The project has a little bit to go to reach their target by the deadline of March 15. To help them, DivNull Productions is increasing its pledge to this project to $500. Two things interest me about this project. First, just like its inspiration, the result will be Open Gaming Content. Second, the design of the system is being driven by feedback from millions of hours of playing the d20 system from players all over the world, a real playground of evolutionary forces. While I’m not the biggest fan of d20, I care a lot about open source gaming, so I wish good luck to this project.

Please consider throwing a few bucks to the project to help them meet their goal. (And, while you’re at it, see if there is anything else on kickstarter that interests you.)

In its naked state, it doesn’t look like much, but the attachments fill it out nicely. The arms have two points of articulation with a wide motion range (at the shoulder and elbow), and the lower arm can be flipped around or even swapped out for different parts that use a “locking hinge”. The basic assembly is shown in the image below. In the final stage, there are two different 2×4 pieces that work for the side torso, both of which are shown. The one on the right gives a slimmer look, while the one on the left provides more options for attaching things to the front of the mech.

Here are some samples using both variations. Each is pictured with a plate containing an indication of how many of each type of dice the mech would use in a Mechaton game. If you’ve seen the game, this should be relatively straightforward. For the red dice, shorter ranges are closer to you, and one of the optional rules is used in some cases. Transparent pips are d6’s, solid pips are d8’s.

All of these models were built using Bricksmith, then rendered with LDView. In making these models, I took some liberties with the colors, as I don’t have all the right colors of these bricks. Bricksmith is built on top of LDraw, and uses its file format. Some of these use one or two unofficial parts (which you will need to download if you want to use the files).

• Naked version (bulky)
• Naked version (slim)
• Balanced
• Melee
• Jumper
• Missile
• Firepower

Parts for the naked chassis are:

Part		Color		Quantity	Description
This parts list generated by LDView. Part images provided by Peeron.
	3020	72:	Dark Bluish Gray	1	Plate 2 x 4
	3021	71:	Light Bluish Gray	1	Plate 2 x 3
	3040b	72:	Dark Bluish Gray	2	Slope Brick 45 2 x 1
	3298	72:	Dark Bluish Gray	1	Slope Brick 33 3 x 2
	3666	72:	Dark Bluish Gray	1	Plate 1 x 6
	3794	72:	Dark Bluish Gray	1	Plate 1 x 2 with 1 Stud
	4070	71:	Light Bluish Gray	2	Brick 1 x 1 with Headlight
	4287	71:	Light Bluish Gray	2	Slope Brick 33 3 x 1 Inverted
	43720	71:	Light Bluish Gray	1	Wedge 4 x 2 Sloped Right
	43721	71:	Light Bluish Gray	1	Wedge 4 x 2 Sloped Left
View on Peeron.com	43710	71:	Light Bluish Gray	1	Slope Brick 2 x 4 Triple Left
View on Peeron.com	43711	71:	Light Bluish Gray	1	Slope Brick 2 x 4 Triple Right
	44301	0:	Black	2	Hinge Plate 1 x 2 Locking with Single Finger on End Vertical
	44301	71:	Light Bluish Gray	2	Hinge Plate 1 x 2 Locking with Single Finger on End Vertical
	44302	0:	Black	2	Hinge Plate 1 x 2 Locking with Dual Finger on End Vertical
	44302	71:	Light Bluish Gray	2	Hinge Plate 1 x 2 Locking with Dual Finger on End Vertical
	6141	0:	Black	4	Plate 1 x 1 Round
	6141	43:	Trans Very Light Blue	1	Plate 1 x 1 Round

• Default fonts are too small.
• Using the “larger font” menu choices improves some small fonts, but not others. Two of the main components of this screen are Flash files, so do not respond to this switch.
• Advertisements take up a good portion of the prime real estate of the screen.
• The screen doesn’t scale when you make your window wider, instead using a fixed-width, centered layout.
• Large sections of the screen are essentially useless for tracking the game (such as the header), meaning you need to scroll carefully to optimize viewing of the interesting stuff.

