Over the past few months I've applied a lot of my time to updating my Earthdawn Character Generator.  We've been playing again at our house, and the program, again, was short on what I needed.  Even the simple act of increasing a characters circle was not clear cut as a it should have been.  I still had a list of items I wanted to incorporate, but this updated was getting pretty massive. With a lot of work invested, here are the highlights:

- Updated the program to use the .Net 4.0 Framework.
- Changed the installer project to InstallShield LE because of that upgrade.
- Added a simple increase and decrease circle button for characters.
- Added the ability to enter character features (Hair, Eyes, Skin Color, etc.)
- Added the ability to change how much money a character had.
- Attributes that are important to a discipline are now made bold on the form.
- Program settings are now saved to a file, so when you want to turn off "New Character Validation" it will stay turned off.
- The program will now uncheck "New Character" when the circle is greater than 1.
- The program will now check for newer versions and prompt the user to update.
- Added the talents, spells, and disciplines of the Earthdawn Companion, and both Denizens books.

There's a bunch more in the change log, but I figure you'd rather just download the program.

As I keep exploring there's more that want to accomplish with this program.  I know I have it in me to update with more content from the two magic books at least (Magic: A Manual of Mystical Secrets & Arcane Mysteries of Barsaive).

As always, this program is unofficial, and not intended to be an infringement of copyright.  There are other, more content laden generators out there, so I'm not really sure how big of an issue this is.

A couple of weeks ago I received a unexpected email from a gentleman somewhere in the United Kingdom.  He complemented me on the this program and had a couple questions about it.  This compelled me to finish up some functionality that I had started after several prior gaming sessions.  In particular, adding a custom item to your character would be much better than continuously re-printing out your character sheet and writing in the custom items. 

The program now supports adding custom items to your edcg or character save file.  These items, if categorized correctly, will now print out on generated character sheets.  There were additional tweaks and such that I documented in the change log, but the driving feature was having the ability to add custom items like “The Sword of 1,000 Truths” or whatever else could be imagined.

At home, Earthdawn has come to a halt due to my participation in the local theatre and school being at full speed.  Maybe when the snow falls we can sit down and roll some dice.  There is much potential for what this program could do, but the impetuous would be if we’re playing it at home, or (the very, very unlikely scenario) of someone throwing a couple bucks my way to spend my time improving it.

Download on this page.

After several uses of this program, I found the usual lack that we feel the most in playing our games is the character sheet that is generated.  The more that we play, the more necessary having a Step table is.  There are all sorts of modifiers such as poison damage and magic effects that will take your base number of dice and change them, either improving or reducing your chance for success.  It became tedious to have one chart and not have it readily available when needed.  Therefore, I spent the time changing the character sheet template to include a step table, as well as other bits of polish.

The bigger improvement and the reason for such a larger install package is the added in PDF export capability.  HTML sheets annoyed me in that they were variable and never looked exactly as I wanted.  I took it upon myself to learn how to use the open source, free to non-commercial use C# library iTextSharp.  It actually turned out to extraordinarily easy to use, can very logically defined.  It didn’t take very long to take to template I had designed (however simple), and have a PDF created of it.  In my opinion they look much better.

You’ll notice that the Export functionality has a new window now allowing you more granular control of what sheets to print and in what format.

Future thoughts on this program after letting the idea percolate a bit include better naming conventions for various sheets that are printed, version checking support, talent cards, and spell cards.  This doesn’t even include support for more than the initial source book in terms of races, disciplines, talents and skills.

Download on this page.