CITY OF BRASS: A New RPG Electronic Tool Suite Is Glimpsed On The Horizon!

With Trapdoor Tech and Lone Wolf cautiously circling each other with their Codename: Morningstar and Herolab/Realmworks applications respectively, another player has been quietly prepping something in the background. The City of Brass, billing itself as "the next generation of gaming apps" is working on "a fully-featured app specifically designed to manage the mechanics of pen-and-paper games while allowing you to focus on what matters".

The application, which will have public betas in early 2015, and hopefully full production midyear, has been privately in use by the developers for months for both D&D 5E and for N.E.W. The Roleplaying Game (the inclusion of the latter attracted my interest for obvious reasons, but the app is designed for multiple systems). It features a world builder, a character (and monster) builder, a story builder for creating adventures, and a campaign manager. Plus a whole bunch of stock art you can use in your creations. Lucas of City of Brass shared some screenshots with me, below.

It's an interesting time, to be sure. It seems that this particular application is pretty much built already, and is is heavy playtesting mode right now. It does look like the forefront of electronic aids development is proving to be a highly competitive area in terms of functionality and cost, and that can only be good for us potential customers!

Here's a D&D 5E character. This is the overview stuff.

And here's the actual character sheet.
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Hoard of the Dragon Queen (D&D 5E) in the Campaign Manager.

Recaps from the Campaign Manager.

The character page. All the sheets can be viewed by the GM.

A preview of the City of Brass character sheet. This is Jack, a PC from a What's O.L.D. is N.E.W. playtest.

The tab with Jack's exploits. All the gold numbers are interactive. If you click them, they roll dice.

The Story Builder. This is the splash screen for an adventure.

An encounter in the Story Builder.

A peek at the World Builder pages. Crisp, clean, easy to navigate and simple to create and manage.

A quick glimpse of the FAQ pages which gives some hints as the licensing and pricing.

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[LucasC]

Our focus with the City of Brass is making gameplay easier for players and GMs alike. That's where we have spent our time and where we will continue to spend our time. It doesn't preclude the creation of a marketplace where content creators could create and distribute their work, but no such market exists presently.

 

[LucasC]

When will this be available?

Early in 2015 for beta and mid-to-late 2015 for full production.

Our testing so far has been with a group of about 15 people and we'd like to see it with a couple hundred before launch. Hopefully beta will give us that opportunity. If the beta is smooth, we'll be ready to go midyear. If it's not so smooth, later in the year.

 

[Velcerick]

As one of those 15 people who have been using the software I'd just like to chime in to say that I've been immensely impressed with the functionality and intuitiveness of the software. The software is truly system neutral, and we've played active campaigns in Pathfinder, 5th Edition, NEW, and an indie RPG setting called Engel; and it worked well for everything. That is just from the player side though. One thing that I think has been overlooked in all of the discussion of useability, subscription costs, exporting, etc., is what is really just a blurb in the FAQ about allowing things to be public, affiliate, or privately viewable.

I've been an alternate DM of our weekly game for several years, and have a particular interest in world-building and homebrew. In the past, if I wanted to share this it meant I either had to know how to build a website, give the information to the webmaster of our old website to share, or print everything out. The district I've built in worldbuilder is now a fully-functional website my players can browse at their leisure and which I can add to and update as more sites get visited and more areas get fleshed out. Of important note in this discussion is that the website is not a bland, ugly wall of text. Without any extra effort a clean and useable webpage is generated. With even minimal experience in using something like a word processor it is easy to make a website that looks like it was professionally developed and managed, with callouts, integrated images, list boxes, sidebars, and more. I have no background in web design, and world builder has allowed me to make a webpage for my players that tells them everything they want to know about my little piece of our game world.

 

[SkidAce]

Seems similar in scope to Obsidian Portal, with extra options built in (easier to develop a character sheet for one).

How customizable will the aesthetics of the pages be? Pictures in the background, banners, logos etc?

 

[Ferghis]

Our testing so far has been with a group of about 15 people and we'd like to see it with a couple hundred before launch. Hopefully beta will give us that opportunity. If the beta is smooth, we'll be ready to go midyear. If it's not so smooth, later in the year.

I think I could bring a small group of people playing several different games into this. We have the final part of a high-level 4e campaign, a 13th Age campaign, and a Fate campaign, all with the same group of people, for the most part. Further, they are the kinds of people that will pay money for these kinds of things, so it would garner you plenty of feedback if we could all get into the beta. Is there a way to get either all-or-none of us in to the beta, since we would not use a medium that wasn't available to all of us?

