UGMT/Tutorial

Calendar/Events

Suppose the "Graewirs" like their little town and attend a moot on the 8th of Kelen. This is were we want to start. Turn to the Calendar plugin. You will notice that the first information button shows "1-Nuz-720 0:00". This is where everything starts per default. We need to move our group quickly through time. There is a Stay button, which allows you to stay for 4 hours (a watch) at the same place. Now, Kelen is two months ahead, pressing this button 68 times in a row will give us blisters. Press the right button instead. Now a menu pops up, where you can select a new duration of stay. Select a period to your liking and move in giant leaps or small steps toward the 8th of Kelen.

The right display has the current day shadowed. As it turns out, today is the Agrikan Balefire ceremony. This doesn't affect us too much in the -- ahem -- hinterland of Rethem. But in two days the Ilbengaad fest starts, which we can see two lines down. This is an important festival in Ivinia and Orbaal. So let's hurry with the moot. In case you're interested, you can also see the current state of the moon and the active sunsign on the left. Since the Graewirs, and therefore you, the GM, will not be interested in Agrikan rituals in the future, you can suppress them by pressing the right button on the Suppress button and check the appropriate line. You can save this for later sessions.

Switch to the "Log"-plugin. Depending on how fast you went to the 8th of Kelen you will see different things here. Be default, the plugin will log all weather changes and all calendar events you actually hit (not the ones you skipped). It will record them with a date and time. Any of these things can be changed and if you want to change something directly, do so. The right panel is fully editable. You may also note that "Locations" are checked. Any time a location is entered or left, this is recorded as well. How this can happen, shall be explained later in these tutorials.

You can also move to the next event by using one of the buttons that say so. Begin Next, End Next will move you to begin resp. end of the next event.

You will note that certain events are shown on the calendar plugin, that are not calendar events, but rather short-term events. These events stem from the encounter plugin and they behave just as regular events, you can go to them, skip past them, etc. Right clicking on one of them will bring show a popup, where you can choose the event to become a sound trigger or show details. In case you select details, the event will cause one of three things to occur. (a) The encounter plugin will be raised and a short description is shown on the lower left - this is standard behaviour. (b) An index entry may be raised, if a a special encounter links to an index entry. You may, for instance devise a Monster encounters, which spring the appropriate reference from the index plugin this way. (c) The sketch plugin may be raised through selection of a special encounter, which references the sketch plugin.

How can all this be achieved? Well, lets raise the encounter plugin through regular means. It comes with the "first level" of Harnic encounter tables. That its, it will roll on one table. Please note that certain tables are currently unlikely to be reached, as there is no "Urban" terrain yet. But tables may be created with many conditions, such as location, weather and terrain. If you need to know the details to this process, read the technical details in the DTD which comes with this plugin. You should also be aware that certain events are not generated fully (they are shown with three question marks). The reason is that the result may depend on some condition that cannot be determined yet (e.g. location).

In other cases, you can modify a randomly rolled event directly. The right panel shows all events. You should never move an event outside of its watch. While this is possible, it is generally not what you expect. Otherwise you can change the duration as you which, the event may even straddle watches. (Note that non-events are listed here as well. They show that the appropriate watch was rolled but nothing will happen.) You can the select, whether an index, sketch, or name reference is to be created (see above). Anything but the name (default) entry requires special syntax, in order for the reference to be resolve properly. A right-click will popup a menu that helps you with that. It will show all existing notes or index entries. Otherwise, see existing character notes for some examples. You can "cancel" an event by putting an empty string, where there was something else before. This is not a reset in the sense that the event will be rerolled. It is a simple cancel, for a reroll you find a seperate button.

You may find that events seem to dissappear as you progress on the calendar. This happens, when a potential event was determined to be no event at all. Obviously, unrolling an event when you pass backward through time does not work as well. Also, each group has a seperate set of events, which is changed, when you activate a different group.