On a 15″ MacBook Pro (1440×900), with a maximized screen (dock on the right), the result looks like this:

Fortunately, the HTML markup of this page is reasonably good for altering (mostly because all the divs have ids), so it is possible to override the CSS for the page to fix most of these problems. Some browsers allow you to override the style of a page out of the box, but the process for doing this is fairly obscure for Firefox. A much more user friendly method for overriding a sites CSS using Firefox is to use a plugin called Stylish. This adds an icon in the lower right of your browser window that allows you to muck with the styles of the page you are viewing.

When you use CSS to alter a page, you are somewhat restricted by how good or bad the HTML of the page you are trying to alter is. While you can get extremely cute with CSS selectors, sometimes there just isn’t anything you can do. Fortunately, most of the things you’d like to do to the Gamecenter site are possible. There are a lot of ways you could hack it, but what follows will alter the game tracking pages to look something like this:

To do this in Firefox, do the following:

1. Install Stylish.
2. Navigate to the NFL Gamecenter page of the game you want to see.
3. Click on the Stylish icon in the lower right of the browser window.
4. In the menu that pops up, select “Write new style → For this URL…”.
5. In the dialog that comes up:
   1. Name the style something like “NFL Gamecenter”.
   2. Add some tags, such as “NFL”.
   3. Replace the script with the code below.
6. Click “Save”.

Now, any time you go to the Gamecenter part of the NFL site, you’ll see this hacked version. If you need to turn this off, you can click on the Stylish icon and select “Turn all styles off”. Also, unless you are using the exact screen size mentioned, you may need to tweak the CSS to match your screen. If you know CSS, there is nothing particularly surprising in the code of this alteration. Also, there is nothing in the code that is tied to Stylish itself; the same CSS should work for any other way of overriding the page style that you can come up with.

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);

@-moz-document url-prefix('http://www.nfl.com/gamecenter/') {

/* Hide extra headers and stuff */
#hd-micro-nav-list, #hd-micro-nav-list, #tl, #header-content, div.tab-list-wrapper,
#gc-shop, #gc-discuss, #gc-track-search-ads, #gc-rr, div.w, div.t, #br, #gc-photos {
  display: none !important;
}

#hd {
  width: 1000px !important;
}

div.c {
  background: transparent !important;
}

/* Hide advertisements */
div#dc-header {
  display: none;
}

/* Left justify everything by default */
#com-nfl-doc, #hd {
  text-align: left !important;
}

#doc {
  margin: 0 0 !important;
}

#doc-wrap {
  padding-top: 0px !important;
}

#hd {
  height: 70px !important;
}

/* Scale the Flash file of the game scores, to make the font larger and
    reach across the screen. */
#hd-scorestrip-swf {
  height: 70px !important;
  width: 1380px !important;
}

#gc-team-stats {
  position: fixed !important;
  top: 70px !important;
  left: 990px !important;
  width: 380px !important;
  height: 280px !important;
  overflow: visible !important;
  z-index: 300 !important;
  padding: 5px !important;
  background-color: white !important;
  border: solid 1px #ddd !important;
  font-size: 14px;
}

#gc-last-score{
  position: fixed !important;
  top: 360px !important;
  left: 990px !important;
  width: 380px !important;
  height: 73px !important;
  overflow: visible !important;
  z-index: 300 !important;
  padding: 5px !important;
  background-color: white !important;
  border: solid 1px #ddd !important;
}

#gc-last-score h2 {
  width: 380px;
}

div.widget-inner {
  background-repeat: repeat-x !important;
}

#gc-current-drive {
  position: fixed !important;
  top: 450px !important;
  left: 6px !important;
  width: 760px !important;
  height: 335px !important;
  overflow: visible !important;
  z-index: 300 !important;
  padding: 5px !important;
  background-color: white !important;
  border: solid 1px #ddd !important;
  font-size: 16px !important;
}

