Realm Sheet, and Scribus

Well I've gotten some more done on the realm sheet. Finished a revamping of the cover art... and with the help of Scribus, I've started to take a second stab at a fillable version.

One thing: Adobe's Reader EULA, as read by the people who work on scribus, actually prevents the reverse engineering and implementing of savable form pdfs. So even with the new one I won't be making a savable version... because I a) can't afford a copy of Acrobat, and b) think very poorly of their heavy-handedness.

At first Scribus was really annoying, but now I'm getting the hang of it. Here's some things I've learned:

OOo Draw import is lacking: If you have text in a OOo Draw file you want to import, save it as a Draw 1.0 file first... You'll then have to do lots of cleaning up but it's a start.

Masterpages: These are really handy. For this project I made a cover, internal right, and internal left master page. That allowed me to set the background on each page (and the color on the covers) really easy...

Don't apply properties to multiple objects at the same time... It doesn't always work... especially pdf properties.

PDF Properties: Is Bookmark is your friend... Works way better than the bookmarks OOo draw's export generates.

You'll probably also need a few other pieces of software: It auto-loads gimp for picture editing, and there's a few pdf things it doesn't handle well yet, that can be done in the free version of foxit.

Anywho, I'm a long way from posting a fillable copy... and I'll have to wait a bit to post a new flat, however I expect to have something available end of next month (November)... and I'm gonna try and talk Paizo in to making it a free download on their site to.

New Stuff II

First... got my pdf of the Bestiary... Paizo's done another really great job with this book. There's not just great wads of changes over the original monsters... but the few differences I have noticed have been good. (Especially in the realm of clarification of fuzzy stuff).

Second... I just grabbed Michael Tumey's "The Gift". I'd already seen bits and pieces over at cartographer's guild... Looks like 56 pages of yummy dark goodness so far.

It's a 5-7 level adventure, for "Gaijin" (which is Japanese for outsiders)... Michel's mentioned that its designed for regular pathfinder characters to stumble a very Japan-like setting. I also remember him talking about how various "oriental books" either were extremely general, and did several things from several eastern cultures and mythos on purpose... or tried to pass of a lot of that general stuff as Japanese mythos and culture. He instead intended for a very true to Japan setting.

It's only available as a .pdf right now, but he's working with the people for Fantasy Grounds and Map Tool to have "VT modules"... He's also talked about a print copy... but isn't there yet... (Considering some of my plans, I'd like to see where that takes him from a publisher/creator pov)...

His maps, as always are great... The art is great... and the bits and pieces I've read are really good (I've had it literally 10 minutes).

If he gives permission I'll post the TOC here later:

• Introduction
• Introduction
• Races & Classes
• Notes for DM
• About the Region
• Yonshu Island
• Port of Gsijinoshima
• The Cursed Ryokan
• The Wilderness Beyond
• Entering Tsue-jo
• Conclusion
• Appendices
• About the Setting
• A - Cosmology
• B - Death & Reincarnation
• C - Obake Beastiary
• D - Language & Names
• E - Religious Reference
• Maps
• License Information

New stuff

Lets see...

Gimp 2.7, I'll be playing with that once I find a way to actually make it build on the laptop...

PFRPG Bestiary... "doesn't arrive 'til tuesday"... but paizo's got them so its all good.

Also check this out http://paizo.com/paizo/messageboards/paizo/products/v5748btpy85k5&page=12#589 looks like the Core Rule Book @ 9.99 did so well they're gonna do the same with the Bestiary.

Windows 7 Pro... Played with this some at work. If you have to have windows, and are looking to move up... This is far better than the failure that was vista. It's still pitifully slow at some things (looking up computer lists on large networks, well ANYTHING network involved is sluggish)

Maptool 1.3b59... Getting there, trevor says build 60 will happen, but with luck 60 will be the "stable" build... then off to 1.4

Google Wave... anybody got a leftover invite? I've been itching to see how well it all works, and I agreed to pass trevor one for his community tool project to go with maptool.

All in all, there some interesting stuff coming up in the next few weeks... now I've gotta go build a CR18 Pathfinder Lich...

I finally have a session with the group that I was playing with last month... but it's still not at the apartment.

Blogger, lack of comments

So I've noticed a continued downloading of my files, and no comments. I went to comment about this on the stat template post when I realized I couldn't comment. I've since been messing with the settings trying to find out why. Now I've got full page set and it seems to let me comment.

This is kind of annoying, especially since I was getting upset with viewers when it was obviously something wrong on google's end.

So, sorry about that, please leave word if you tried to comment and couldn't and I'll see if I can find out what's going on.

Pathfinder Stat Block Templates

So I'm building an Orc NPC for my brother's game, and my custom pathfinder sheet while good, is obviously still missing some things... especially for npcs.

Like any other person building lots of npcs especially now for not just myself but other GMS, I went looking for a stat block template... I still haven't found a electronic character generator I like for PFRPG so I was hunting for something simple.

Nothing, not even a fan made one on paizo's site (well I did find a generator spreadsheet but bleh was it a mess)...

So I sat in Open Office, while playing with a few of the pdfs from paizo (an adventure path and bestiary preview) and cooked one up. Then moved to Microsoft Word to make it behave there as well. The MS template doesn't overline the section dividers so if someone has an idea how to do this and it look good let me know. Also, please comment on anything you see it needs or doesn't need. Its designed with the export to pdf function in mind.

Now I gotta go back to work, but here are the templates.

I've also been doing some work on the realm sheet. I'm hoping to pitch it to paizo for an actual cheap pdf product, but that's gonna take some doing.