Slowly, but steadily, progress is being made on my big rules-refactoring project. I now have the Tempest Crusaders fighter pack fully extracted from the website repo and added to the separate rules repo, and can generate a PDF as well as files in the format the website generator uses.
The final step in this process is to get the scenario rules moved over too. I’ve done this two times already, so hopefully this time it’ll be pretty straightforward…
Quick one today as I am quite behind where I hoped to be! – but I wanted to provide an update nonetheless.
This evening I hope to establish a process for producing printable assets for the Tempest Crusaders fighter pack and Into the Tempest scenario pack. I’m sure I won’t get it all done but if I can make a good start I’ll be very pleased with myself.
In my first post in this series I wrote about the work I was doing to make publishing rules updates easier. I am relieved to say I have completed the first major chunk of this work! 😤
There is now a shiny new PDF for the current version of the Core Rules (v1.1.2) available on the Rules page of the website (or just click here). It was generated using Pandoc and Weasyprint. Henceforth, when I want to produce a printable PDF of a version of the Core Rules I need only press a single button – previously I would have to separately maintain a Word document from which to generate a PDF, which was such a faff I only ever bothered once.
I think this will be a great workflow improvement for this game. (And for future projects!)
Please take a look at it if you have time and let me know if you spot any issues with it, or improvements that could be made. For example you might want the rules available in A4 rather than A5 booklet format, and I can certainly look into providing that as an alternative.
Next I need to figure out how to do more or less the same with Tempest Crusaders and Into the Tempest…
As I write this I am waiting for TeX Live to install. I have spent the last month or so of my limited Magewinds development time putting the Core Rules into one big Markdown document and figuring out how to get back from that to the format I build this website from (multiple Markdown documents, one per 2nd-level heading). Export to the website format is now working, thank goodness1, so I can move onto phase 2: exporting the Core Rules to a printable format (PDF). That shall be done today, I hope.
At the end of all of this effort I shall be abe to update the rules in one place and automatically regenerate both the website and the PDF, which will be a great workflow improvement for Magewinds and for any future games I design.
Once this is done, I am planning to make some adjustments to the Core Rules, the fighter pack and the scenario pack, before locking them all down at the end of September. That way, any documents I print before the Meetup are not invalidated by last-minute work, and so that attendees can plan their warbands a bit without me pulling the rug out from underneath them!
The Meetup, by the way, is in November – please reach out to me if you’re interested in attending and you need the details.
…It’s still installing, how?
And I learned a lot along the way, which was secretly the purpose of the exercise 😉 ↩
Three wizards by North Star Military Figures: a Stormwarden, a Sigilist and a Lich. Painted by me!
When approaching a miniatures-agnostic game it can be difficult to know how to start. What are the expectations? Where are the limits? The purpose of this post is to show new players how they could choose, build and paint models for Magewinds.
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