#gc-current-drive-window {
  width: 750px !important;
  height: 320px !important;
}

#gc-current-drive-scroll-bar {
  height: 320px !important;
}

#gc-current-drive-scroll-track {
  height: 300px !important;
}

#gc-top-performers {
  position: fixed !important;
  top: 450px !important;
  left: 785px !important;
  width: 575px !important;
  height: 335px !important;
  overflow: visible !important;
  z-index: 300 !important;
  padding: 5px !important;
  background-color: white !important;
  border: solid 1px #ddd !important;
  font-size: 16px !important;
}

div.span-4 {
  width: 280px !important;
}

}

The makers of Stylish allow uploading of scripts like this; however, their “new account” feature is broken as of this writing. Once this is corrected, this page will be updated with a link to the “official” version of this script, which should make installation even easier.

Introduction

Since the late 1980’s, certain roleplaying games have made use of “dice pool success” mechanics. Such systems roll a handful of similar dice (usually d6 or d10), with the number of dice usually determined by the traits of the character for whom the roll is being made. That is, typically someone with more skill in something will roll more dice, also referred to as having a “larger pool”. Usually, each die rolled is compared individually to some sort of target, and if the die meets or exceeds that number, the die is considered a “success”. The quality of the roll is determined by how many successes are generated (i.e. how many dice meet or exceed the target).

One appeal of this type of mechanic is that it allows many variables to affect the roll, using a number of different mechanisms. A system might allow the situation to alter to number of dice, the target number, the number of successes needed to reach a goal and so on. As a result, many variations on this the basic idea can be found in different games.

One type of variation is known as a “roll and keep” system. The idea here is that you roll your pool, but only get to keep some subset of the dice. For example, you might roll seven dice but only be able to keep three, selected after the roll is made. Obviously, players will typically pick the best three results.

While not many games use roll and keep systems, the appeal of them is twofold. First, it adds yet another variable into how the roll can be manipulated (i.e. changes to how many dice you keep). Second, and more importantly, it allows a game designer to exert some control over the maximum number of successes generated by a roll. That is, some pool-based systems can get intro trouble with “runaway successes”, where various imbalances between characters can get magnified, with some characters scoring ungodly numbers of successes. Using a roll and keep system allows a designer to focus on a “sweet spot” for the number of generate successes. This post aims to investigate what various rules variations do to a roll and keep system.

One caveat: this analysis starts with a very “crunchy” (rules-heavy) system, and mutates it into an even more crunchy system in some ways. The point is really to see what happens within the roll and keep system, rather than try to convince you that the result is somehow “good”. The system does what it does; it’s up to you to decide if that is useful to you.

Start with an existing system

To keep things slightly more focused, the starting point for this investigation will be a popular pool-based system from a game called Exalted. As written, this game does not use a roll and keep system, but it has a number of features that might be usefully implemented by changing it to a roll and keep system. Some of what follows might make a bit more sense if you know a bit about the world of Exalted, but you don’t really need to know the game to follow along. Some important ideas of the system, as written:

• It uses pools of d10s.
• It uses a large number of “traits” rated (mostly) one through five. Some of these are called “Attributes”, some “Abilities”, but there are other kinds as well.
• Pool size for any given test is based on one Attribute, one Ability and, optionally, one “specialty” (rated zero through three).
• Dice that roll a seven or higher generate a “success”.
• Dice that roll a ten count as two successes.
• One important trait is called Essence and is a very rough measure of “power level” in the game. Mortals have an Essence of one. Very powerful gods have an Essence of ten.
• Player characters in the game are superhuman, typically with an Essence of two to five.
• Players have access to magic that allows them to (among other things) manipulate dice in various ways. For example, they might spend “points” of this magic (called motes) to buy extra dice for a roll, etc.
• Player characters can be different kinds of superhuman, each kind having their own “style” of magic. These different kinds are explicitly not equal in the game, with some being “more powerful” than others.
• Everything in the game that can use dice pools can gain a few additional dice for a roll just by giving a cool description of what they are doing. This is called “stunting”, and can provide from one to three dice.
• Everything in the game that can use dice pools also has a set a traits called Virtues. If they are really desperate, anyone can “channel” a Virtue to gain dice for a roll. This is costly, and can only be done a limited number of times.

