Bite-sized Pieces

Having identified the games that I'm probably going to use for campaign play, my latest RPG project is to build up some useful resources for those games. This is mostly motivated by my realisation that "Black Crusade" really needs some add-ons for it to be less painful to prepare and run, although the game that I'm actually focussing on first is SWSE.

(The games that I've identified for one-shot play won't get the same attention, because they're not really worth the effort. I'll run them as-is, without supplements, without house rules, and without other resources. And that, incidentally, is why I've identified "Black Crusade" as being for campaign play or nothing - it needs the work done to be usable at all, but if it's just for one-shots then it's not worth doing the work.)

At the moment, the tasks I've earmarked for SWSE are as follows:

A new character form: I have an existing character form for the game, but I also have a far better character sheet that I found online. The first task, then, is to convert this sheet into a PDF form, replacing my existing version. (This task is actually complete. Ideally, I should perform some optimisations on the new form to reduce the file size, but as that would require access to a newer version of Acrobat (full version, not the Reader), it will need to wait.)

Item cards: This is my immediate task. Using the Magic Set Editor, it should be possible (nay, easy, if a bit time consuming) to put together cards for all the standard items in the game. I'm starting with the Core Rulebook, but intend to go through the various supplements as and when time permits. That done, I'm also planning to convert the items from the "Arms & Equipment Guide" from the previous edition - although some of the statistics will need to change, the fundamentals should not.

Force Power cards: I already have a set of these cards, and they've proven to be a major boon. However, the cards only cover the Force powers from the Core Rulebook, and I have no means of expanding the set. It is therefore my intention to use the Magic Set Editor (again) to put together a new set of cards from all the Saga Edition books.

Talent cards: As with the above two items, except that the cards generated will detail the various talents available in the game.

"Monster Manual": The set of antagonists available in the Core Rulebook is extremely bare-bones, and although the supplements expand this greatly, the data is spread thinly across a large number of books. Therefore, it is my hope to gradually consolidate this into a single reference document. This can then gradually be added to as I develop new characters, monsters, and other antagonists for various campaigns. The key here is of building an ever-growing resource, rather than simply transcribing the existing data.

That said, the existing antagonists also suffer from one of the classic 'monster' errors - they provide a whole lot of references to talents, feats, and powers, but fail to explain in the text what these mean. In actual play, this leads to too much referencing of books. So, I'm intending to gather all the relevant information into a single place, making for a more useful reference.

The web enhancements: In addition to this, there was a significant amount of web support provided for the game by WotC. At some point, it is my intention to go through all the relevant articles and strip out all the 'resource' elements from them (ignoring the commentary). I'm generally planning to do that last, as I suspect it will be easier to add the various elements to existing documents, rather than trying to generate the documents from the resources and then adding the material from the printed supplements.

The great joy of all of these tasks is that they can be performed a little bit at a time. With RPG projects, it's very easy to take on far too much work, get bored, and abandon the project. And then, next time, to decide to start over with a clean slate. But if instead the items are inherently small scale (one item, one monster... it's just that there are a lot of them), I'm hoping there won't be the same temptation.

And, as an added bonus, much of this work can be done in concert with building resources for one-shots and campaigns using the game - every time I generate a set of stats for a monster, it can and should be added to the manual; any time I generate a character, I can generate the appropriate item cards.

At least, that's the plan.