If You Think Something is Missing…

Doing the bookkeeping for the pledge drive for me is fairly tortuous! I guess I’ve worked out a system coding where I rest my hands (and mind) so I can go for marathon sessions. But 4 hard hours of copy and pasting and typing and clicking send and… well lets just say it hurts until I want to barf.

So if there are mistakes, that’s probably why. But if something is wrong, just contact me, and I’ll get things straightened out!

(My loving ex-lawyer, now wonderful teacher, and for many years between those two, spreadsheet and mail-merge wizard wife, has kindly offered to do the bookkeeping next year. She loves doing this stuff, and watches me struggling with a combination of sympathy and amusement. Huzzah! Praise the heavens! I’ll be setting up a unique email address to handle everything, and in my wife’s loving hands, I’m sure it will go much smoother).

Thanks again everyone!

Free Tools Pledge Drive Winners!

What an amazing pledge drive! We broke both the record for total amount pledged ($5130!), and total participants (150!). Thank you one and all for your incredible generosity.

As is true of every year, despite the amazing array of prizes provided by the community, there can only be so many winners of the special treasures. But If you’re not on the list, I hope you enjoy your adventure code(s), and know that you play an integral part in bringing the tools to everyone in the community. Thank you!

Without further ado, here are the winners of this year’s prizes! (Random prizes determined by rolls in the Crawler’s Companion!)

Harley Stroh’s Maps and Manuscript: Hector Cruz
Online Session with Terry Olson: Jeff Scifert
Keith Nelson’s Table Flags: Matt Couch
$50 Etsy Credit to Bruce Cunnington’s Store: Mark Plourde (So sorry Mark for leaving you out on the initial post!)
Dark Trails book and Swag Bag from David Baity: Timothy Spahn
Alternate Cover DCC Rulebook from Joseph Goodman: Chris Lauricella
Children of the Fallen Sun Book from Stephen Newton: Matthew Rayburn
Mutant Hobo Bundle from Jim Wampler: David LaMacchia
Star Crawl Books from Jonathan Snodgrass: Benjamin Longman
All the Zines from Jon Wilson: William Nielsen
Special Treasure Purple Tickets: Richard Paldino, Julian Bernick, Ben Walker, and Robby Anderson

Also, as a reward for longtime generous support, I worked out two special prizes from my own notes/papers of adventures past. These went to Keith Nelson and Jim Kitchen

The ‘Euro Prize’: from Jürgen Mayer (an incredible DCC Annual Vol. 1 Limited Foil Cover Edition): Kalin Kadiev

Shadow of the Beakman provided by Joseph Goodman: Terry Olson, Matt Towle, Chris Tomason, James Chodes, John McCloy

Dark Trails Dice Bag provided by Jon Wilson: Ross Miesem

One lucky winner who donated $40 or more was to win a Purple Ticket. I’ve expanded that to five! The winners are: Dylan Lewis, Joan Troyer, Jonathan Snodgrass, James Schubert, and Matthew Robertson

The ‘below $40’ Purple Ticket winner: Eric Betts

Originally three backers who pledged less than $40 could win the full lineup of Purple Sorcerer adventures. I’ve expanded that to ten! The winners are: Mirko Froehlich, Brian Dees, Jonathan Perkel, Geoffrey Knox, Denis Bokenkroger, Edward Karbala, Andrew Brogan, Hugo Hernandez Navarro, Francesc Castellanos San Roman, and Donn Stroud

Battlemap PDFs from Frank Turfler:
Nebin Pendlebrook: Russel Smith, Michael Bolam, David York
Frost Fang: Ralf Wagner, Anthony Mason, Kevin Heuer
Crypt in Cadaver Canyon: Stephen Murrish (+ special final crypt encounter), Timothy White, Stefan Surat

Lesser Key to the Celestial Legion PDFs provided by Donn Stroud: Sean Rawley, Luke Martinez, Ian Wilcox, Patrick Bramble, Christopher Kearney, Kathleen Lambert, Clayton Williams, Ngo Vinh-Hoi

Whew! Congrats to all the winners, and tremendous thanks to everyone who participated in this year’s drive. You truly make my life easier, and in a very real way make the tools possible. 2020-21 is going to be an incredible year for the free tools!

