UGMT/Tutorial

Create and Develop PCs and NPCs

The first question you might ask yourself is: what can this tool do for me? High aspirations as this software has, what can it actually do? This tour is going to give you an idea of what is possible. First you should get the tool running. This shouldn't pose a problem. Do this by double clicking on UGMT.bat or UGMT.sh - whichever suites your OS the most - in the directory where UGMT.zip was unzipped. If it still doesn't work, it might well be a bug. Go ahead and tell me - my address is on every page.

The first Character has been created as an example, he is called "Aegald" (you may enter ISO-8859-1 letters here, so in fact the name is "Ægald" instead.) Looking on the right you see attributes sections and skill sections, you may have to scroll. The rules are those of HM3. The buttons on the left are fairly self-explaining. Create a new character by pressing the "Create" button from a popp menu. (You should know how popups spring into being in your environment.) Click on the field "New Character 1" and edit it into a new name, say "Borthin". You can then roll his attributes. If he is a PC, you should probably reroll his key attributes. Look at the rules which they are, or let the mouse hover over the buttons to get the information from the tool-tip that will appear. After having rolled almost all attributes, you should fill in those that could/have not be rolled, most notably "Deity". (There are others, such as chantry quality, which you should check and fill in before developing a new character.) You can reroll any attribute by clicking on the button with the name on it. Most players are not satisfied with a fully auto-generated character. You can change things here at any time. For instance, rolling a random profession is not the norm for most characters, so choose one. For Borthin it will do.

Now let's develop the character and click the correponding button. Now the "Automatic" development button will be activated and some faded text below the character tree view will say "Fate". This line will show you what phase of each step you are in. If you have "Fate", you just need to press to auto-generate the skills for you. It may also say "Choice". In that case a certain number of buttons will be high-lighted, which may then be used as these options by pressing the left mouse button on them. It may also read "Choice" with a number in paranthesis following. This works as before, but these numbers are option points you spend for the character. Proceed with the development, by processing the first "Fate" phase.

Now you will see the "Language" button highlighted, which has no ML field. The reason is that this button hides all language trees which in turn hide the numerous individual languages. So pressing such a button will expand or shrink the trees. Among the languages you can choose the native tongue of the character. (Most should choose "Hârnic".) After you have chosen a language the "automatic" stage has been completed and the next button will be enabled with it's "Fate" phase. (The old is disabled.) You can continue from here and work through each step.

There are two more buttons to explain. One is titled "Finalize". Use it to copy the preliminray ML column to the ML column. This column will be saved when you use the save button. Any time you press a single skill, the same thing will happen, but only to the single skill. The other is titled "Export HTML". This will create a HTML charactersheet, which you can export (see the export plugin) or open directly in any suitable web-browser. The file will be called code.html, where code is replaced by the automatically generated 4-digit number shown above the tree-view for the characters. Using a number is a simple means to avoid players viewing each others' charactersheets via the export plugin. (It is by no means secure against overly nozy players.)

You may have noticed that you can "create" two things from the popup. You can create a group/sub-group. You can create and rename jsut as characters as mentioned above. In case you'd like to rearrange the characters and groups, use drag-and-drop in the hierarchy-tree. Of course, you can't develop groups.

You can add some descriptive notes to the character. This should be references to something from the sketch-plugin. These notes become visible when you choose the Toggle Synopsis button. You can thereby switch between a read-only version of the character and the generation board. Please read the sketch plugin on how to create notes and add sketches. Also take a look at how Ægalds notes are referenced.

One last note. The final age of the character is determined, once he has been finalized. This is mostly due to account for veteran characters. The age is always taken such that the characters has his determined age at the time of the current active group. Thus, if you play in the year 740TR, the new character's birth date will be such, that the age that is determined by the rules is reached at 740TR.