Migrating Articles between Realms?
 

Is it possible to share articles from one realm to the next? I'd certainly hate to have to recreate my Monster Manual in both realms.

Directly, no.

The idea in RealmWorks would be to export the articles from one realm and then import into another.

So this comes down to planning for content you want to share. You can make a copy of a Realm as a starting point for a new game (so, keeping a "pristine" copy around is good), and it will have new, independent copies of the content.

You can also export content from Realm A to import into Realm B. Those will be copies that include the same identifier and would be recognized to be updated if you export changed versions from Realm A and import those into Realm B.

Those are the primary options.

Are there any limitations btw If I export things around? E.g. can I export my monsters from Realm 1 to Realm 2 and later I want to export from Realm 2 back to Realm 1? It looks like all kinds of meta data is stored with a realm and wondered what kind of limitation I will have.

Currently I still have a problem exporting a small realm, some portions work but full export does not. Iam still trying out to figure how to do it :)

The ID assigned to the original Topic is retained on export, so re-importing would be a way to share updates back and forth between realms, technically.

The issues are practical, like forgetting which one in the one with the latest changes, for example, and replacing new with old as a result.

Also, generally, exports tend to be multiple Topics. With potentially thousands of topics in each Realm, maintaining a list of exports at the topic level would be hard to manage.

Likewise, if you have, say, 30 monsters in your original A->B export and 30 in your B->A export... but they are not the same 30, then you might make mistakes again.

My plan, and recommendation, is to treat one of the Realms as a "Master" and only export FROM that Realm to others.

Ex.
I have a Golarion Master realm that holds 3 Adventure Paths + assorted supplementary materials. I will export some of that material when I start a new game. Monsters would be one export. Regional support content would be a second. The AP I intend to run would be a third, and probably "General world knowledge" content a fourth. So, to support 3 APs I would have about 5 or 6 exports, and I don't really expect all of them to be used together. The value of this is that all Identifiers are recognized from the master into the game copy. If I have multiple groups, I can re-use some of the exports, and as I add more support material, I can re-do the selected exports with updated material and update the game realm appropriately. This would be much harder to manage if I were exporting and updating in multiple directions

I do this all the time. Mostly with spells and mechanics articles. You simply bulk tag the articles you want to migrate with the export tag. Do the export. Then import into the new realm. It is pretty painless.

On thing that would make it more painless, is to have a realm with nothing but monsters, spells, and other articles that are not campaign specific. That way you can just export the entire realm and import it into a new realm.

But I only have a couple realms and I'm generally just running one, so I just manually select the articles from previous realms that I want to move into a new realm when I'm setting up a new campaign.

I know you wrote this a year ago, but thought I'd comment to say thanks! This was a really good Bio X4 review explanation, and yes, a painless way to move articles!

Thanks dude