If you’ve won a physical prize, I’ll be confirming your address (likely tomorrow). Adventure codes will start going out shortly. (There are still a number of you I need to check on which adventure you prefer). Those who donated $40 or more will also be going up on the Purple Sorcerer Patrons Page.

Thank you!
Jon

Wow, just wow…

What an amazing drive everyone! Thanks to all of you.

One of the most consistent and generous donors swept in at 11:57 with an enormous pledge to push us over $5000! We’ve broken the record for most given overall ($5131), and just as importantly, the largest group of supporters ever: 150.

Wow, the work of figuring out the prizes and distributing codes will begin tomorrow, but for now I’m just sitting here smiling. I’m so excited for the coming ‘tools year’, and I can’t wait to begin rolling out cool new DCC utilities for everyone to enjoy!

The Final Stretch…

We’ve reached the final 15 hours or so of the 2020 Free Tools Pledge Drive: thanks to all you who have been so incredibly generous, making this year’s drive another tremendous success!

In particular I need to thank those who have provided such amazing prizes. I hope I never take for granted the generosity involved here: such cool, inventive stuff provided by creators who obviously have better things to do than come up with prizes for me each year! Thank you, thank you.

With the funds raised I’ll be significantly increasing the muscle of the main server, and adding secure access to both the data and testing server. (This is increasingly important as I’m running into problems testing some new features of the tools that expect a secure connection!) All the fees for the year have been paid.

On the hardware front, I’ve bumped up the memory of the iMac we purchased 2 years back, added some new SSD storage, and beefed up the testing pool with a ‘taller skinnier’ Android phone which runs a newer version of Android OS. (I can’t tell you how many problems this eternal push beyond a 2 to 1 aspect ratio in phones has caused me over the years!)

When we wrap things up and I know the total I have to work with, I’ll be adding an eclectic mix of hardware for development/testing purposes. These will include a new Windows laptop that I’ll use for both testing and development. (This lack of a native PC near at hand is sort of a strange gap for me that I’m excited to fill. I’m planning on setting up a simple KVM to seamlessly switch between my Mac and the PC, allowing me to see the tools in all the main browsers in Win 10 in seconds. At certain points while testing new features this will be a huge time saver).

Finally, to fill in more ’strange sizes and other things’ gaps, I’ll be picking up an iPad mini… and a cheap Raspberry Pi kit! One area that hasn’t seen ANY testing over the years is Linux, and rather than futzing around with a Linux partition or virtual machine, I thought it would be fun to put together a Pi, something I’ve always wanted to do…

It’s startling to look around my room, and realize that just about every bit of tech I have has been supplied by your generosity over the years. You really do make the tools possible! I’m so excited to push everything forward this year to provide new useful tools to the community.

So, onward to the end of the drive! The total raised so far basically covers the bases: any funds added today will make my ‘bang for the buck’ hardware decisions just a bit easier.

On Monday after we’ve wrapped, I’ll begin contacting the ‘top donors’ to start the process of figuring out which treasure goes where, and I’ll begin shooting out mountains of adventure codes to everyone. 🙂

Thank you, one and all.

Day One is in the Books…

Thanks to everyone that has given on day 1! We’ve eclipsed the our stage 1 goal, and all the basic server expenses and fees for the year are now covered. On to stage 2 and some new hardware for testing!

The Free Tools Pledge Drive

Two new treasures have been added to the pool: Bruce Cunnington is providing £50/$50/€50 in value to a lucky winner so they can order items from his Dungeon Denizens Etsy Shop! (Do check out Bruce’s shop: it’s full of cool stuff!)

Also the coolest dude in DCC, Jürgen Mayer, has brought back the coveted ‘Euro-Prize’: in this case an incredible DCC Annual Vol. 1 Limited Foil Cover Edition for a lucky European winner!

I remained convinced that there is no gaming community quite like this one. I’m continually blown away by the goodwill and generosity of everyone here. Thank you.