Also, a question about a specific potential feature on the world-builder. Is there a way to make an entry available to just one person? Or a small subset of people? As in, so and so knows something more specific about the Court of Winter, but the rest of the party doesn't know it, and its not common knowledge. Is there a way to implement that?

 

[LucasC]

How customizable will the aesthetics of the pages be? Pictures in the background, banners, logos etc?

We want to maintain a clean, crisp look to the site, keep things as simple as possible, and ensure as consistent a user experience as possible. To do all of this comes at a the cost of limited customization of the look and feel. Page backgrounds, for example, are not supported presently, although you can upload and use any images you want in your pages. If we find there is a strong desire for additional customization, it's something we can look at for future enhancements.

 

[LucasC]

Is there a way to get either all-or-none of us in to the beta, since we would not use a medium that wasn't available to all of us?

Our intention is to use a Kickstarter to cover the costs associated with beta. Our supporters will be given access to the beta.

Also, a question about a specific potential feature on the world-builder. Is there a way to make an entry available to just one person? Or a small subset of people?

The direct answer to your question is no.

At present, permissions work like this:

• Private (just you and anyone you've declared as a contributor which gives them access to edit your pages)
• Affiliates (you and all your friends)
• Residents (you, your friends, and anyone with an active CoB account)
• Global (anyone with Internet access; available in World Builder only)

I will add, however,

Player "handouts" are available inside Story Builder. What you describe is one example of how they are intended to be used. A handout has the same permissions as noted above, but a URL that you won't just 'stumble' across (they use a GUID in the URL).

Right now, you can create these handouts and share the link with your players (either through City Mail or some other means you prefer). They can then store it on their character sheet for easy access in the future. This is just a temporary solution though, functionality that is in development presently, and has always been part of the plan, will allow you to assign the handout to a character (or characters), and then the player(s) that owns that character will be able to easily see it.

 

[SkidAce]

We want to maintain a clean, crisp look to the site, keep things as simple as possible, and ensure as consistent a user experience as possible. To do all of this comes at a the cost of limited customization of the look and feel. Page backgrounds, for example, are not supported presently, although you can upload and use any images you want in your pages. If we find there is a strong desire for additional customization, it's something we can look at for future enhancements.

Thank you for the info and quick reply.

 

[Ferghis]

Right now, you can create these handouts and share the link with your players (either through City Mail or some other means you prefer). They can then store it on their character sheet for easy access in the future. This is just a temporary solution though, functionality that is in development presently, and has always been part of the plan, will allow you to assign the handout to a character (or characters), and then the player(s) that owns that character will be able to easily see it.

I think this is inadequate to handle the lore of a world in which people are privy to different information, and I press this point at this juncture because it's becoming increasingly clear to me that this feature is difficult to implement at later stages of development.

But before I get into it, let me emphasize how desireable this feature is. First, it is (or will be) highly requested. Your biggest competitor, Realmworks, moved this feature up on their to-do list despite the difficulty in implementing it based solely on the volume of user requests. The same is true on the feedback forums of many of your other competitors. Second, reasonable people can disagree, but, this is the main feature that differentiates your product from a Wiki. There are others, I'm sure. And I'm sure you will regale me with other reasons why your thing is better than a wiki, but you will find many who think that I can do the bulk of what this product does with a free Wiki. As I tried to say earlier, I'm not being cheap here: one colossal advantage of my wiki is that I have control over the risk of my content disappearing. Realmworks has a long-standing company behind it, so it garners a bit more trust on that front. This lack of trust is the main reason I have not renewed my subscription to Epicwords.com, where the admin is so absent that I fear it might disappear any day, so do not underestimate it. But I digress: this is an important feature, and its implementation will differentiate you from your competition.

Which gets me to why I'm spending the better part of an hour of my time to impress this point on you now: it's a bitch to implement properly, because it requires each LINK to verify the access rights of the user: otherwise users without access see a non-functional link, and the point of the whole secrecy thing is highly diminished. Implementing this early on makes it a lot easier. Talk to your partner (who, I take it, works the tech-end of things) about it. Do your own research to confirm what I'm saying.

And mark. My. Words.

 

[Ferghis]

This was cross-posted to reddit. Hopefully it gets you some traffic and traction.

http://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/2qjx1l/new_campaign_manager_coming_like_realmworks_and/