Mutating into the roll and keep

Changing this system to a roll and keep system requires answering two questions. First, what determines the basic limit on how many dice are kept? Second, how is this limit manipulated? The way the world of Exalted works suggests some choices here. After some experimentation, the key really comes back to the notion of the different “kinds” of character mentioned above and how these are intentionally not equal. Also important is that most rolling will be using magic, so what happens to the rolls when they are augmented matters more often than how rolls without magic work. While there are number of possibilities here, the following accentuates the differences of the kinds of characters. What seems to work is:

• As with the standard system, characters roll Attribute + Ability + Specialty.
• Characters keep a number of dice equal to their Essence + 1. Note that this limit is intentionally on the low side, compared to the size of the pool. This has several ramifications but generally means that adjustments to the keep limit are more formidable than adjustments to pool size.
• Stunting works as in the standard system, adding dice to the roll.
• Virtue channeling adds to the number of dice you keep. (Also, for those who really know Exalted, in this system it does not cost Willpower.)
• The different kinds of characters each have their own basic mechanism for manipulating a roll. (In Exalted terms, the following replace excellencies.) The names for the different types don’t matter so much, but are arranged by “power level”, from strongest to weakest:
  • Solars (and their offshoots) can spend 2m to buy one success, with a maximum of Ability successes added to a given roll.
  • Lunars, prior to rolling, can spend 1m to convert a pool die into a single success instead of rolling it, with a maximum of Attribute die so altered for a given roll.
  • Sidereals can pay a flat 3m to add one to the number of dice they roll, but count two successes for rolling 8 or 9 as well as 10.
  • Alchemicals can pay a flat 1m to raise the number of dice they keep by two. This can only be done once per test.
  • Terrestrials can pay 1m to add two dice to their pool. They may add up to Ability + Specialty dice to a given test.
  • Spirits, Fair Folk, Ghosts and other essence users can pay 1m to add one die to their pool, adding a maximum of Ability dice to a given test

Example

For a particular test, a character uses an Attribute rated at 2, an Ability rated at 4 and a specialty rated at 1. This provides a dice pool of seven dice. The character has an essence of 3, which means, after the roll, she will keep four of those dice.

Her roll is an extremely good one: 2, 5, 8, 9, 9, 10, 10. She obviously elects to keep the best four dice, which are 9, 9, 10, 10. Each 9 gives one success. The 10s give two successes each. Her total is six success.

Later she needs to make a very similar test (based on the same traits). This time, though, she describes her action in a really neat way, and is awarded two stunt die. While this makes the pool larger, it doesn’t change how many dice she can keep. This roll happens to turn out worse: 1, 2, 4, 5, 5, 5, 6, 8, 10. She still keeps four (5, 6, 8, 10), gaining three successes (one for the 8, two for the 10).

Even later, she has to make the same kind of test again. This time she is in real trouble. She describes well again, gaining two stunt dice. She also channels one of her virtues (rated 3), which allows her to keep three additional dice. She rolls well again: 3, 5, 6, 7, 7, 7, 8, 9, 10. Thanks to the channel, she keeps seven dice (6, 7, 7, 7, 8, 9, 10) giving seven successes.