2020 Free Tools Pledge Drive!

Support the Tools! Discover Treasures! And, as always, see lots of exclamation points!

Note: Like last year, we can no longer rely on Google+ as the central hub for organizing and running the Free Tools Pledge Drive. As a result, we’re all a bit dispersed these days, so please share the drive in your favorite online haunts to get the word out, and if you’d like to donate something to the prize pool, please let me know: it would be most gratefully welcomed, as I would love to exand this year’s pool of prizes!

Thanks everyone!

Additional ‘Leveling’ Options for the Generators

I’ve completed a rather extensive upgrade to the Zero-Level Party, MCC, and Upper Level generators to add additional optional ‘leveling’ features to help judges prepare for con play in particular.

You can now set minimum and maximum total attribute bonus ranges for both single and 4-up sheets. For example, you can set a minimum combined bonus for all six stats (or in the case of a 4-up sheet, 24 stats) of -1, and a max of +1, and the generator will only create characters and 4-up sheets that fall into this range. In combination with the new upper level hit point options, this should make it a breeze to create stacks of sheets balanced for specific needs.

This IS an extensive ‘under the hood’ update, so please let me know if you notice anything strange. Click on the ‘’Find out more about minimum and maximum ability totals’ link under the appropriate drop downs to get full details about the new features.

As always, I’m thrilled that many of you continue to find the tools useful, and I hope these new additions make them even more useful in spreading some DCC/MCC love to a world that really needs it. 

https://purplesorcerer.com/create_party.php

New Upper Level Hit Point Method

I continue to be amazed by the talented, dedicated judges in this community: You all rock!

In a previous discussion online about generating upper level characters for players, I mentioned the strategy of printing out a stack of characters, and letting your players choose a favorite sheet from a packet of 3-5. (With either the upper or zero level sheets). As a judge, you can quickly scan the line at the top of the pdf’s (now including the upper level generated sheets) to see the average stat number, as well as total bonus for the sheet. You can then separate the sheets into groups of similar-powered sheets before distributing.

After thinking about this for a bit, for judges who want to further ‘level the field’ I just added a new “Upper Hit Point Method” to the upper-level generator. In addition to the regular hit point rolling method, you can now generate a pool of characters with the same “percentage of max” hit points: so say you want all the characters generated to have about 70% of the maximum possible hit points for their level and stamina, to keep things relatively consistent between characters… you can now do that. (You can choose anywhere from 25% of max all the way up to 100%).

I think I’ll likely add a “total bonus for all six stats in x-y range” limiter at some point, so the generator will only create, sheets with a +1 to +2 total bonus or -2 to +2 bonus, so you don’t have to sort them yourselves. But for now, just set the “How Many?” dropdown to fifty, the ‘Style’ to ‘Randomize all but level PDF’, and the ‘Upper Hit Points Method’ to the percentage of max you prefer, and hit create. In short order you should be able to produce a good selection of characters to sort into pools for the power level session you’re going for. (And of course, there will always be the option to do things the ‘presumed DCC way’ and let chaos reign!)

(You can also enter the stats for up to the first four characters by hand… so you can even fine tune specific characters as needed.)

Thanks again to all our great judges: hope this helps a few of you. 

https://purplesorcerer.com/create_upper.php

Our Contact Us Form

The Contact Us form has been acting intermittently strange for a while now: so tonight I finally gutted the code and updated things to the latest version of the script I use!

It seems to be working well now, but please let me know if you notice any strangeness while trying to contact me. (If the form is malfunctioning, you can always get to me at info (at) purplesorcerer (dot) com.

Thanks everyone!

Living4Crits Talks about the Sunken City

James from Living4Crits has always been a big fan, and supporter, of the Sunken City Omnibus. The book provided the backbone of his first extended DCC campaign, and in this video he goes over each of the adventures, and talks about highlights from his time running them.

I love how he took the adventures and made them his own. I think you’ll enjoy the video, and I hope it inspires you to check out the rest of James’ content: his (and his family’s) enthusiasm is infectious. (In a good way). 🙂