I started by creating a private map (private because I didn’t want it shown to players immediately). I backed it with a texture–sort of a death valley looking wasteland texture. It’s one of the ones that ships with EpicTable. For the ravine, I used the drawing tools. I made myself a nice, thick black pen and painted in a ravine. I could have just drawn some squiggles and circles and said, “these are cactus, those are rocks”, but as long as I was prepping…. I went out to the Dundjinni “user creations” forum to search for cactus and rocks. This is an excellent place to find images for maps, as well as advice on making maps. My chief complaint is that every time I go out there, I get distracted and wind up looking at images way too long. (Dundjinni’s also my preferred map making tool, but this was just a quick-and-dirty battlemat, so I just wanted to plunk some images down on the EpicTable map.) And that’s exactly what I did. I downloaded a bunch of rocks and cactus and put them all under “maps” in my campaign folder. I then went to my map and inserted an image object for each cactus image I downloaded. Then I just duplicated each of these objects a few times and changed their size and rotation. In no time I had a cactus forest! I did the same thing with rocks to give the area a little interest (and to create some hiding spots!).

Cactus Forest Drawn with EpicTable

The other negative thing was that, with all those cactus objects, it was pretty tough to grab the character that I wanted to have positioned in the cactus forest. The real solution to this is (as some of you on the forum have suggested) to have a separate layer for background objects. I never wanted to interact with the cactuses, I just wanted them there in the background, and dropping in image objects was a convenient way to do it. While I’m not trying to make EpicTable a full-blown map-drawing tool, I’m pretty convinced adding layers like this to EpicTable’s map feature set is valuable. Since I don’t have that functionality right now, I took a screenshot of my creation (I used SnagIt, but you could just Alt-PrintSceen and paste it into any image editor. I replaced my texture+objects map with a new one: an empty map backed with the image of a ravine and cactus forest that I’d just created. Essentially, that’s equivalent to what I want to be able to do with layers. If you do this, make sure you turn off the grid display before you take your snapshot, so the grid isn’t part of your background.

I considered fishing around for top-down tokens. EpicTable lets you specify a separate image for a map token…but I don’t always like using top-down tokens. Unless you’re very familiar with the thing(s) your fighting, it’s tough (for me at least) to get a sense for who’s who from the top-down token. I actually kind of prefer the pog-style tokens, and EpicTable will make a pog-style token automatically from the character portrait.

Abandoning my thoughts of top-down tokens, I went through the first part of the PDF, looking for character portraits. It would be incredibly helpful if Paizo provided these as PNG images, but they don’t. So, I started with a screenshot…only the portraits aren’t exactly isolated. They have the page background, and some of them have text wrapped around them. I can maybe—maybe—ignore the background, but I can’t ignore text in my character portraits. So, I started cleaning them up in an editor. It struck me that there must be a better way. There is. There are various tools out there that let you extract images from PDFs. They’re not all created equal, and the result isn’t what you’d think. They don’t all just tumble out as ready-to-use PNGs. Extracting images from a PDF is a topic unto itself, so for now, lets leave it as: I pulled images for several characters from the PDF. If you’re interested in how I did that, let me know.

While I was at it, I pulled, not just character portraits, but a full-length character image for one of the characters that seemed especially imposing or worthy of attention, an image of the caravan in the midst of the adventure’s first encounter, and some maps for the ruined monastery that I figured we may or may not get to this first session.

I made shared characters for the important NPCs, filling in nothing but their names and portraits, and made private characters for the first couple adversaries I’d spring on the group. The difference is, the shared characters were in the portrait bar, immediately visible to the players. As with the shared NPCs, I only bothered with names and portraits for the monsters and adversary NPCs.

I added handouts for the full-length character shot and for the picture of the initial encounter and left these unshared, so I could pop them up on the players’ screens at the appropriate moment.

In this case, I created my new folder, "Legacy of Fire". Then, I immediately created sub-folders under it: characters, maps, handouts, books. In campaigns where we use character sheets, I end up with a "sheets" sub-folder as well, but we’re not using character sheets for this one (yet, at least).

I copied the PDF adventure, "Howl of the Carrion King" into the books folder, along with the "Legacy of Fire Players Guide", so both these are where I can find them quickly. I also put the Pathfinder core rulebook PDF there, because this is the only Pathfinder game I’m in right now, and having it all together is worth more to me than the purity of having a separate "game systems" folder somewhere.

Note that none of this is in EpicTable. It’s just on my file system. But by organizing it this way, I make it easy to find the files I want when I’m setting someone’s character portrait or setting a map background or something in EpicTable.

