Strange Eons (SE) is the custom component design tool for Arkham Horror and other board games.

Excellent stuff Chris. SE is a great program. Have noticed a bug or two, and will compile a (short) list of them for you in the coming weeks. Will also (hopefully) finish off some of my add-ons and share them in a couple of weeks or so when I can put Visual Basic away (learning it for a potential new job) and go back to Java.

Great stuff.

Now to download the plugins.

RAZ

Chris (Thelric),

Any chance you can add an option to start with the "One of the Thousand" Cult Membership? I would imagine it would cost $10 like the Silver Twilight membership. Or has it already been added and I just missed it?

I get a graphical error where it clips the base and right hand side of the terror track ovals and the Kingsport Rift Progression circles. Anything can be done about that?

-Frank

@thorgrim:

Thanks again for the report.

@squad:

A good idea. Yeah I suppose the cost will be $10, this was is the standard cost set by the designers for "special things" like blessings and the STL membership.

@Frank:

It appears to be clipping all token types, not just round ones (it is just more obvious on the round ones). I'll look into it.

Cheers,
Chris

Frank said:

This has been fixed for the next release. Thanks. I think someone may have mentioned it on the old forum, too, now that I'm thinking about it. If so, sorry about that to whoever else reported it.

Cheers,
Chris

Thanks to everyone who has been testing out RC1. All the bugs that have been reported so far have been fixed and will appear in the final version of 2.00. In the meantime, if you installed RC1 using the Windows installer, you can download a small (240kB) updater that will patch your copy of RC1 with the latest bug fixes.

And of course, please keep reporting any bugs you discover. Cheers, Chris

It doesn't seem to want to patch mine. But then, I was using V2 beta . Should I update it myself by uninstalling and reinstalling RC1 and then patching that?

-Frank

Frank said:

Yep. The patch only applies to 2.00 RC 1.

Cheers,
Chris

Hi Chris!

Hey great program. I found this back when I first bought AH, and you have really added some great features. Thanks.

Now this next bit is Off Topic, but i'd love to see you use the technology you have put into Strange Eons, and use it for a card creator for Cosmic Encounters. That would really rock...

-David

drswoboda said:

I haven't considering writing something for any game in particular, but I have consiered writing a general tool that would work for any game. But there is no way I'll have time to start any new projects until my dissertation is finished, so it will be a while before anything might happen on that front.

Cheers,
Chris

What a wonderful creation. Sterling work, good sir.

I just wish I had a decent printer to manifest my works in physical reality. BTW, has anyone managed to succeed in producing cards that are indistinguishable in quality from the official materials? I mean to the point that they could be mixed into a deck and genuinely get lost in the shuffle?

Wow. Great work.

But now I want something like this for Cosmic Encounter, too.

Criswell said:

This is unlikely without a lot of effort and expense. In fact, I can often tell what expansion an official card is from by looking at the back of the card, because there are minor variations in colour or the card coating between printers and print runs. But don't despair. There were a few threads on mixing custom and official components on the old/old old forums. Here are the replies from one of those (one of, if not the, most recent one):

(Thelric:)

When you add new components of some kind, also add in some copies of existing items. For example, add in some extra cultists when adding new monster tokens. This separates the fact that new tokens feel or look different from the fact that they have new content, so there is less temptation to take advantage of the different look/feel.

Instead of mixing new material into the decks, only use it in conjunction with something that is not random (or that is easier to randomize). For example, an investigator who starts with a specific starting item as opposed to mixing that item into the deck.

Completely replace a particular deck with new content. The Gilman Memorial Exhibit does this for Exhibit Items.

Balance the content that you add (you should do this anyway). For example, if you add new unique items, the mean of their list prices should be approximately $5. If you know that the custom item at the top of the deck could be one of the ones that is worth $1, it reduces the temptation to make a special effort to get it. The Dunwich Horror expansion added several powerful new items, but it also added tasks and missions (worth $0 and $2-3, respectively) to balance them out.

Don't worry about it and rely on the honesty of the players.

When drawing a monster, tip the cup and gently shake until a monster falls out instead of using your hand. If more than one falls out, take the one that is closest to you. Or, use something other than your hands to draw (such as tongs). Or, wear a glove.

For some decks, you can easily keep the official and custom decks separate and then randomly (or even deterministically) determine which to draw from when a card is needed. For example, if you make a new mythos deck that is 1/2 the size of the official deck, then you can roll a die at the start of the Mythos phase. On a 5-6, draw from the custom deck. Otherwise, draw from the official deck.

(Dublin Ireland/Glasgow Scotland:)

The only way we know to add new things to the decks so their appearance is indistinguishable from the other cards --- is to take rejected cards that one has previously removed -- example, really stupid spells that don't work well -- and just print a couple of words across their text side with a felt tip pen or something. This marked card is then shuffled back into the appropriate deck. The home-made card with complete instructions is in the box for a reference, but is not actually drawn.

For example, we took a few discarded spells, wrote a couple of words across the text, and then shuffled them back into the spell deck. They link to home-made cards not actually drawn.

This system would not be good for many of you, who are very intent on not marring or blemishing any cards in your set, regardless of whether you want those cards in play or not.

