Pen, Dice & Paper

HEXROLL 2E - alpha build #9 - bugs and walls

Hello Brave Adventurers,

Today's rollout addresses quite a few bugs that crept in during the past few weeks. I dedicated most of this weekend to fix them. I will always try to prioritize fixing bugs over adding new features or content.

I also worked a bit on making city maps, specifically city walls, look better. Up until now, walls were drawn without considering bodies of water or roads. I now take both into account. The result should look nicer.

Another mi...

HEXROLL 2E - alpha build #8 - a mixed bag

Hello brave adventures

Today's rollout has a mixed bag of small features, content additions, minor tweaks and bug fixes.

Dungeon Labels

You can now get a quick preview of any dungeon hazards before guiding your players through it. Use the labels toggle button to alternate between seeing the area numbers, a hazard symbol indicating an encounter and no label at all.

Bookmark-friendly Titles

Using your browser bookm...

HEXROLL 2E - alpha build #7 - Content editing & water hexes

Hello Brave Adventurers,

In today's alpha rollout I added the ability to statically edit sandbox pages. You can add lore, image links, or tales of your players bravery (or cowardice?)

When editing a page, HEXROLL copies the generated version of the text and you will be editing the copied version. You can always revert to the generated version by clearing the entire text and saving. Saving is done by pressing the save button in the editor's toolbar or locking the p...

HEXROLL 2E - alpha build #6 - VTT maps

Hello Brave Adventurers,

Today's alpha build marks another milestone with the addition of VTT maps - bringing us only a torch-light distance away from the BETA stage.

Here's what you can do today:

• Create a VTT for your sandbox map and invite others to join.
• Reveal or partially reveal the map, hex by hex, to your players.
• Add tokens to dungeon and cave maps.
• Reveal dungeons or cave areas to tokens with a light or sight range.<...
  2023-09-30 11:52:16 +0000 UTC View Post

VTT Projection Preview

Hello Brave Adventurers,

The topic of VTT came up in our Discord this weekend, so I made this quick demo of the upcoming realtime VTT projection feature I'm currently working on.

This is a natural follow-up to cave maps. Caves pose an interesting mapping challenge to both the referee and the players when not playing in Theatre-of-the-Mind mode.

This is still work-in-progress, and the idea is to provide a separate players visible URL of any sandbox dungeon or cave map (and th...

HEXROLL 2e - alpha build #5 - Caves!!

Hello Brave Adventurers

Today's alpha rollout meets another milestone with the inclusion of the new cave generator. This is a big-ish feature that I'm very pleased with how it turned out.

There are still tweaks and improvements needed, but nothing that cannot be mitigated by re-rolling areas.

Moving forward, this new generator will open up more content options, such as monster lairs, dungeon extensions or underground areas for settlement loc...

What color scheme should be the default for 2e?

Assuming the option to toggle between the two during a game is always available.

HEXROLL 2e - alpha build #4 with settlement links, performance improvements, docs draft and a roadmap

Hello Brave Adventurers

This week's rollout is now live with some cool additions, together with a draft version of the Hexroll Guidebook (at docs.hexroll.app).

The guidebook is incomplete, but provides a good starting point to understand Hexroll's interface and behavior better. I will continue adding to it and rewriting things as I make more progress.

Here is the change log for this week's rollout:

2023-09-02 18:44:07 +0000 UTC View Post

Hexroll Backpack is now open-source

Hello Brave Adventurers,

I've just released the source code of Hexroll Backpack on Github. It is released under the terms of the GNU Affero Public License version 3.

Hexroll Backpack is based on the already open-sourced Electron project, and anyone who wishes so can now build it directly using the source-code.

HEXROLL 2e - alpha build #3 with offline support

Hello Brave Adventurers,

My day job involves caring for a high value, high profile web service, ensuring it is up and running 99.999% of the time. We call this five nines - and we work hard to make it happen.

Applying all the best practices I know of to hexroll dot app, it will have an outage at some point in time.

To reduce the risk level, this alpha build includes Hexroll Backpack - an offline sandbox viewer.

Here is the change lo...

