Chrysalis Game Data

This repository contains the scenario and media files for the Chrysalis Roleplay Games:

• Descent (one-shot table-top RPG)
• Mindstorm (single-day mystery party)
• Archives (single-evening mystery party)
• Auction (alternate reality game, mixing live encounters and web interactions)

You may freely modify, use and share these assets under the Creative Commons - Non Commercial license. Their authors are listed in the team page of the Chrysalis Game website. For commercial use of media or text files, please contact us via this website. Python code files, on the other hand, are released under a permissive MIT license.

For now, Chrysalis texts are in French only, sorry for the inconvenience.

Use with the Pychronia Portal

Most of this content can be loaded into a web portal called Pychronia, for use in an online context with per-player user accounts.

See the repository of the Pychronia portal, and especially its "GETTING_STARTED.txt" doc, for more information.

A demo of the portal (with chrysalis game data loaded) is available on the Chrysalis Game website.

Generation of PDF scenario files and other documents

The "docs/" subfolder contains python scripts to automatically generate PDF documents for the games of the Chrysalis universe, while checking scenario consistency along the way.

To know more about these utilities, see the article Assisted script writing, with Pychronia Tools.

You can use these utilities, especially the "rpg_sheet_generator.py" mini-lib, to produce your own auto-validated story files from restructuredtext files.

Note that output folders will contain restructuredtext files along their PDF counter-parts, so that you may debug in case of PDF conversion errors, or fallback to manual rst2pdf invocation if needed.

Common setup

Create a python virtual environments (see https://virtualenv.pypa.io/en/latest/) and activate it; python 3.7 has been tested, other recent python3 versions should work too.

Then install common dependencies, from inside the root folder of the repository:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Then go into the tooling folder:

cd docs/

Chrysalis:Descent

Run:

python build_descent_pdfs.py

The "docs/output_descent/" folder should then contain the gamemaster manual, and character sheets, for this tabletop roleplay game.

They are meant to be used along the assets of the "descent_media/" folder.

Chrysalis:Mindstorm

Run:

python build_mindstorm_pdfs.py

This script relies on the presence of an "docs/_initial_game_data_dump.yaml" file, a dump of the data stored in the pychronia portal database, which includes some useful scenario texts.

If this yaml file is not present, the script will attempt to generate it using the Pychronia code, so ensure that the Pychronia repository root is added to your PYTHONPATH. In case the generation of this dump fails, you can also initialize and run the Pychronia portal normally, and copy/paste the yaml data from the "database content" page of the gamemaster area of your game into this dump file. The Pychronia portal should be in default Auction mode for this dumping (see "persistent_mode_settings.py" files), since the build script overrides relevant values of the mystery-party when needed.

The build_mindstorm_pdfs.py PDF generation script is quite long to run, so you might want to disable some steps later in it (by replacing some "if True:" by "if False:"), to regenerate only what you need.

The "docs/output_mindstorm/" folder should then contain the gamemaster manual, character sheets, summary docs, and in-game documents for this mystery party game.

If you have put properly named images in "trombinoscope/" folder, the generated common_guests_gallery.pdf file will gather them.

You'll need to have LibreOffice installed in your system so that separate documents can be extracted from ingame_clues.odt file using "unoconv.py". This step might fail if the pagination of this ODT file is altered on your system (e.g. fonts missing), in this case edit it by hand to respect the splitting information stored in the INGAME_CLUES_PARTS python variable of the build script.

Chrysalis:Archives

Run:

python build_archives_pdfs.py

The "docs/output_archives/" folder should then contain the gamemaster manual, and character sheets, for this mystery party.

See instructions for "Chrysalis:Mindstorm" above, for some constraints and possibilities of this build system.

Chrysalis:Auction

Run:

python build_auction_pdfs.py

The "docs/output_auction/" folder should then contain the whole gamemaster manual for this alternate reality game, as well as a preview version with only a few pages (and some broken internal links in it).

These documents are meant to be used with the different media of this repository, as well as the Pychronia portal, to master the adventure.