Where to store the bad guys?

Hello everyone. John here, long time PnP player.

I'm really liking Realm Works. It helps solve the main problem I have been having with my game. Now that I am suffering from middle age brain more, and the games are much more irregular, keeping track of names and such have been a problem. It makes me sad that I have to ask my players, a lot, what the name of an NPC was, when I was the one who made them up and named them.

Anyway, my question. Where do I store/ place the bad guys that my players are facing? I'm assuming that the layout of the main topics (Sources to Other) has been tweeked a good bit, so I don't understand why there is not a place for enemies in among them. I can stick them under the People topic, but in my mind for example, the hellhounds that are in room A4 or not really people. And they are not really part of a Group.

Just having been looking at it for a few days, I'm tempted to make a main topic of Enemies or even divide it more and add two topics say Monsters (like for the hellhounds) and Enemies (for major/ reoccurring bad guys).

But I would rather not make major changes like that until I at least understand why its not set up like that already. So if this has been hashed out, and I'm missing something, please let me know. If this is just something that no one has thought of yet, I'll be happy to repost it in the suggestions forums.

Very good questions, JTFinnegan.

Are your players ever going to see revealed content? If yes, then they will see that an NPC is included in the Enemy group.... Is that a problem? Not always, but if there is a mystery or someone is pretending to be nice who really isn't, it'll give them away.

I put recurring enemies in the same cast group as everything else myself.

Recurring enemies are usually members of an evil organization or group. So they get links that make tracking them down easy.

I would not create the hellhounds from room A4 as Individuals -- they are part of room A4 as bit players in the story. If they should become recurring enemies for some reason, I may take some extra time to create individual topics for them. But until then, they are part of the Scene description.

My approach echos AEIOU's. The only thing I would add is if you are looking for an easy way to find named characters and don't want to dig back to the scene where a bit player resides (or can't remember the exact scene where he/she/it was encountered, I would use cast lists. You could have a cast list for each adventure, areas, or even session. If you add a parenthetical with the name/alias of the scene a bit player appears in, you'll have an easy way to jump to further details. Also, if an NPC evolves from a bit player to a more important role, when you later create a topic for that NPC, the name will be linked to your cast list.

I just leave monsters as part of the scene topic, I don't have a separate topic for each monster.

My NPCs have their own person topic. There is a tag which defines whether they are friends or not with the party (so it can be a hidden GM tag).

I do list some monsters as part of 'people', but only if they're monsters the characters are likely to find in the game over and over again - I have a listing for 'undead' because one of my groups is a cult who use undead to guard their lairs. So the characters will come across hecuva repeatedly.

I've also a listing for 'creatures' where I list general creatures the characters will find repeatedly, like the Gynosphinx they met and asked to guard one of the bad guys.

All the other creatures (wolves, bears, etc) I list in the entry for the area concerned.

Evil (or not evil but antagonistic) NPCs I list as 'people' in the same way as other people, and the tag saying what their attitude is towards the party, I don't reveal. Nor do I reveal it in the case of friends of the party, either. It is just never intended to be shown.

JTFinnegan said:

Hello everyone. John here, long time PnP player.
It makes me sad that I have to ask my players, a lot, what the name of an NPC was, when I was the one who made them up and named them.

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Hint : make it look like you're asking them to check they've properly recorded the names If they cannot, make up a new name

Idealy you've recorded the name in realm works, which brings us to the next question:

I can stick them under the People topic, but in my mind for example, the hellhounds that are in room A4 or not really people.

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Hellhounds are not people. My advice would be to create a specific topic only for meaningful characters. Usually intelligent individuals that can speak and interact with the players.

If you want to record how many hellhounds the PC encountered, just write the list of monsters they meet in the scene topic.

for instance:

Create a topic for the scene(or place) "Cultists dungeon".

Then in a snippet :
A1 : deadly trap
A2 : a nude poster of Samantha Fox
A3 : 3 hellhounds, 2 cultists and mickey mouse

Mickey Mouse being the leader of the cult you may want to create a topic for him, but if he's not meant to parley with the players and will eventually meet his death anyway, the topic may not be necessary.

Whenever you want to remind the players of what happened in the cultist dungeon, refer to the scene topic you've created.

i think I would probably create an entry for Mickey Mouse anyway; it's not that much work, and he may return as a lich or have a child or wife bent on revenge, or it may be necessary to refer to the exact date he died.

I've confused myself in the past with all these things and had to fluff a situation - the players can always tell. I'm a rotten liar for that kind of thing.

I'm charmed by the idea of there being a poster of Samantha Fox in a dungeon - could it be that world's equivalent of a Yellow Sign?

The other thing you can do it you want the stats quickly available for multiple encounters is use the mechanics articles for monsters that will be appearing a lot.

Agyess said:

The other thing you can do it you want the stats quickly available for multiple encounters is use the mechanics articles for monsters that will be appearing a lot.

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That's what I did, but I'm rethinking this approach. Initially, I created an article for hobgoblin and gave it alias for plural and alternate names. That way, in an scene I would just mention that there are X number of hobgoblins and that would be linked to the hobgoblin article.

