4E Rituals collected

[gmkieran]

Currently running a 4E game and having a great time. The party is finally getting into some of the magic and madness and things are getting MUCH more interesting. Unfortunately, this means that, because of the way all of the fun powers/rituals/items/feats are spread all over a dozen books, I have to have lots of .mod files open to run things, now, and FG keeps crashing. It occurred to me that one way to solve this might be to collect things I need/want to use from all the disparate modules and put them into one (or at least one per classification). So, last night I built a Rituals module, collecting all the rituals I could find from all the various DMGs, PHBs, and other source books.

Now that I've got it, I'd like to share it with the community, but I have no idea what the legal issues might be (if any) and whether anyone would be interested. It's not original work - all I did was copy and paste the existing .xml code from the separate modules into one. I'm not looking to sell - more than happy to share. I know there is a Compendium of Rituals published - this is definitely not that, as I don't have access to all the original source materials.

So, can I/should I post it here? Has anyone else started this kind of collection (hate re-inventing the wheel)? If it's legal and I did others (say magic items), would people be interested?

[Moon Wizard]

gmkieran,

Unfortunately, as long as the original material came from a third party publisher (such as Wizards), you can not legally distribute your compendium module, since it contains their information.

Perhaps you can share the steps that you took to consolidate instead?

Cheers,
JPG

[gmkieran]

I was afraid of that. Oh, well, I will enjoy using them, anyway. Step-wise the process is simple, but irritating. There are some details I'll have to go back and verify, but I'll post 'em here tomorrow.

Thanks, JPG!

[gmkieran]

as promised, step-by-step for creating a rituals-only library .mod:

1) make copies of all .mod files containing rituals
2) rename all copied files to .zip
3) extract the client.xml and definition.xml files from PHB4e.zip (because it has the most rituals to begin with)
4) open definition.xml in a text editor
5) change "4E Players Handbook" to "Rituals", save and close
6) open client.xml in a text editor
7) delete everything from "<powerdesc static ="false">" to "</magicitemdesc>"
8) search for "</ritualdesc"
9) delete everything from "<refencounters>" to just before "<group type="string">Chapter 10 - Rituals</group>"
10) search for "<libary"
11) delete everything from "<aafeats>" to "</aacondition>"
12) delete everything from "<refpowerlists static ="true">" to "</magicitemlists>"
13) search for "</rituallists>"
14) delete everything from "<alchemylists static ="true">" to "</alchemylists>"
15) find and replace "4eplayershandbook" with "Rituals"
16) find and replace "4E Players Handbook" with "Rituals"
17) save and close client.xml - re-open it in Internet Explorer
18) scroll to the bottom of the file and look for any errors
19) if there are none, close the file and re-open it in your text editor.
20) extract the client.xml or db.xml file from your next .zip (I found it handy to rename the .xml to the book I was working on to avoid name conflicts)
21) open that file in your text editor and search for "<ritualdesc"
22) copy everything between <ritualdesc static="false"> and "</ritualdesc>" excluding those two tags
23) paste that material after the last entry before "</ritualdesc>" in your Rituals client.xml
24) search for "<rituallists" in the source file
25) copy everything between "<rituallists>" and "</rituallists>"
26) paste that information into a third text editor window
27) find and replace the "@xxxxxxxx" with "@Rituals" (where xxxxxxx is the name or abbreviation of the source .mod)
28) find and replace "ritualdescyyyyyyy" with "ritualdesc" (where yyyyyy is again the name or abbreviation of the source .mod)
29) copy the result and past it just before "</rituallists>" in your Rituals client.xml
30) repeat steps 20-29 for all .zip files containing rituals
31) once all data has been copied, move the Rituals client.xml and definition.xml back into the .zip file (replacing the existing versions)
32) rename the file Rituals.mod, move it to your Modules folder, boot FG and verify that the module opens and displays correctly
(it should have one link, labeled Rituals which will open up a list of all the rituals you copied in, each linking to a display window)

these steps can be used to create collected .xml files for any given section - simply eliminate everything except the desired section of a copy of PHB4e
(ie <Alchemydesc static="false"> to </Alchemydesc>) and then copy and paste the appropriate entries from other .mods and rename as necessary
it's slightly faster than building from scratch and requires minimal knowledge of .xml

long and ugly, but it worked!

cheers!

[gmkieran]

finished the Magic Items collection today. A little more involved, because of links to other sections (powers, monsters, etc) that had to be brought in, in addition to the immediately relevant information. Have to test it tonight, but I think it's good to go.

[Saravyn]

Are you using the 4E Parser to generate these modules from info you have scraped?

Is it possible to just copy the rituals from the scraped text files into one file and then parse that as a Rituals module?

[Zeus]

Is it possible to just copy the rituals from the scraped text files into one file and then parse that as a Rituals module?

Yes it is. Just list the Rituals one after the other in your rituals.txt file. Watch for identically named Rituals though (if any).