Running the numbers

The various choices were analyzed using software simulation, written in Python (source). The simulation makes a million rolls using 30 dice each. For each roll, the stream of dice is used by a bunch of different “strategies”. Each strategy represents a type of character, adjusting its traits and, importantly, kind. The strategies are set up such that they cover all relevant combinations. Each of these is fed the 30 dice results, but how many they actually use depends on the strategy. If a strategy is supposed to have a pool size of 12 dice, it only takes the first 12 dice for its pool and ignores the rest. By working in this way, all of the strategies use roughly the “same” results for their million rolls. This is not exact, of course, as some strategies use more dice than others, but it provides a more “fair” comparison of the strategies (and is much faster than rolling pools independently for each strategy a million times each).

What turns out to be interesting here are graphs where the traits are kept constant, but the various magical effects are used to the full extent allowed (that is, solars always buy Ability successes, etc.). You can see from these how the magic works at each sort of “skill level”. (It is also illustrative to show how the “canon” system works. That is, the system that doesn’t use a roll and keep mechanism, but rather always keeps all dice.)

Consider characters at Essence 3, but with minimal traits. At this level, the results are fairly homogeneous, and the magic doesn’t change much:

One thing to notice, though it doesn’t show on the graph very well, is that with their additional dice, terrestrials and spirits can occasionally get lucky enough to exceed the maximum achievable by a solar (about an 0.1% chance of getting six successes, while solars can only hit five), even though they do worse on average. This result will hold in any situation where the keep cap exceeds the standard pool size, which doesn’t happen that often. With traits this low, however, it still happens with virtue channeling/stunts:

One oddity you see emerge here is that the because of the way sidereal magic works, they are more likely to get even numbers of successes than odd.

When traits move to 3 dots each, you can see another emergent behavior: when the base pool and the cap become close, without magic the basic “roll and keep” behaves very similarly to canon, but magic causes the various types of exalts to have much different expectations of success:

Also note the “canon” line in the graphs above. Bear in mind this is just a standard roll in the original system, without any magical augmentation. Since each die can possibly generate two successes (by rolling a 10), Exalted has a bigger issue with “runaway successes” than most other pool based games do. The “roll and keep” tends to keep runaway successes under the original system more constrained, with magic use having a bigger impact than luck.

Things get more interesting when you ignore the virtue channeling and add only some additional dice, say from a stunt or specialty. Since these two cases are mostly the same (the only difference being that three dice from a specialty help terrestrials more than three dice from a stunt would), we’ll look at the specialty case:

Here, you can really see how the excellency differences play out:

• Solars are simply “more excellent” than the others, but since they are limited in how many successes they can buy, not overwhelmingly so. This is a departure from the canon rules, were the gap between solars and others can be severe.
• Lunars have the same minimum and maximum successes as solars, but average one fewer success. Still they outshine other types.
• Sidereals leave much more up to luck, but still regularly hit celestial levels of success. Their minimum is much lower than solar and lunars (they can still actually get zero successes), and their max is slightly lower, but they have a much flatter curve, that favors the high end.
• Terrestrials, unlike celestials, can’t gain more with magic than without, but are much more likely to hit the high end of their range.
• Alchemicals most closely match the canonical curve. They can do better than even solars, but not very often.
• Spirits are similar to, but outmatched by, terrestrials.

As the traits climb to five, all of these trends become more accentuated, and the higher powered exalts make better use of their increased skill:

When you add stunts and channeling to mix, however, the odds tend to even out a bit, particularly for those in the mid power range:

Higher Essence

As Essence increase to five (the realistic upper limit for PCs in most games), the keep limit becomes less relevant, particularly at average skill levels, because you are keeping nearly all of the dice you roll. You start to see a more canonical behavior of the magic:

Once traits are maximized, however, the disparity between pool size and limit cap returns, and the difference between the types of characters become more pronounced:

The low end

One thing that turns out to matter a lot in this analysis (and the reason Exalted is being used as a base) is the notion that rolling a 10 generates two successes. This mixes in interesting ways with the keep limit. Obviously, 10s are much more worth keeping but, more importantly, they allow the success count to exceed the keep limit. That is, even if you can only keep two dice, it’s possible to get four successes. Further, the more dice you roll, the more likely that outcome is.

