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Tubel
April 20th, 2012, 00:26
Hi Everyone,

I'm brand new to FG2 and I've been reaping the rich harvest of everyone's terrific knowledge on these boards as I set up my first FG campaign.

Anyway, I had a bit of an idea that I thought was pretty cool, so I thought I'd share it and try to give something back to the community, so to speak.

I am about to run a PFRPG campaign for my regular gaming group and was trying to get all the NPCs straight in my head. So I thought what I needed was a sort of family tree with links between all the families in the town etc. This idea lets me plot out complicated connections, keep the family histories of the NPCs together visually for quick reference, and facilitates the quick access to NPC profiles straight from the pictoral representation.

I've mocked up a dummy one here from a tiny part of the puzzle so you get the idea (I don't want to show the whole complicated picture because my crafty players trawl these boards - Blaen in particular the crafty devil!). It's very handy if you want to mind-map a lot of complicated connections in your scenario for easy access.



Basically I constructed the diagram using Visio (but you can use anything that can draw a line and a box really)
save as a jpeg or whatever
open the image in FG
right click > layers > enable shortcuts
drag the links from the NPC list onto your family tree (or mind map or whatever)


You can see in the screenshot that I have hovered over the link to Othal and clicking this will bring up his NPC entry strait from the diagram. This is exactly the same as linking story/encounter entries on a map of course, but I thought it was an interesting way to use this feature of FG differently. Hope others find this idea useful.

Valarian
April 20th, 2012, 12:41
Great idea. The adventure plot can be mapped out as a flowchart, or NPC interactions mapped out, and the map pins used to link to story items or NPC sheets. Excellent. I will be looking to use this myself, I think.

OpenOffice Draw is another good tool to use for this, and is free. For mind maps, Freemind is a good, free, tool (Sourceforge project).

GunnarGreybeard
April 20th, 2012, 13:12
That's a pretty ingenious workaround there. ;)

Tubel
April 20th, 2012, 14:20
Yeah Open Office very good, never tried free mind but I've tried a few different mind mapping tools. I just happen to already have Visio installed already. Although as a result of this I realized I'd installed 2007 and not 2010 so fixed that while I was at it!

Glad you guys like the idea. It's nice to 'give back' to the community rather than just take!

Zeus
April 20th, 2012, 15:21
Uber cool ....

Just like Masterplan but inside FGII.