Transferring Story Book Contents to New Ruleset

[bobthebuilder]

Hello,

I have an old ruleset and a new ruleset and I want to transfer my Story Book contents of the old ruleset into the new. How do I do it?

Both rulesets are located in the Application Data Folder/Rulesets folder of FG2. I'm wondering if I could simply cut the story book "file" (if there is one) in the Application folder from old ruleset and paste it into the new one, but I'm unsure how to do this and if I could it would save me hours of time.

Any help on this would be appreciated.

Thanks
-bobthebuilder.

[Griogre]

Bob this is easy to do. For safety make sure you make a copy of the source campaign db.xml file before messing with it. Then, just open the db.xml file in your old campaign in an editor or notepad. The db.xml file is seperated into several areas. You want the part that starts with <encounter> and ends with </encounter>. Its the second section after charsheet. Select the whole section and Cntrl C it. Next open the new campaigns db.xml file and paste the xml into the encounter section of that file. You want to do this in a campaign where the encounter area is empty or you will wipe out what ever was in the there before you pasted it in. Make sure you only have one open encounter tag and one close tag. Save the file and you should be good. If you have an questions let me know.

[Valarian]

Alternatively, if you don't need to edit the story sections further, you could create an adventure module of the story items. You would use the /export command to do this. It would allow you to use the story items in any campaign folder using the same ruleset.

[bobthebuilder]

I forgot to mention,

I want to retain all Story Book contents that are already in the new ruleset.

For example, say I have three "Stories" each which constitute a single adventure located in the Story Book of the new campaign, now I want to `port over' three other Stories located within my old campaign of the old ruleset. I want both to coexist in the new ruleset. How do I do it? Following Griogre's method any thing I transfer from old to new automatically wipes out pre-existing new stuff. I need to overcome this somehow.

-bobthebuilder.

[Oberoten]

In base XML *of the new ruleset* add the name of your old ruleset.



<importinfo>
<acceptfrom ruleset="d20" />
<acceptfrom ruleset="Arm" />
</importinfo>


per example.

Then go to the old ruleset and export the notes with the /export command. Open the module in the new ruleset.

All done.

** edited for clarity **

[bobthebuilder]

It's asking me to specify the module name and the module file name I'm exporting to amongst a set of other optional things, but my Story Books are not in modules they are just created as a Story Book within a campaign.

-bobthebuilder.

***

EDIT: Here is what I mean--

Old Ruleset -- Old Campaign -- Old Storybook (data within, want to transfer all to new campaign)
New Ruleset -- New Campaign -- New Storybook (want to retain all data here)

No modules were ever created in this process. I need a way of transferring storybook data across to the new campaign without making a module, without re-typing every (thousands) of words.

-bobthebuilder.

[Griogre]

Hmm. 1) You should be able to modulize your old entries. And this is probably the better way to do it if you ever think you might need to transfer the stuff again to another campaign. 2) You can just copy the old stuff into the new campaign and instead of overwriting the existing stuff - add it. However you would need to re-number the IDs of each entry to make sure they are unique. Depending on just how many entries you have this could be a fair amount of work (and it sounds like you have a lot of entries) - though it would be far less work than re-inputting it.

It sounds like you may not have actually made a module last time or you did not activate it - so I'm going to give you a set by set on that. First open up the old campaign and type /export in the chat to pop the export window.

Fill out the Name: That is what will appear in your module list.
Fill out the File name: That is the name that will be on the file in the module folder.
The rest are all optional.

Next in the middle I would check everything on the left side of the middle - Story, Image & Maps, Personalities, Items. However if you *really* only want the story book entries and no monsters or maps and you don't have any links in the storybook to those - then you could check just Story. The defaults under I H S C are fine.

Then right click the middle and select export. You should get a message in chat saying the module was successfully exported.

Next, close FG. Then restart FG and load the New campaign. Click on the module button in the top right and you should see the name of the module you just exported (you may need to use the mouse wheel to scroll down to find it if you have a bunch of modules in there). Once you find the exported module double click on the area where an icon would go to the left of the module name and the brown book on the right should open. For a very large module it may take a few seconds to load.

Then close the module activation window and click on the story book - you should see your enties.

Bear in mind with modules if you ever want to *really* change something in your module you need to load the old campaign make the changes and then re export the module.

[bobthebuilder]

Thanks, that worked quite well. I will create more adventure modules from now on each time I have an adventure to write up so that I can keep images and stories uncluttered. The way I was doing it before was to have multiple adventures co-existing with dozens of images and stories, and when I exported (old ruleset to new) it became more convoluted! Much easier to keep each piece separated into individual modules.

-bobthebuilder

[Bidmaron]

Bear in mind with modules if you ever want to *really* change something in your module you need to load the old campaign make the changes and then re export the module.
Under the current FG2, you can edit module pages without re-exporting. Note this feature is for adventure modules only (i.e. still no ability to create or edit a library rulebook module through the FG2 interface [it's all xml editing]).

[Griogre]

True but there are some restrictions. If you make the changes to the adventure module in one campaign, if you open the adventure module in another campaign - it will not have the changes. This may be exactly what you want - but if you wanted to change the adventure module so the changes are in any campaign you open the adventure module in, you still do need to re-export the adventure module.

[Bidmaron]

Thanks for the amplification, Griogre, as that is especially cogent to what this fellow was writing about.