The Tavern

A fully contained, Offline, Encounter Tracker and Builder. For people that run games off old laptops or don’t want to deal with spotty wifi.

Adventure Wrench is a tool I made for myself. And it does two things.

The first thing it does is keep track of my encounters. And as an off-line encounter tracker for laptops. It’s actually fantastic.

The second thing Adventure Wrench does is it helps build encounters.

Meat

When you click on “The Vault” you get a list of items that can be copied or deleted from the Current Game Encounter. There is only ever one encounter built in this application. Which suits me just fine since the encounter builder is dynamic and fast enough that I can build the encounters at the table in seconds.

I accomplish that feat by having a large number of items in my vault ready to use. These represent npc’s, creatures both specific and general, traps, and treasure. And sometimes lore or places.

This program and other Encounter builders approach the problem of building Encounters depth first.

You have to build the axe some character/monster needs first, then the character/monster then the encounter.

I know that in the mind of the GM, world building is usually accomplished Top Down.

1. Events in the world create the encounter.
2. Environment determines what characters/monsters will be there.
3. The individual weapons abilities are determined by who/what is being encountered.

To Partially fix this problem I introduced templates.

Because a template can be a general rule. Like “swamp creatures have poison attacks and weapons.” We can start to think of encounter building and world building as a set of increasingly specific rules.

That should allow us to build Top down in templates. Templates can Incorporate other templates. So we can stack general rules into specific ones.

Here is an example making a group of npc’s that can be applied to any species of creature:

Now lets look at a Top down approach to making something that applies to any denizen of a swamp in my world.

Rules and Options

So is this a better approach then the usual encounter builder? It’s a little more flexible and has a few more tricks. I am still looking for that killer feature to add.

As a reminder these templates don’t get applied specifically to monsters. They can be applied to any “item” inside the vault. Which is just where we keep finished items.

To apply a template we go to the vault and then click the add button. Which opens up this:

So I apply one template here, “Normal Beast Attacks”. And it:

1. Generates a stat block based on the CR
2. Adds claw and tail attacks to the generated output.
3. The damage is scaled by the number of this item in the group. In order to target a CR of 4.
4. Then I can delete Actions, update formatting, change or add things and then save.
5. Once saved into my vault I can copy it to the live encounter in the encounter tracker at any time.

The encounter tracker:

One important note is that the Tracker is very independent of the builder. At any time you can create new entries there using the add button. And it allows you to just copy things directly to it’s description like a stat block.

Imports

There are some cases where you’ve made something so generic you might want to share it with others as a starting off point or save it for later. The “Switch Game” Feature allows you to switch to a new save file. Should tell you where the save files are. And you can copy those files and rename them as required. The application only remembers the last name it used. But the switch game button will allow you to move over to using a different game. I advise closing and re-opening the application if you do so.