(Squidnibble:)

The simple solution to monsters in the cup feeling different to the others in the cup is to use spawn monsters from Dunwich that are not in play as tokens that cause the custom monsters to arrive on the board.

Glaaki isn't the GOO? You've got five tokens right there that will cause you to pull a homebrew creature instead.

(Formerly known as Jake:)

GOO and Investigators is pretty easy to add. Roll of randomly at start of game to detremine them. Small cards are tricky.

(Bill Andel:)

Do you know what would be extraordinarily helpful? If FFG were to put out a set of cards with blank fronts and some blank monster counter sheets to which players could "sticker" their custom components.

(Shawn Kehoe:)

For the full-size cards, you could use card protectors that prevent players from feeling the texture of the card. You could even get the ones which mask the back side of the cards, although that would make sorting trickier. Also, your cards wouldn't fit in the original AH box anymore.

You could look for a cheap copy of King in Yellow or Curse of the Dark Pharoah to get spare cards to customise.

TheDukester said:

That's fair. Actually Strange Eons is fairly easy to modify. The biggest stumbling block for adding components to a game like Cosmic Encounters would be getting the high quality scans of actual cards to make base pictures out of. Once you have that, using a program like gimp or photoshop to erase the text so that you can write on it would be pretty easy. Modifying card types so that they have different backs and use different pictures is fairly straight forward.

Once you had some high quality scans of Cosmic Encounter or Runebound cards, making the card bases for those games would be very easy. I can't do it myself because my only "scanner" is a digital camera.

-Frank

I've had some ideas rolling through my head that I'd like to add to AH, but never wanted to go through all the effort to actually create them. I'm new to the FFG forums and just happened to stumble across SE, looks like it's exactly what I need, thanks for making this available!

IDIOT NEEDS HELP

How do you install and make use of plug-ins?

I’ve downloaded various plug-ins that look really interesting, but I have been unable to make use of any of them. I end up with a zip file containing files that strange eons doesn’t seem to recognise and I don’t seem to be able to do anything with. I’ve tried adding plug-ins through the ‘manage plug-ins and extensions’ window within strange eons as well as taking darker paths, but have been unsuccessful at every turn. I’m sure it's really easy, but I have reached an impasse and need some help.

If I have overlooked something in the published docs and FAQs I apologise for wasting your time, just point me in the right direction.
I’m running strange eons 2.0 Release Candidate 3 and the plug-ins all come from the official site e.g. Case Book Player.

Thanks

sulphurea said:

Some versions of Internet Explorer incorrectly rename these files to have the extension .zip . The extension should be one of .seplugin , .seext , or .setheme , depending on the type. The files will not work correctly without the proper extension; you must rename them if necessary.

Once they have the correct extension, you can just drag and drop them onto SE to install them.

To rename the file you need to display file extensions if they are hidden (Folder Options | Advanced | Uncheck Hide file extensions for known file types).

You can prevent Internet Explorer from renaming these files by Disabling "Open files based on content, not file extension" under security settings (click Custom Level, scroll down about 3/4 of the way through the list).

Cheers,
Chris

Disabling "Open files based on content, not file extension" under security settings had the effect of displaying a page of code with explorer flagging restricted content. Allowing the restricted content allowed me to save the file which still ended up a .zip. The address bar did show what the proper extension should be and using your advice I changed the extension manually and everything is working fine now.

Thanks for sharing your wisdom and responding so quickly. I wouldn't have sorted this out without your help.

A fantastic program,

Tom

Hi,

in the King in Yellow expansion, some of the Mythos Cards have no Portal opening and no monster movement but instead ask the players to place 2 Doom tokens on the Doom track or to raise the Terror track by 2.

This (of course) can be done with Strange Eons, but there seems to be no way to center the 'place 2 Doom tokens on the Doom track', it's stays on the left side of the card, while it's centered on the KiY cards.

Is there a way to center this info, or do I have to create an extension?

PS: AWESOME PROGRAM! Strange Eons RULES!

Currently the Gate/Doom/Terror box is always on the edge so that there is room for a Monster Movement box. And the Monster Movement box is on the other edge so there is room for Gates and Doom Tokens.

If you want to make cards that have a centered Gate text (like Intermission) or a centered Monster Movement (like Next Act Begins), you can open up the resource files and play with the numbers in "card-lyout.txt". The key values are "mythos-doom-text-region" and "mythos-movement-region" (make sure you get the white move and the black move or it will look weird and bad).

This forum's lack of Ctrl-V support is inexcusable.

-Frank

pvdlinde said:

SE let you have no monster movement block before KiY came out, so there was no official card to match back then. The final version of SE will center them to match the official cards.

In the meantime, you could move them region yourself by patching the settings of the individual card, but in this case there is a little hiccup. The round "window" graphic includes some of the surrounding card background so that it will cover up the corners of the (rectangular) location graphic. If you move it to the center, it won't match the surrounding background.

Cheers,
Chris

Thanks for the replies

I'm looking forward for the final version, then.

Thelric said:

Just so that there is no confusion for anyone, that should have read "final version of SE 2.00 ".