I seldom run pre-written adventures, but little time means I didn’t want a lot of prep, and about half the people who stopped by the EpicTable booth at Gen Con were playing Pathfinder.  I also happen to own a bunch of Pathfinder adventure paths…which is odd, given that I don’t run pre-written adventures.  They’re just so pretty, and they’re really well written—I’m just a horribly egotistic GM.  And to be honest, I’m terrible at prepping something that originated in someone else’s head.  My mind keeps drifting…a little like this blog post.

Okay.  Pathfinder.  Legacy of Fire.  On EpicTable.  And my thought is, why not use this as an opportunity to talk about how I use EpicTable?  I usually play rather than GM on EpicTable, because dealing with the challenges of GMing was too much on top of fretting over this little thing and that little thing about EpicTable that wasn’t the way I wanted it yet.  But this time, I’m GMing, and I’m more than passingly familiar with EpicTable, so I thought I’d turn this into an article series and talk about things I run into, things that I wish were different, things I plan to change, workarounds, things that have become so ingrained I’ve forgotten they’re workarounds….

Our Cast

• Salim, played by Jeremy (New Jersey).  Some of you know Jeremy from the EpicTable booth at Gen Con.  He’s the guy with red hair in a ponytail, who probably looks more relaxed than me.  He also wrote the nifty little “sign up for the beta” app that some of you used at Gen Con 2010.
• Almut, played by Allen (Texas).  Allen was the founder of this group, back in the late 90s, who enticed Scot and I in with the rather minimalist pitch on a game store corkboard:  “Allen.  Greyhawk.”  He has the unusual distinction of selling more pre-release copies of EpicTable at Gen Con than anyone not actually working the booth!   He also single-handedly put up the EpicTable facebook presence.
• Zahar, played by Scot (Oregon).  Scot and I have gamed together off and on since 1985.  I’m not a player killer DM, but Scot’s characters have managed to work around that and meet some spectacular ends. When that day arrives when EpicTable has actual documentation, and it doesn’t have weird developer-centric asides in it, Scot’s likely to have been involved.
• GM, John (New Hampshire). I’m the EpicTable developer and your host on this blog.

Interested in following along?

I’ll post my observations about each Legacy of Fire session, focusing on game prep and gameplay in EpicTable, here in the EpicTable Legacy of Fire series.   There’s also an EpicTable Legacy of Fire campaign on Obsidian Portal.  Using Obsidian Portal is something I’ve wanted to try for awhile—partly for research (as in, “Is there anything I should be doing for people who use both EpicTable and Obsidian Portal?”  Hint:  there is.)—and part my just wanting a site for campaign maintenance so I don’t find myself tempted to resurrect the Excel spreadsheet that I used to use to generate an HTML campaign index.

So, go ahead, follow us as we take EpicTable into the unforgiving sands of Katapesh!

Steps to a Character Sheet

1. Find an image (PNG or JPG) that you want to use as a character sheet.  You can often get these from game PDFs.
2. Create a tabletop for each player.
3. Set the background to the image you selected.
4. Use text fields, image objects and drawings to fill in your sheet.

A Picture An Annotated Screenshot is Worth a Thousand Words

What’s Ahead

Character sheets will become fully supported.   That’ll mean…

• fields that you can lock in place or group with other objects
• the ability to clone a whole sheet so you can just have a template sheet that you clone for each player
• a gallery of Xs and check marks and similar things
• probably, more types of fields than just text and image—probably checkboxes and lists, even though you can get the same effect today with images and notes
• eventually, data-driven and calculated fields

Unlike a more traditional roleplaying game, in Fiasco, your group creates a cinematic story inspired by films like Blood Simple, Fargo, The Way of the Gun, Burn After Reading, and A Simple Plan. 

You can learn more about Fiasco at the Bully Pulpit Games site.  It’s really worth checking it out.  They can explain Fiasco way better than I can, so the rest of this article focuses on how EpicTable supports Fiasco.

Game Setup

For this game setup, I’m using a hypothetical playset dealing with art thieves and Cthulhu relics. 

Cards and Dice

During setup, you create the characters and their relationships, objects and other things they have in common.  You use an index card to track each of these, so the basic setup consists of character portraits with index cards between them.  EpicTable makes this easy with built-in support for index cards. 

Fiasco uses white and black six-sided dice, two of each per player, and you move them around on the tabletop during character creation and during play.  EpicTable lets you drag dice onto the tabletop, change their color, and clone them to produce lots more.  From there, you can drag them around, roll them, whatever you need to do.

Characters and Players

I like to have pictures of the characters, so that I can visualize them as we’re playing out a scene.  In Fiasco, the index cards lie between characters and one of them describes the relationship between the characters, so it’s important that the characters are on the tabletop.   I’ve used plain old images (you can just drag them onto the tabletop and they’ll automatically get sent to the other players) and text fields to represent the characters. 

