2018 Free Tools Pledge Drive!

That special time of year has rolled around once again: The 2018 Purple Sorcerer Games Free Tools Pledge Drive is Underway!

We do this once a year to raise funds to help cover the costs of creating, maintaining, testing, publishing, and hosting our free tools. As always there’s a pile of awesome prizes and rewards available to those who participate, supplied by the coolest people in the hobby, including the Dark Master himself! (If you’d like to add something to the prize pool, let me know quickly so we can add it to the list!)

The drive will run through next Saturday. I’m always astonished by the generosity of this community: thanks so much for your continuing support of the free tools!

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Site Issues: June 20 at 11:00 p.m. Pacific Time

UPDATE: Things have been restored. I’ll leave this post up so that true hard core users can bookmark the backup server… just in case. 🙂

A power outage has taken down the server facility where the Purple Sorcerer site is hosted. Hopefully the issue will be resolved very soon, but if you absolutely, positively, must create some sheets now, my data server (which mirrors the main site) seems to be up and running. You can access it using the link below. 🙂

http://74.207.247.173

The Crawler’s Companion Version 1.8

This major update to the Crawler has been approved at Apple, Google Play, and Amazon, and should appear in their app stores shortly. (Sometimes it can take a while to filter through all the nooks and crannies of the various sites).

For you side-loaders of the DCC world, the Android APK’s (and the PC and MacOS Desktop installers) can be found on the Crawler page at https://purplesorcerer.com/crawler.php. I provide a number of different versions there to hopefully provide compatibility for as many Android devices as possible.

This update has been in the works forever. I’ve been in a testing cycle for much too long, since I get so freaking queasy about the potential problems of rolling out a new version. But, as they say, you’ve got to let the stirge fly free at some point. A fairly significant portion of my free hours have been poured into it over the last year, so I hope the DCC community finds the new features useful. 🙂

What’s New in Crawler Version 1.8
• Dual-screen landscape mode for tablets! (Depending on how you’re holding the device at launch, it will either choose portrait or landscape mode).
• Information sharing between Crawler apps in the same campaign
• Updated campaign battle data system
• Dice multipliers and modifiers on the dice-rolling screen
• Campaign notes page
• Add names to your spell casters
• More die colors

Be sure to visit https://purplesorcerer.com/help to view the Crawler 1.8 QuickStart Video to see the major new features in action.

GM’s Day Sale at RPGNow!

Everything is 33% off until March 12!

Check it out.

Upper Level Generator Updated!

I’ve integrated Goodman Games sheets as the default styles for every class. (You can find the old look as ‘Classic Style’ in the styles dropdown).

Upper Level Generator

This has been a major overhaul involving a fairly significant amount of new code: though I’ve fixed a few bugs along the way, there’s a good chance I’ve introduced new ones, so let me know if you spot anything strange!

New 0-Level Party Generator Sheet Style

As my health is improving, my productivity is starting to pick up. 🙂

I’ve added the very cool Goodman Games 4-Up sheet to the ‘Styles/Format’ dropdown in the O-Level Party Generator. Just select ‘4 character PDF (Goodman Games New)’.

https://purplesorcerer.com/create_party.php

Site Traffic for 2017…

Every great once in a while I dig through the logs of our visitors to PurpleSorcerer.com. Here is the rundown for last year:

2017 PURPLE SORCERER GAMES YEARLY REPORT
Visitors: 18,000 unique visitors
Traffic: We average about 135 user sessions per day: the week before GenCon sees a spike of 4-5x normal traffic. 🙂
0-Level Characters Created in 2017: ~4.3 million

MOST POPULAR PAGES
1. 0-Level Party Generator (30% of all traffic)
2. Upper Level Generator (16%)
3. Sorcerer’s Grimoire (11%: over 17,000 spellbooks created)
4. Sword Generator (3.5%)
5. Mutant Crawl Classic Generator (3%)
6. Crawler Download Page (3%)
7. Mercurial Magic Generator (2.5%)
8. Demon Generator (2.3%)
9. Dragon Generator (2.2%)
10. Unique Monster Generator (2%)

TOP TEN COUNTRIES
1. U.S.: 72%
2. Canada: 5.3%
3. United Kingdom: 4.3%
4. Brazil: 3.5%
5. Spain: 1.7%
6. Australia: 1.7%
7. Germany: 1.6%
8. France: 1%
9. Sweden: .9%
10. Norway: .6%

TOP U.S. STATES
1. California (10%)
2. Texas (9%)
3. Washington (7%)
4. Illinois (5.5%)
5. New York (5%)
6. Pennsylvania (4%)
7. Ohio (4%)
8. Michigan (3.5%)
9. Florida (3.5%)
10. Georgia (3.3%)

TOP METRO REGIONS
1. New York
2. Chicago
3. San Francisco/Oakland/San Jose
4. Seattle/Tacoma
5. Dallas/Ft. Worth
6. Washington DC
7. Los Angeles
8. Portland
9. Boston
10. Atlanta
11. Houston
12. Spokane
13. Philadelphia
14. Denver
15. Detroit
16. Kansas City
17. Minneapolis/St. Paul
18. Birmingham
19. Pittsburgh
20. Austin
And as far as I can tell, we had one visit in 2017 from South Dakota. 🙂

TOP REFERRERS:
1. Purple Sorcerer Blog
2. Google
3. Reddit
4. Facebook
5. Google Plus
6. Goodman Games
7. Old Guy Gaming
8. Smursh
9. Roll20
10. Role Playing Public Radio

TOP BROWSERS OF OUR VISITORS
1. Chrome: 63%
2. Safari: 19%
3. Firefox: 10%
4. Edge 2.4%
5. IE: 2.2%
6. Opera: 1%

OPERATING SYSTEMS USED WHILE VISITING
1. Windows: 51%
2. Android: 17%
3. IOS: 16%
4. Mac: 13%
5. Linux: 2%
Desktop vs Mobile: 1/3 of our traffic is now mobile.

I’m thrilled folks continue to find the tools useful. Thanks to everyone who supports Purple Sorcerer Games!

Here is a graph of traffic throughout 2017. See if you can spot the run-up to GenCon!