Oh fellow forumers, I've recently came by a new eeepad tablet, plus some new guys I met declared their interest in tryiing out a campaign of rogue trader.

Since all my manuals are in pdf I thought that maybe I could use the datas...tablet to spice things up, like a way to keep sheets updated, managing handouts, maps, showing pictures of npcs, and so on.

Do you have any tips, some crazy ideas, know of some app that might be of use?

Btw, the planned hardware is a laptop for the dm, with an extra monitor that players can see, and of course the tablet, who can circle around players.

Be wild.

Just sayin' you should play Shadowrun. That would be a disgustingly amazing set of props for a Shadowrun game.

Shadowrun?!?! Wrong forum!

There must be some gothic-themed backgrounds out there... that would definitely be a must to get the right "atmosphere." I think you are definitely on the right path though!

Well, if you consider the seneschal artwork, I'm not too far from the setting, but honestly, I'm looking for stuff that could be nice, as of now I found some amazing map/dungeon/solar system generators, but I need something more like an image viewer to display maps who can support layers with annotation, to jot down where the party is, where it has been, being able to overlay a hex grid and use virtual (or physical) minis to track a fight progress, and so on.

Basically I'd love to be able to somehow bridge the videogame rpg experience with the pen and paper one. Seeing how much can I bring on the best of the 2 worlds.

I'm going as far as planning to code a website with those tools and just let chrome do the interface job.

I have an Ipad tool for maps, it's awful.

Tablets are still mostly hype and very little actually usefull tools. Can't believe i even paid 5 bucks for that mapping tool on my Ipad.

Hmm, still haven't found much, btw yes, there's still not much in the department of actually decent apps for android/ios.

ALTHOUGH you can use ny web based tool at hand.

Did you check the Frame Work for maptool? Did a full system yesterday, had asteroid to use for cover, etc.

It's a nice tool, bit of a big learning curve but nice little tutorials in it.

Seen maptool, hated it, it's also impossible to distribute the information easily, eventually my players plan to get tablets of their own.

I use Epicwords.com for all my campaign info and the players can interact through forums, wikis etc on there. I can also post maps and pics and "quest" info. Being that its web based it should work on just about anything. They are even looking at making the site more mobile friendly.

There used to be a program out there called dataslate out there if you can find it. I think it was a cool way to display imperial style readouts.

There is another cool tool called Astrosynthesis which lets you create 3D star systems with all the planet info you could ever need, you can even output movies from it of orbits and system flybys, you can find it on NBOS.com . They also have a GM tool called ScreenMonkey (which you can try for free) so that you can do all your maps and encouters through a browser and another great organizational tool called The Keep . Lots of good stuff on that site and its all built to work together.

I've used a laptop as a GMs tool for a while, with pdfs replacing all the heavy books I used to lug around. Excel helps me keep track of things, and roll all my dice for me.

But after getting an iPad, I was thinking along the same lines as you. After a brief discussion on these forums , I wrote a little Players Datapad for my players to help speed up some of the time consuming dice and table-lookup actions. I also made a more generic version for others to use.

On an iPad you can add a bookmark to the home-screen, and if you launch this as an app, it will run full-screen.

Another possibility is to use Dropbox , quite possibly the best thing since sliced bread!

Add files to your Dropbox folder on your PC, and it syncs and is instantly available on other devices connected to your account. Install the free app on your iPad, and when you add the latest handout, it will show up on the ipad too. It works very well, and provided a decent internet connection syncing is pretty instantaneous.

@ Darth Smeg

That is website you created is so awesome! What are the odds you could make the source code available so that people can customize it like you have for your players?

I too would be interested in that. Although I've done a bunch of my stuff through google docs I'm looking for a bit more organized method to my madness.

Guys you are being amazing. To the pont it will take me some time to go through all your suggestions.

If someone is working on a web tool I might consider contributing some code

Allright, though the code is filthy. Look, but promise not to laugh

I'm no coder, and it shows. This was a learn-as-you-go project for me, and it's a mix-n-mash of javascript, php and sql in there.

I've removed some passwords and made a .zip with all the necessary files here .

I've also made a very basic howto on what you need to set up for this to work.

Let me know if you ever use this, if you make funky additions or anything else I might find amusing (like re-writing the whole thing in a tidy, well-thought-out manner).

Also, something that would be very handy, and requires no coding at all, would be if someone with lots of time on their hands would finish the powers.xls spreadsheet. It's basically a structured description of all the psychic powers, which would let me (and others) import it to a database.

The custom power-roller for my group includes the text descriptions of Havelas' powers, but these are all hard-coded in the scripts.js file. Very dirty, hard to expand when new powers come along in new books, and not very usable for others. I started myself, but had to go drink some beers and never got back to it. If you do, I'll drink a beer to you and think warm happy thoughts. Don't worry about the columns with SomethingCode (J + K), I'll fix that later.

Another time consuming but potentially useful thing would be to re-create the perils.txt and phenomena.txt for Rogue Trader and/or Deathwatch, as I believe they are a little different (et least the DW is). As it is, I have just implemented the DH version.

Wonderful! I'll look through this this weekend and try to get my head around it. If I can make sense of things I'll see what I can do about working on the .xls file. Sometimes I award my players bonus XP or fate points if they do game relevant data entry, update or create wiki's or work on editable PDF's for me so I may pursue that as well.

At any rate, thanks for sharing your hard work with all of us!

You're welcome. I cleaned the code up a (very little) bit, and organized it all a bit more. I also included examples of customized pages pr character as well as the general versions. The .zip file is updated to include this, and it's content/functions can be previewed here .

If you have suggestions on functions to add, things to improve, I'd like to hear 'em. I might not be able to implement them, but hey

As of now I've got knee deep in a crazy project, this is how it went:

1. I set up a private mediawiki to store data about the campaign
2. I created a template to quickly create character sheets from raw data
3. I decided it would be nice to have skills link to a page with the skill description
4. Things went out of hand when I tried to edit the rulebook with the errata
5. Now I'm importing all the rulebook in the wiki
6. ...
7. Profit? Or possibly my death due to exhaustion?