Another interesting point is that I haven’t made any actual characters in EpicTable for this game. In Fiasco, everything about a character is right there in the index cards, so the only thing I wanted to add was a portrait to help me visualize the characters.

Beta note: Had I made characters, I could have just dragged down character portraits but in the current beta, EpicTable turns into pogs (round tokens), which is not what I wanted for my Fiasco game, and it’s kind of pointless to create a character if all you want is a picture.

I’ve also added player portraits.  There’s no reason why you’d have to do this.  I’m not even sure it’s not a little distracting, but some of the beta testers have asked for player portraits, so I thought I’d show an example of how they could be used.  All I did, in this case, is add a portrait from each player’s Skype or Google profile, along with a text field for their name.  It’s a good example of how you can do something yourself, even if that lazy EpicTable developer hasn’t gotten around to adding it for you.

Future possibility:  There’s an outstanding feature request to be able to show character tokens in portrait mode, with captions or nameplates like those shown here.  I’m inclined ot do that just as soon as the opportunity presents itself.  That would have eliminated the need for separate text fields.

Use of Text Fields

Just a couple notes on text fields.  You have a lot of options in how you want to represent text on the tabletop in EpicTable.  I used a somewhat larger font for the character names, compared to the player names.  I also gave the character names a semi-transparent background to make them stand out a bit more.

Playsets

Fiasco uses something it calls a “playset” as a context for the story.  It’s essentially a setting, the set of relationships, needs, objects, and locations around which the story is built.  There are many playsets for Fiasco to choose from—both ones created by the makers of Fiasco as well as those created by the gaming community.  Because the playset is the scaffolding on which your story is built, you refer to the playset often during game setup and character creation. 

There are a couple ways you could do this in EpicTable.  If you have the playset as a PDF, you can likely export the relevant parts of it as images and use handouts.  Handouts in EpicTable are images that you can share with the other players. 

Another way you could go is to create a “Playset” tabletop and use one or more index cards or rich text cards to hold the various lists that make up a playset.  The rich text cards support importing RTF files, so if you happen to have your playset available in that format, you could just import it into a rich text card. 

Future possibilities:  Several people have asked about direct support for PDF.  This is something I’d love to do, and every few months, I look around at tools for integrating PDFs into EpicTable.  Why “PDF support” isn’t straightforward is a larger topic than I want to cover in this post.

GM-less-ness

Fiasco is a GM-less game.  I know that sounds a little unusual if you’ve not played a GM-less game before, but in my opinion, it’s really worth trying this form of gaming.  When everyone around the table has an equal part in building the story, you get a very different kind of game.  Rather than the surprises coming from behind the screen of the all-knowing GM, they come from other players incorporating your ideas to take the story in directions you never could have foreseen.  I don’t know that I think it’s strictly better, but it’s a different kind of fun and much more creatively demanding.  You can’t coast when no one person has responsibility for the “reality” of the game world.

EpicTable supports GM-less play out of the box in that there are very few constraints on who does what.  For instance, in the Fiasco setup, anyone can edit cards, move dice or cards around—just like your physical tabletop.  I’m actually having to add some (optional/configurable) constraints for those who want more power in the hands of the GM.

Beta note:  As of beta 13, the only constraint on non-GMs is that only the GM gets to choose any character as his chat persona.  Players can only choose characters they own.  In addition, the roles are fixed in this beta—the host is the GM and everyone else is a player.  In the released product, the host will be able to set the role of each participant, so there’s no need for the host to always be the GM.

Chat?  I Think Not.

Fiasco is such a fluid game, I’m not sure I see it working over text chat.  I’d be more inclined to use Skype and just hide the chat window, reclaiming that real estate for the tabletop.  If I had wanted to use text chat, however, it would have been worth my while to create characters, rather than just using images like I have in this setup, because EpicTable would then let me speak as my character, associating their portrait with my speech.

Wrap-up

I hope you’ve found this helpful.   Go give Fiasco a shot, if you haven’t already.  It’s a very different experience if what you’re used to is D&D, but don’t let that intimidate you.  It can be a pretty good time, especially if you have a group that is used to gaming together.  In any case, Fiasco’s a good example of a game that makes non-traditional demands of a tabletop, and hopefully, this discussion will give you a few ideas about how you can use EpicTable in ways you’ve not thought of before.

– John

		EpicTable Screenshots VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

These are also up on flickr and facebook.  One could reasonably ask “why here and facebook and flickr?”  Mostly, I just can’t decide how best to present them. I really like the way the Windows Live galleries integrate effortlessly into the site. EpicTable already had a facebook presence, but I like the way flickr presents them better, and I can’t leave well enough alone.  Count yourself lucky that I haven’t provided a link to these on my screencast.com site too.

It’s the same set of screenshots, so your choice:

• EpicTable screenshots on flickr
• EpicTable screenshots on facebook