun.
>
> Thank you for creating a product with such flexibility!


Awesome! Good to see that people are making use of the new stuff we
added. Just please don't tell your players that it was our fault they
got stamped on.


(Was it an african or an indian elephant?)


--
Colen McAlister, colen@wolflair.com
Chief Engineer, Lone Wolf Development

[DaggerdaleDM]

Awesome! Good to see that people are making use of the new stuff we
added. Just please don't tell your players that it was our fault they
got stamped on.


(Was it an african or an indian elephant?)

African - of course. (nice to see that there are options)

Which brings me to a question. Is there a seperate way to add common templates such that I could create a gnoll fighter/thief and add a template such as, I don't know, say fiendish to him? I haven't figured out how to do this without copying the creature and creating a new creature with the template already factored in.

[Colen]

DaggerdaleDM wrote:
>
>
> *Quote:*
>
> Awesome! Good to see that people are making use of the new stuff we
> added. Just please don't tell your players that it was our fault they
> got stamped on.
>
>
> (Was it an african or an indian elephant?)
>
>
>
> African - of course.
>
> Which brings me to a question. Is there a seperate way to add common
> templates such that I could create a gnoll fighter/thief and add a
> template such as, I don't know, say fiendish to him? I haven't figured
> out how to do this without copying the creature and creating a new
> creature with the template already factored in.


If you scroll down the list of classes, you should see "Celestial
Template", "Fiendish Template", "Half-Dragon Template" in the list. You
can then apply those and the effects will be calculated for you. Is that
what you're looking for?


(Now I'm looking forward to the barbarian half-dragon african elephant.)


--
Colen McAlister, colen@wolflair.com
Chief Engineer, Lone Wolf Development

[DaggerdaleDM]

Ah, that will work perfectly. I'll check that out. I didn't know about those.

(Now I'm looking forward to the barbarian half-dragon african elephant.)

That is just wrong!

[FifthWanderer]

Disturbing beyond all words....

[SushiDave]

8) OK... so here's the thing - I am a newbie (registered user) of this most amazing and awesome of programs. This means that I am at a loss on how to construct custom thingies.

I am going to attempt to use this program to create stat sheets for some very special NPC's in the campaign world I am working on. So here's the deal - rules are meant to be broken... simply because the rules that WoTC made up ARE broken (in some respects)

Specificaly, in this instance with skeletons. Yes, their skeleton template is fine for most circumstances in a conventional setting... but my world is ANYTHING but conventional! I have two specific needs... 1stly, I need a group of skeletal pirates whom are more like the 'Pirates who don't do anything' chaotic good that suffer a 'Robin Hood' complex. Robbing from the rich & giving to the poor. Granted, they consider themselves poor... but at least they acknowlege that others are in that same boat (literaly?)
The second involves a group of high level skeletal bards... known collectively as the Grateful Undead!

I guess the question is - "How can I copy the existing skeletal template to a new one & then remove these aweful restrictions?"

I hope this makes sense to someone out there that knows these kinds of technical issues?

[Mathias]

Go into the editor, create a new file, go to the templates tab, and select "New (Copy)" and select skeleton from the list. Give it a new name and unique ID (or name it skeleton template, give it a new unique ID, and put the old skeleton template's unique ID in the "replaces thing ID" field to overwrite the regular version.

The changes themselves are a bit more complex. I'd study the files in the source folder (a subfolder of HL's default save directory), and look there for how things can be accomplished. srd_templates.dat is where to look up the existing templates.

[SushiDave]

thx 4 the info... sounds like I have my work cut out?

[Mathias]

I'd practice on a few feats and go through the tutorial in the help about building races and classes before trying a template, since a lot of the detail of the template is in the scripting that makes all the specific changes from race to template, and you'll get to see smaller scripts for feats and classes, and get an idea of how to use them.

Although, re-reading your post, if all you want to do is remove the pre-requisites - that's a matter of deleting a few entries in the Pre-Reqs button within the template.