BrimstoneReact

An interactive character sheet for "Shadows of Brimstone" written in React.

Hey there!

October 7, 2016 by t0pquark

Looking at the view counter on Neocities, it looks like more than a few people have found this site by chance/randomly. I figured it was time to write a post about what this thing is, how/why I'm making it, what to do if there are problems with it, and what my future plans are for it.

HOWEVER: If you just want to jump to your character sheet, you can do so by clicking "Character sheet" in the top nav.

What is this site even for?

This site was built to be used with the board game Shadows of Brimstone.

That game looks pretty cool. But why would you build a web page to help play a boardgame?

Excellent question! Here are couple of reasons:

  • The game uses approximately 1.5 million counters while playing, and requires several local forests worth of paper to track stats during an adventure. Seemed like there might be a better way.
  • With all the character sheets, counters, cards, and scratch pads, you quickly run out of room on the table for new map tiles to be added as each adventure progresses.
  • I'm a computer programmer, and I could, so I did. (Also: I'd never used React, and turns out it's pretty cool.)

Ok - that's the why. What about the how?

This site uses a technology called React. It was developed by Facebook as a way to create fast, flexable, and highly interactive web applications. At it's core, it's really just a javascript library, but it also has a completely different design methodology for HOW you build modern web pages. This also means that some older web browsers might not be able to fully use the site, or it might break in strange ways. Sorry :(

So my character sheet is in the cloud?

Negative. I wanted this thing to be as self contained as possible, so all data is stored directly on whatever machine you are accessing it from. It uses something called "LocalStorage". Other websites use that space to save your preferences, username, address, etc. I use it to store your character information. This also means that if you "clear your cache" on your web brower, you'll also lose your character sheet.

But why is there no save button? I need to save!

Because of how React works, if you make a change, and can see that change on the screen, it's already been saved. Everything is automatically saved due to the underlaying structure of the application.
UPDATE: When editing items, you WILL see a save button. This is to prevent someone from accidently losing a bunch of work entering an item

It doesn't work on my machine/tablet/phone/smartwatch!

Currently, I'm only testing against the latest versions of Chrome on Windows and iOS. There are a LOT of different browser combinations out there, and since this is jsut a side project of mine, I can't take the extra time needed to test them all. That being said, if you ARE using Chrome and there is still a problem, you might have some bad data saved in your character sheet. You can try clearing it here:

WARNING: Clicking this will erase your character sheet!

So when are you going to add cool new stuff?

Currently this site is very much alpha (not even all functionailty has been created, much less tested). Hopefully in the next week or so I'll be able to get the last major pieces in place:

  • Add items, abilities, and injuires/mutations to the character sheet.
  • Pull in the stat bonuses from the items (etc) to automatically update the character sheet based on what is equiped. (Stats will be colored to let you know they are being affected)
  • Builtin calculators to help with adding gold and experiance (e.g. d6 x 50 gold / 15xp +5 x hits)

What I WON'T be doing is adding a database of cards, character base stats, or character ability upgrades. That stuff is all FlyingFrog property.

Anything else?

Yep! A special thanks to Klutz over at BoardGameGeek for all of their work making awesome character sheet images for this game!

Also: Friends don't let friends play as the Drifter. Ever.