I should post here first but I always forget to let you know about the actual plays we release. Currently, we release one weekly, alternating between Rolemaster and Adventures in Middle-Earth.

Both are played using the Fantasy Grounds virtual tabletop (VTT) software. The AiME one follows Tales From The Wilderland and the Rolemaster Classic campaign is based on the 1989 Shadow World adventure, Demons of the Burning Night. It’s just a bunch of middle aged blokes blundering their way through things so don’t expect anything too serious!

One of the players also streams it live most Fridays at 19.30ish UTC:

Watch live video from MajykFngrz on www.twitch.tv

In these times of lockdown, maybe these might help pass the time?

Stay safe and be well.

Happy gaming.

The RPG Encounter Companion breached over 2000 installations last month! Looking at my app vitals there sure are a lot of active users now! Hope you’re enjoying the app!

The software used to develop the RPG Encounter Companion is to be made open source in the next few months which makes it all the more important to migrate it across to Unity.

Looking more into Unity, it looks like sending requests via the internet the way it is done currently for submissions and bugs is not possible. They are in between network APIs which means, if I move it across, those features will have to go. I’ll still offer an email address to be used for submissions/problems but it is a bit of a step backwards in ease of use of the app. On the upside, the look of the screens will be much sleeker thanks to way Unity handles that!

The Actual Play podcast ( https://wolfshield.podbean.com/ ) for both Rolemaster and Adventures in Middle-Earth gain more listeners every month. Imagine sitting down to a tabletop session and 20-30 people filed in to observe you and your friends play! Exciting and scary to think about!

It’s also on YouTube though that is not as popular, probably because there aren’t many visuals other than the Fantasy Grounds client!

Well, that’s it for a bit!

Happy Gaming!

Work continues on the new (non RPG related) app using Unity. There hasn’t really been much to update you on, hence no November or December updates and January looks to be the same.

The C# language is easy enough to learn, as is Unity, it is just, well, there is so much more to it! You could easily lose yourself in the Unity engine!

So how did 2019 go? Better than expected really! We have over 1500 downloads of the RPG Encounter Companion! Alas, 46 paid app sales haven’t really justified any more development time for content so that will be it for updates until I port it over to Unity which will be after the new app ships. As mentioned earlier this year, website, developer and software costs meant I spent more on the app this year than I made but luckily I have another revenue stream that pays the bills!

This year I started recording then editing the actual play sessions we do for Rolemaster and Adventures in Middle-Earth. ( https://wolfshield.podbean.com/ ) That has been fun but I’ll probably need to cut one of those in 2020 to make more time available for development of apps.

Speaking of 2020…I’ll launch the new app, move the RPG Encounter Companion over to Unity, continue with one of the actual play podcasts and start on a new mainstream app. Well that’s the plan anyway!

And finally…

I get very few submissions from users for the RPG Encounter Companion, so few in fact that I’ve toyed with the idea of removing it completely but I got one this month that decided the issue…

Location: Ham Sandwich
Event or Character: Character istics are
Description: I pedal to the lake and I play Xbox

Yeah, I’m keeping it in.

Hope you have a great year.

Happy adventuring!

It’s been a month of learning for me whilst I get to grips with Unity and C#. Luckily C# is very Java like so that hasn’t been too bad to understand as I’ve programmed in Java before. Unity is all new to me so that is slower going but I’ve manged to knock up a simple app with buttons and images by the end of this month. Next month will see me experiment further.

I’m happy to welcome another 148 user downloads of the RPG Encounter Companion this month! When we hit 2000 downloads I’ll add some more content as long as some technical issues between Google and Corona ( the development platform I use ) get resolved.

Happy adventuring!

This month, for the RPG Encounter Companion, I finished the coastal shore location which brings the total up to 8 travel areas. I also fixed a submission bug where large amounts of text would not be sent. Finally, I fixed some typos and grammar errors that I noticed when testing this update.

Going forward, I want to use Unity to create this and future apps. This will require me to spend time working out how to do that and learn another programming language, C#, which will be used for the advanced scripting I’ll need.

Well that’s it for another month. Happy adventuring!

We now have OVER 1000 ACTIVE USERS!

Not much done on the app this month as I’ve spent three out of the four and half weeks of August on holiday abroad! Alas, not from the proceeds for the RPG Encounter Companion! This app actually costs me money! Annually, I spend £80 for Apple’s developer licence and almost £150 for website costs. We currently have 34 users who unlocked the Inn premium content (thanks for the support by the way, you’re brilliant). After tax and Google/Apple/Amazon’s cut that is not even £100! Once I release the final free content for the Coastal location, I’m going to have a serious think about whether to put time into more premium content for other areas as that will run into 100s of thousands of words. I may just support the free content and add more to the Inn premium features. Let me know what you think.

During September, I’ll hope to finish the Coastal location.

Happy adventuring!

This month saw us hit over 800 downloads for the RPG Encounter Companion! We’re getting over 100 a month now.

My thanks to Mark who submitted a Bug/Feature report that asked that I include desert and coastal encounter locations. I added desert this month and hope to have the coastal one ready for next month’s update.

Also in this month’s update were button noise changes for the travel section as they made a dice rolling noise or nothing all all. Now all make the “bottle clink” noise. (Remember, if you don’t want sounds just go to the settings screen (the cog icon) and bring the volume slider down.)

We continue to add actual play content to the Podbean and Youtube channels where we now have over 700 views between the two sources. Here’s the latest taster episode:

And here is the full episode on Podbean:

Anyway, time to add some coastal encounters. Happy adventuring!

We’re up to over 700 downloads now! Please leave me a rating so I can reach others. If it is going to be a bad one, please talk to me first so I can see if I can change anything to change your mind!

I updated the app this month with some more second names, about another 40 which combine with another list so hundreds more combinations are available.

For those of you who unlocked the Tavern premium content, I have added the ability to mail a saved encounter list to an address you specify. You can then print, edit or whatever it later. Please make sure you check your spam folder if you are sure you got the address correct but still haven’t received the list. My yahoo mail sent it straight to spam but now sends it direct to my inbox.

Work continues on the premium content for the City.

Also, shameless plug again, please check out our actual play sessions for Rolemaster and Adventures in Middle-Earth if you like that sort of thing. I also release them as podcasts in case you fancy a listen to some not too serious roleplaying whilst driving etc. ( https://wolfshield.podbean.com/ )

Here’s a short taster for the latest Rolemaster session…

Anyway, this month I’ll be working on the premium content and also sort out some of the behind the scenes code stuff to make the app easier for me to work with.

Happy Gaming!

Working on creating character and event descriptions thus no code changes this month though I have got a send mail script working so will add that to the app in the next few weeks. This will allow premium users to mail their saved encounter list in case they want to print it for use in a session later.

I received my first submission in May which will be expanded and added to the Forest section. If you mail me your contact details I can run it by you first. Thank you for taking the time to send one in!

On a non app related matter, we’ve started releasing actual plays for Rolemaster and Adventures in Middle-Earth. The YouTube channel is at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5PEvyi9nDtmIxVwUrh-5-A/

Here’s a quick taster of the AiME series…