Quest!

In a slight deviation from past blog posts, I’ve had cravings to return to something I did many many years back. Hero Lab development. A while ago, turns out 8 years ago… my time flies, I started writing data files for the Savage Worlds version of Modiphius’ Achtung! Cthulhu rpg. I got quite a long way through it, but for some reason stopped. I think I hit a problem with the way the Savage Worlds data set worked and gave up for a while, then my laptop had a meltdown and took some of the updates with it and I couldn’t bring myself to restart.

Well, it seems that I don’t have enough projects on the go at the moment, so stupid brain decided it would be fun to try and create the data files for the new 2D20 ruleset instead. I have no idea why… I don’t even play! All said and done, I’ve started to have another play, so I’m going to keep a diary of what happens, what issues I come across and what I need to do next. For now this is completely private, but when it reaches a reasonable state, I may well release it if I’m allowed.

Tonight’s activities have been to set up my Github account again, set up some tools and have a look at the sample ruleset that the Hero Lab dev tools provide as a starting point. So far it’s looking fairly familiar, though I never had to actually venture into the deep depths of the main game config for the last set… so I may be biting off more than I can chew at this point.

First step. Define Humans as a race! The race is, unsurprisingly, defined in things_races.dat. Humans don’t have any racial benefits as it just assumes everyone is human. The definition is pretty straight forward.

  <thing
    id="racHuman"
    name="Human"
    compset="Race"
    isunique="yes"
    description="Humans are... well. You and me!">

Seems pretty simple so far.