But having used RW at the table a number of times, I'm finding it easier to have stat blocks in context so I don't need to click through and load a new tab. Unlike print, there is no page limit and it is simple enough to cut and paste. Now that is what I use monster articles for: a place to have the stats handy to copy as well as detailed background info that is helpful when preparing adventures, but not needed during the game.

What I really need, is Hero Lab so I can link RW and HL together, but I chose the wrong game system (DnD 5e), which doesn't have HL support.

Thanks for all the replies. After playing around with it for a few hours, it turns out that I can't actually find a way to change or add to the top level of topics. I can't say it can not be done, but if it can, I did not find out how to do it.

Now lets ignore facts, and let loose the theory crafting of war.

Before I bought RW, I was checking out the GenCon youtube videos that are posted there. In the videos the people who are involved in making RWs, had Rise of the Runelords loaded, and were using it as an example of what you can do with the program. One of the things that they had was a topic for goblin(s). Now there may be something special in RotRL with the goblin(s) so that they would gave them their own topic, but I think not.
My guess is that the topic was made so that they could have a general goblin(s) spot to store the general info about goblins. A picture, a description, general facts like tricky fighters, likes to make traps, can train riding worges, and the leader types can have a few levels of sorcerer. (I am now sad that I can't remember my coworkers names, or how to make the cry emoticon but I can remember stuff from a game book I read 30 years ago.) In each room topic, I am guessing, you will have the encounter list and if they learn one of the general facts about goblins during the fight, you jump over to it and reveal which fact or facts they learned at that time in the general goblin topic. I am also guessing that they are planning to do that for either every single monster, or every monster you encounter more that a couple of times.

Which brings me to my love of lists. If you then group types of monsters under subheadings, you can have facts that you learn about types of monsters. So when you meet your first skeleton, you reveal the skeleton topic, and the undead topic that all the undead are listed under. As you learn more, for example, after meeting a couple of more types of undead, you learn that all undead can be hurt by heal spells. The GM then reveals that fact under the undead topic. Thus anyone who later joins your games, even if they have never played DnD or Pathfinder before, can look up this sort of institutional knowledge that is stored there.

When the market opens, I can find out if my guesses on this were close or not. As for right now my new game is a supers, so I'm not really going to need a monsters list, but I may try making a realm out of an old adventure I created in ADnD 1, and updated and ran in ADnD 2, and ADnd 3. If I do I'm going to try the monster subtopic divided by types and see if it works or if it is more hassle than it is worth.

To AEIOU, yes I am aware that if I have an Enemies topic or subtopic it will alert the players to an enemy. I only intend to use it for known enemies that they already know about. If for example, the hero works for a police captain who he thinks is helping him, but in reality is trying to kill his aunt, then he has the Captain as a friend under Peoples, and Unknown Mastermind under Enemies. When he finds out they are one and the same, you connect them together with a equivalency link and then the player can look at the revealed info about him on both.

I'm going to go make a suggestion post over on the suggestions board. I don't have any great hope that they will change the main topics list at this point, but maybe it will get added to a to do list and a few years from now when they are rebuilding the code anyway they may throw it in.

The beautiful thing about RW is you can do whatever you want. For how you would like things to be organized, create multiple cast lists -- Enemies, Friends, Unknowns, Monsters. That should work for your needs but I speak from experience when I say you are painting yourself into a corner with this method.

(Un)fortunately, another beautiful thing about RW is that it makes it trivial to create complicated campaigns and plotlines. You know, where the enemy of your enemy is your friend, even though they're your enemy. My worlds are shades of grey. My villains are sometimes allies. People switch sides. I think you can see why containers become less useful the more involved your campaign becomes.

The general recommendation is to NOT use containers for anything that can change or could belong to another container.

Monsters (and spells and poisons and class info and feats and and and) go in my Mechanics section. For me, they are just generic numbers with rules attached to them. They normally don't have names. If I give one of them a name, they have changed in importance and I may create a new entry for them that goes into the region's cast list.

I have a lot of bit players in my world -- the local baker, the kid that delivers messages, the queen's handmaiden, that guy in the bar -- that are just there for fluff. They don't need stats beyond who they are, what they do and how do you identify them. They don't qualify for a full entry. Instead, I keep a list of all NPCs in the region as a table in my Cast List entry. This gives me a quick reference to everyone and where they can be found. And I can always make a full entry later if the NPC becomes more involved.

This is how I deal with over 400+ named NPCs:
I play a King Arthur Pendragon game and we play more the events of a family than that of a single character, so all the aunts, uncles, nephews and nieces are there. To keep track of them I have given each a topic entry. Unfortunately this gives me over 400 entries.

I use the containing ability to group the NPCs. So I use this mainly as a visual aid. so I can find them quickly again.
I started out to group them by family. So I made a Group:Family entry where all members of a family are placed.
I noticed that this still created a large number of entries and so I group them by ethnic and region. for the last I used the Group list type.

This gives me the ability to quickly find the NPC.

Some issues I had to deal with:
- Wives: Do I change their location or not? As in the Pendragon world a wife becomes part of her husbands family I change them from their parental family to the husband's family.
- Non landholding knights and families. I started out with only landholding families. their main holding became their family name. So non landholding knights had no family name. I placed them under the family of their wives, in essence becoming part of her family.