Tag: hack

Seed: Fourth World 1.4

wordman 1 Comment

LogoAlmost exactly a year ago, when I published “probably the last revision I’ll do” of this hack of Dungeon World to the Earthdawn setting, I really thought I was done. What changed since was some dissatisfaction with parts of the work and with some of Dungeon World basic moves.

The version presented here (1.4) retains the basic approach to the previous versions, an small evolution rather than a revolution. In building it, though, its becoming more clear than one of the main design goals — to change as little as possible in the Dungeon World rule set to retain compatibility with all of its material — is becoming a hindrance. This is not so much that the tonal changes needed for Earthdawn would benefit from a different type of powered-by-the-apocalypse hack, though there is some of that. Rather, some of the warts in Dungeon World itself are becoming more noticeable, both to me and in the community at large.

As one example, version 1.4 already tinkers with some of the basic moves. As another, when running Fourth World, I would almost certainly use nearly every rule in Lampblack & Brimstone’s Perilous Wilds, particularly its replacement rules for hirelings and undertaking a perilous journey. If a future version of this hack is ever done, it will almost certainly alter the playbooks to assume those rules as a baseline; however, once going down that path, the whole thing might just be better served by a PbtA hack more customized to Earthdawn, so that may never happen.

The significant changes in this version include:

  • You occasionally see Dungeon World moves that improve a 7-9 result to a 10+ result, or vice-versa. I found the phrasing of the Fourth World moves that do this awkward enough that I created a nomenclature for it, called “steps” to make this smoother (see the “On Steps” section).
  • The Aid or Interfere move has been tinkered with again. In the prior version, it had already been altered to use stats instead of bonds. This version makes the 10+ result a bit more interesting.
  • The Hack and Slash move has been rephrased. This looks jarring, but the actual result of the move is the same. The reason for the change is that some of the moves in the playbooks seek to give you additional choices if you elect to take damage on a 10+ (rather than the standard “do extra damage”). The wording of the official Hack and Slash made the phrasing on this type of playbook move clunky. It becomes much easier to build playbook moves like this with the different phrasing of the basic move (plus, I think the phrasing for it matches the phrasing of other Dungeon World moves much better in general).
  • The Relics chapter now has a whole section about how the Spout Lore move can/should be used to interact with the concept of item ranks and discovering information about relics to unlock their power. Moves that reveal information about relics were tweaked to match the information in this section. (Those moves are also much faster in game world time now.)
  • Added some clarification about what casters can do while weaving, and what sort of things can interrupt them.
  • Earlier nitpicking about how many spell matrices you can use at each circle have been eliminated as an unnecessary holdover of pointless Earthdawn crunch. The “total sum of spell circles within matrices” limit remains, and takes care of this well enough organically to the point that other limits won’t be missed.
  • Prior versions sort of ignored the existence of thrown weapons. The main ranged-fighter discipline didn’t have choices for them, for example. This has been addressed. Also, the single “throwing dagger” has been replaced with “throwing knives”, representing an abstract “bundle” of knives with an ammo stat.
  • A lot of the species moves got tweaked to be slightly more interesting (previously a lot of +1 to things).
  • A number of playbook moves called for rolls to gauge the degree of success in situations where failure wasn’t actually interesting or it was not obvious how to handle a miss. Many of these got changed to avoid the roll entirely. There are probably some I missed.
  • General move streamlining in all playbooks, including some additions, removals. Added moves were often adding social moves to playbooks that lacked them. All playbooks also get tools for creating art as standard gear.
  • The Swordmaster got a major overhaul. All the fixation stuff (which came from the DW paladin) has been moved to an Obsession (a “compendium class”). In its place is a move that really takes advantage of the rephrasing of Hack and Slash to give the Swordmaster control of positioning and showmanship.
  • The Thief playbook contained redundant moves. So did the Troubadour playbook, with the bonus that one of them didn’t really work. These moves got sorted out, usually by consolidating then adding some additional stuff.
  • Additional magic items and relics.
  • Additional monsters.
  • Several new obsessions. Tweaks to the Obsession rules.

You can download the lot, including InDesign sources, here:

Seed: Fourth World revisited

wordman 3 Comments

LogoWhen I last published this hack of Dungeon World to the Earthdawn setting, I claimed that it was as complete as I intended to make it. Apparently, that was a lie.

This version (1.3) remains much like the previous version, with the following changes:

  • Bonds have been replaced with flags, an idea from Rob Donoghue. This necessitates changing some other things, such as the Aid and End of Session moves. Disciplines now have a “suggested flags” section rather than a bonds section. All references to Dungeon World-style bonds removed and moves that mentioned them changed. (This turns out to solve a problem: version 1.2 also used the word “bond” to refer to weaving a thread into someone or some place. It still means that in 1.3, but is no longer ambiguous.)
  • A lot of people wondered what happened to the idea of karma from Earthdawn. It actually was there in version 1.2, it was just called what Dungeon World calls it: “preparation”. I gave in and switched to calling it karma in this version, even though the term as used in Earthdawn bears little resemblance to what the word actually means. Still, this change should help Earthdawn players who are looking for it. Also, it has always been the intent to make preparation/karma significantly more useful and present than it is in standard Dungeon World (where it is so useless that, I’d wager, most players aren’t even aware it exists), so this change should differentiate it even more.
  • Most of the disciplines were tinkered with a bit. This is particularly true of the air sailor, as that playbook is significantly based on the aid move and, therefore, was previously based on bonds. In general, the number of “plus something to something” moves has been reduced, as have the (already small) number of moves that dictate what happens on a miss. All of the disciplines remain based around two stats, but a few now have a better balance of moves between those two stats than they did before.
  • I took a crack at building character sheets. These are experimental, continuing my dabbling with legal sized paper. (The aspect ratio of legal paper falls between 16:9 and 16:10, the typical aspect ratios of nearly all modern laptops, so landscape legal pages fit very nicely in full screen.) It’s also the largest paper that most home printers in the US can easily support. For those in places where the only aspect ratio for paper you can easily buy is based on the square-root of two (the ISO 216 standard), shrinking these sheets onto A4 is probably your best bet, but probably not entirely satisfying. Each playbook is formatted to fit on a single side of once piece of paper (spell casters also have a separate spell sheet).
  • Debilities now inflict -2 instead of -1. This makes them more…debilitating, and forces them to be taken a bit more seriously. They can often be glossed over, forgotten in standard Dungeon World.
  • A number of rules have been changed or tweaked. Magicians can now get a fifth spell matrix, for example, and move triggered when someone aborts a spellcasting attempt has been added. Swordmasters can no longer become immune to stuff. Fireball is a bit different. Changed a warrior’s “carnage” to “impetus” and altered the way it worked and is explained a bit. Addressed monster tags better. And so on.
  • Some added gear, magic items, mounts, monsters and so on.

This is probably the last revision I’ll do of this hack. Maybe not. Anyway, you can download the lot, including InDesign sources, here:

Seed: Fourth World

wordman 3 Comments

LogoSince its creation in 1993, the fantasy world of Earthdawn pushed my buttons. Now, the recent kickstarter to fund the game’s fourth edition has rekindled my enthusiasm for the game. Yet, as eagerly as I backed the kickstarter and long to play in that world again, my interest in going back to those mechanics, even in updated form, approaches zero.

Therefore, this seed, suggesting ways to alter Dungeon World to fit into this rich high-fantasy setting. Like all DivNull Seeds, this one isn’t fully grown. If it plants a fire in your belly to do something with the idea, go for it. But, please, share what you make of it with the rest of us.

This hack sticks to the standard Dungeon World rules as much as it can, but all of the standard playbooks (Fighter, Thief, etc.) have been cut up and reassembled into the fifteen Earthdawn disciplines, adding custom bits to fill in the gaps. Had this work not largely been completed before the release of Class Warfare, the disciplines would probably have been built using those more modular rules instead. I contemplated going back and redoing them all, but by then the disciplines had sort of mutated into their own thing and it didn’t seem worth changing.

If you want to have a go at this hack, here are some possibilities you might try:

  • Actually do use Class Warfare to make the disciplines.
  • Instead of shuffling around existing moves, rebuild each discipline from he ground up, based more strongly on the Earthdawn originals.
  • Expand the hack with conversions of Earthdawn monsters, mounts, ships, relics, etc.
  • Convert more existing Earthdawn adventures to fronts.
  • Expand areas that I glossed over a bit, like horrors, blood magic or astral space.
  • Build obsessions (compendium classes) based around species or nationality or whatever else.
  • Anything else.

As I do not plan to do any of the above myself, I’m making the source files (except the fonts, which I lack the rights to distribute) available as well. Post a comment here if you turn them into anything You can download the lot here:

Update: A more recent version of this document exists here.

Giving LPub an ability it should already have

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The open source LPub is an application that lets you publish instructions for LEGO models from LDraw data, primarily as PDF files. One of its nice additional features is the export of pages as PNG files. While functional, this export doesn’t properly support transparency. Since PNG files do support transparency, this is a bit irritating.

There is UI to set the background, and it has a “none” choice, but using it results in a solid white background instead of a transparent (or, worse in older versions, to a solid black background). Another choice is to use a background image, so you can try to fake out the application by setting the background image to a PNG that is nothing but transparent. The program allows this, but when you export the result, you see the art for each page layered on top of each other (clearly, the app is not clearing a buffer between pages).

Over a year ago, I submitted bugs for both of these problems to the LPub team (here and here). As of this writing, neither of them have been assigned to anyone, much less fixed.

So, I decided to fix it myself. Getting the code downloaded and built in XCode took several hours, and would have taken even longer had I not found the very useful “Compile LPub4 using XCode on Mac OS X” post by Mark from More than just bricks. I had to tweak a couple other things to get it to work, but nothing too drastic.

Knowing nothing about how the code worked and very little about Qt, the GUI package it uses, it took a couple of hours figure out where to make the fix and getting it working properly. The main trick is to add QPixmap.fill(Qt::transparent) in a key place in Gui::exportAs. The rest of the changes are just slight alterations to the UI. Not many changes needed, and maybe I missed something, but seems to work for me.

A patch containing my changes was made against the current head of the project’s CVS tree. I have submitted it to the LPub team. I will update this post if it gets included in a release.

Altering NFL Gamecenter to use entire screen

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The NFL’s Gamecenter allows tracking of games that you can’t see on TV due to dumb networks or socialist rules. If you have more than one person viewing the game, what you might like to do is put a laptop on your coffee table to show one game, while everyone watches another. Unfortunately, the layout of the page that tracks games does not lend itself to this. It has at least the following problems:

  • 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:

nfl-gamecenter

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:

nfl-gamecenter-hack

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. It has been posted here: Stylish script for NFL Gamecenter