For example, if you roll only two dice and keep both, the chance of getting four successes is only 1% (with a 34% chance of failure). If, however, you roll 12 dice and keep two, the chances of four successes is closer to 35% (with the chance of failure dropping to around 0.2%). So, the limit and the 10s rule combine to reign in the number of total possible successes, but yet still let skill matter.

This is easier to see when looking at the results for the low end of the power scale: Essence 1 characters. Since mortals can’t use magic (and everyone that can use magic has Essence 2 or more), graphs at this level are more simple. At this level, it is a bit more useful to look at how the roll and keep results change the dynamics of the game compared to the canonical system.

One twist here is that Exalted divides mortals into two groups: standard mortals and heroic mortals. The difference is that, for standard mortals, rolling a 10 only generates one success. This changes things a lot for them. (If you suspect that mortals are a bit screwed in the world of Exalted, you’d be totally right.)

Let’s look at a minimal mortal, with all traits at one. Since the keep limit equals the number of dice, this works just like canon, so is not particularly interesting, but consider when this character stunts:

Heroic mortals cannot do better than four successes here, even with the stunt, because stunting doesn’t change the cap. The standard mortal can only get two successes in this situation. Compared to not stunting, the difference for the standard mortal is a drastic increases the likelihood of getting two successes (from around 16% to 53%), and decrease the chance of failure (from 36% to 13%).

You can also see how, compared to canon, the 2+ success results are “compressed” into a lower range.

But what if, instead of stunting, they channel a virtue (rating 3)? Looks like this:

Under r&k, the mortals still can’t crack four and two successes, respectively. In this case, the culprit is the size of their dice pool. Their keep limit is over twice the size of how many dice they actually can roll. The canon case has much different behavior here, as it is rolling five dice instead of just two.

Channeling a virtue in this situation is much worse for the mortal than a stunt. This turns out to be more of a fringe case, but it has an interesting effect: mortals simply cannot do “legendary” things, unless they both stunt and channel. Or, put another way, it is possible for even the weakest mortals to do awesome things if they stunt like hell and pour their heart into it:

You can really see the divergence from canon here. Compare standard mortals in canon to heroes in r&k, for example. In this case, canon mortals gain 7 successes 3 times out of every two thousand rolls. Heroes in r&k don’t do this as often, though they can get 8 successes while standard canon mortals can’t (meanwhile, canonical heroes can get as many as 14). Note that standard r&k mortals still cannot achieve “legendary” successes, though they could with a higher virtue.

As mortal traits increase, the result of raising their attributes doesn’t affect their success caps, but moves their results more reliably to the higher end of that cap:

So, on the low end, this system seems to at least function, and does a fairly good job of “keeping the man down”. Can’t have mortals get too uppity. With enough stunting and heart, they can still do “legendary” things.

Conclusions

While initially intended to be a somewhat generic look at how you might manipulate a roll and keep system, the results actually turn out to depend heavily on the specifics of the original system used, particularly the rule that awards two successes on a 10.

On the other hand, if you consider the specific flavor of the game in question, you actually can use roll and keep to make the game work a bit more like it is described. That is, with some minor mechanical changes, the success rate of the various kinds of exalted can be tinkered with until they match the relative power levels implied by the game’s descriptions, all in a way that minimizes the huge success disparity of the original system.

I want a chart of every possible three die outcome of rolling 3d6 (order doesn’t matter)…. My mind doesn’t really love looking at numbers and percentages, but is very good at processing visual information….

As the notion of presenting probability information for role-playing games in a visual way dovetails with a possible future DivNull project, we dusted off the (rusty) graphic design tools and went to work (click for a larger version):

Direct download links:

• Large PNG (184 KB)
• Compressed SVG (11 KB)
• Adobe Illustrator source (407 KB)

Congratulations and best of luck to Ms. Shoemaker. We can’t wait to see the result.

