Questions regarding the set up of a Living World.

[Madnick]

Greetings guys

I got some questions for you regarding my game in Fantasy Grounds. I am a game master that I run multiple games in my world the past ten years. Since I found FG my life became so much easier, but many of my tables remain resistant in moving to FG mostly because i cannot find a way to organize my self in it. What I want to ask is what would it be the best way for me to transfer all the lore, npc's, monsters of the world to FG. By making a module with all that info in it? Will it be easy to move around with out losing the links between the people and the plots? If there is any guide around that could point me to the right direction of making actually a setting in FG, I would really appreciate it.

If I manage to set up everything as a module or something like that, is there any way for that information to be public to more people? I got more game masters that are running games in the world, and I would like to see the changes they are making to the lore the moment they do it. Is that possible? Or should they export the info send it to me and me having to re-import everything from scratch?

Just to have a better understanding, I would like to soon have a discord channel with all of my players and my game masters. If I decided to run a game in FG i would like all the information this game would create to be ready for use by me in the future but also by all of my other game masters. Is that possible or there is no way to have an active living world running in FG.

I hope that makes some sense

Thanks for your time.

[esmdev]

If I understand your question correctly, my answer would be yes.

I have a development campaign that I created where I make all my changes to races, classes, tables, monsters, etc., for my game. Then I export those changes to a module that I call ESM Includes. I can use ESM Includes in whatever 5E campaign I am running and my players have access to whatever is in there. I've found that it helps to develop everything in one campaign specifically designed for development and then use the include files in the active games. That way I can keep all of my changes in one place and only need to modify one include file.

You can distribute the include module to your GMs and everyone will have access to the same information or rule changes as everyone else.

[LordEntrails]

What you want to do is very complex.

You might end up wanting several development campaigns so that you can have your primary Dev, then a player info dev, a fellow DM dev, etc. It's going to depend upon a lot of things, and many of them are going to depend upon your desired workflow.

For instance, if you want other GMs to be updating lore, how you handle that will be interesting. If each has their own Dev campaign, then they can export modules and share those (via a cloud share or email) but then you would not be able to update the 'master/canon' without opening the module and copying the story entry to your master Dev campaign.

I would use something like Visio, PowerPoint or a mind map program to layout a logical outline of what information resides where, and how the info gets from one point to the other. Then figure out how you are going to control that info and distribute it with the tools you have.

Something like RealmWorks or Obsidian Portal might work better for some of these aspects than FG. But of course, FG will be the better 'play' resource, just maybe not for controlling information.

And if you haven't already, check out the Adventure Module Creation in my sig. It does not address this type of use, but does talk about development campaigns and updating them.

[Madnick]

Thanks a lot both for you answers, i thought that it would be complex but I am still hoping that it could be doable. I do not need obsidian portal or realmworks for the gathering of the information because I have everything on my One Note account. The set up is tailored made for me to always find what i want in a second and of course really easy to add or change new stuff while we play. My main issue is that instead of having that on my One Note i would love to move it to FG because when i play my games is so easy to just use the automated process it provides. And in the same time being able to post some information to the players by using the share image or map etc.

I will most definitely take a look at your guide, i think that my solution for the first beta testing process will be to just make multiple modules probably separated by areas of the world and then try to find what would be to the best way to share it to other gms while allowing them to edit them.

Perhaps by having a second fantasy grounds account that could work as the God machine that has only the final parts of the lore? And manually adding all the new info that i accept from the Gms...don't know thinking loudly here.

anyhow thanks for the ideas, if you got more keep them coming.

[LordEntrails]

So, if you share a module, from your master dev campaign, no one can edit that module inside FG. Any edits they do will not be in the module, but rather in the campaign. Now they could then export those changes, which would then only include changes and not the module you exported. But, you could then use that an 'approval' process because then you would have to open their 'suggested changes' module in your master dev campaign and copy or incorporate those changes into your master. Then you could export the module and re-distribute the updates to all the GMs.

I think it's do-able, you just have to think it through and be aware of the limitations etc.

[Trenloe]

Perhaps by having a second fantasy grounds account that could work as the God machine that has only the final parts of the lore? And manually adding all the new info that i accept from the Gms...don't know thinking loudly here.

Your own personal data you add to Fantasy Grounds is not stored in an account. It is all stored locally on your hard drive - in the FG App Data directories. This is why LordEntrails was mentioning development campaigns - which would all be stored on your hard drive.

You really have 2 choices:

1. all of the changes come to one person (may be difference people, with each person owning a clear set of data that will produce a single FG library modules) and they update a master development campaign and produce a library module from that campaign to share with everyone.
2. Use some form of version control. You could share the module making campaign database file (db.xml) via a central version control system. Checking out the campaign database file (db.xml), making updates in FG and then checking the database file back in. Depending on the changes, and the version control used, you can probably also merge some/most changes together - if two people had made updates but took a while to upload, or were working on updating at roughly the same time. The downside to this is that you'd have an education process with all of the GMs you allow read/write access to the version control - making sure the know how to use it properly, regularly check-in their updates, etc..