HEXROLL 2e - new alpha build rolled out

Hello Brave Adventurers,

I rolled out a new alpha version earlier today, fixing quite a few minor bugs that our in-house expert quality assurance team (namely, "Paper" - the youngest of "Pen, Dice & Paper") uncovered.

Fixed bugs:

• Duplicate items appear in shops inventory.
• Duplicate monsters appear in wandering monsters tables.
• Caves probability can be set even though caves are not enabled yet.
• Re-rolling a complete dungeon area does not u...
  2023-08-04 20:26:56 +0000 UTC View Post

Any Patreon login issues?

There were a few instances where Patreon's login page did not successfully redirect folks back to hexroll.app.

HEXROLL 2e alpha is live!

Hello Brave Adventurers

Hexroll 2e alpha version is now online and available for you to test run at https://hexroll.app/generate.

What to expect?

This is an alpha version of the generator. This means that (a) there are missing features; (b) there are still critical bugs waiting to be randomly encountered; and (c) the service could suffer from some unexpected down time or ...

The road to HEXROLL 2e - discord server is live

Hello Brave Adventurers,

Preparing for the next version of HEXROLL, we now have a community discord server. This will be a good place for us to chat, discuss ideas, share feedback and report bugs.

Patreon supporters get access to the Patreon-only chat channels.

See you there!
Ithai

The road to HEXROLL 2e - alpha version is imminent

Hello Brave Adventurers, 

Time for another cheesy devlog update :)

HEXROLL 2nd Edition alpha is nearly ready. I'm now playtesting it with my kids. As soon as I get things reliable and fun enough to use, I'll make it  available here in our Patreon community to get your feedback.

The last several weekends were dedicated to stability. More  specifically, making sure that re-rolling is as predictable as possible. Re-rolling entities in HEXROLL usu...

The road to HEXROLL|2 - Mapping

Another quick video update on some mapping features I'm currently working on.

The road to HEXROLL|2 - Hex Crawling

Another quick update showing how hex crawling will look like :)

The road to HEXROLL|2 - The new WIP dungeon maps module

Here's a quick preview of the new SVG dungeon maps. This is still work-in-progress, but you can get a sense of what's coming.

The road to HEXROLL|2 - an updated tileset

Adding rivers and roads meant I had to create a revised tileset. The new tiles will allow river and road curves to be layered between the hexagon and the art. Tiles will also have low-res versions to make large maps look less noisy when zoomed-out.

This was also an opportunity to add three more terrain types: Jungles, Wetlands and Tundras.

The new hex map module is looking better and better every day and I can't wait to share more with you - but I'll reserve my next update to show...

The road to HEXROLL|2 - I'm now adding rivers

..and optional trails between towns and cities to add more options to wilderness travel.

The road to HEXROLL|2 - under the hood stuff

It's St. Patrick's day here in Ireland, and I had a few spare hours to work on the server-side of things and record this quick update. This is not something you will ever need to see or use - but this is how things will look like under the hood.

Let me know if you'd like me to record and post more live demos in the future. I'm not too good at this, but I can try and get better :)

2023 development poll #2: What device do you prefer using with HEXROLL?

The road to HEXROLL|2 - experimenting with full continents

I still have my work cut out for me on this one. The plan is to generate full continents with at least 10,000 hexes. That's well over 200,000 square miles - packed with NPCs, dungeons, monsters, treasures, conflicts and glory!

The road to HEXROLL|2 - it's a whole different beast

Greetings Brave Adventurers,

Allow me to geek out super briefly and using a couple of diagrams, illustrate how HEXROLL|2 will be in many ways more of a platform, rather than a simple generator.

The current HEXROLL has a pretty straightforward structure. Oversimplifying, it's an executable that when given a set of parameters, outputs one big HTML file:

HEXROLL|2 on the ot...

The road to HEXROLL|2 - introducing Scroll

Greetings Brave Adventurers,

I took some time off from work this week and made some meaningful progress.

Specifically, I now have a working version of the new random text generation language Scroll that will be used to support the new capabilities I plan to add to the generator.

Check out the full basic tutorial at https://pendicepaper.com/posts/introd...