On a whim, DivNull Productions decided to take this out of the realm of hypothesis, with Wordman posting:

This post started with the following hypothetical:

Posted By: ValamirImagine said benefactor announced “Pitch me your game ideas and the designer whose idea I like best will get $1000 to bring it to fruition”

Other popular game design forums maintain, however, that debate about hypothetical situations are useless and only “actual play” matters. So, let’s play…

As of now, there actually is a benefactor (i.e. me) saying “Pitch me your ideas for how you would use $1000 to either make a new game or improve an existing one that hasn’t been released, and I’ll donate $1000 to the idea I like best to help make it happen”.

Conditions:

• Only pitches made on this thread, publicly, will be considered.
• No pitch made after 15 October 2009 will be considered.
• Donation will be made on or before 31 October 2009.
• If your pitch is selected, you have until the last minute of 31 October 2010 to make good on the idea. At that point, the world will know if you are person of your word, or a failure.
• This donation in no way affects any rights you have to your work. Nor does the donation create any liabilities from your work for the donator. Succeed or fail, you’re on your own.

While this pitch process was neither widely advertised nor, to be frank, particularly well run, a number of compelling proposals were submitted. These remain visible in the thread linked to above, but have also been reproduced as the first 11 comments of this thread as well.

We are no longer accepting pitches; however, there are likely to be more of these “DivNull larks” in the future. This one was something of a trial run, so was deliberately kept somewhat quiet. Future larks will be more public.

DivNull will announce who receives the gift in a few days, both on this blog and in the original Story Games thread.

Changes to this release include:

• Artifact list updated with information from sources released since version 1.0. (Note that this was enough to add a couple of pages to the book, so page numbers are not consistent between versions). Information added from:
  • Graceful Wicked Masques: The Fair Folk
  • The Compass of Terrestrial Directions Vol. IV: The South
  • The Manual of Exalted Power: Infernals
• Updated the “Materials” chapter with information about infernal materials.
• Old Realm writing now shows correct title. (Previous edition contained a working title.)
• Correction of many typos and phrasing problems.
• Sciences section altered significantly.
• Intra-document hyperlinks on page numbers in the index are a bit more snappy.
• Formatted to allow reading from Acrobat 5.x and up (previously required version 7.x or better). This should fix some incompatibilities reported with in-line viewing with some browser plugins.

Today, however, after using a couple of different operating systems, three different computers (with manufacturing dates spanning over 15 years), four different disk drive technologies, and some slightly questionable ethics, DivNull is pleased to announce the availability of the sources to these character sheets in Adobe InDesign CS3 format.

DivNull would like to release the sheets under a non-commercial Creative Commons license; however, we do not have any rights to the underlying Shadowrun property, so probably do not have the right to issue such a license. Instead, a readme file in the archive containing the sources details the usage: credit us, respect the creators of Shadowrun as they have asked, don’t charge anyone, don’t pretend that your changes are our originals.

Otherwise, go nuts.

• Download Wordman’ Shadowrun Sheet Sources

Writing for this work originated in a number of fan sites for Exalted, particularly the Exalted wiki and Exalted Compendium Redux. Thanks go out to the writers who allowed their work to be included.

The artwork used in the PDF results from a bit of an experiment. Rather than an using an open, take-what-you-can-get approach, DivNull looked for fans of Exalted on deviantArt, inviting 75 of the most talented to participate. This process intentionally avoided inviting artists that have a lot of work published in Exalted books. Artists were invited over a long period, and given months of lead time to prepare art for today’s release. Of those contacted, six actually delivered art, a response of about 8%.

This response was less that what was hoped, but realistically better than expected, especially since no payment was offered or given. Thanks go out to those artists who contributed.

Thanks also go out to White Wolf for their Dark Pack guidelines, which allow supplements like this to be created in the first place.