Thank you for the great feedback I’ve received from my character sheet over the years. Unfortunately, each time I’ve gone to re-create or re-imagine the character sheet to take care of some of it’s failings, I realized that I couldn’t do it justice until I could put more information about the character and how to level that character up right into the sheet (hidden but useful information). Today, I’m trying to make the goal of having an online character sheet, complete with leveling capabilities, a reality. But first, the data…
For anyone interested in the project, I’ve decided to share my old PBML project on GitHub, now called MVML for Megaverse Markup Language. It’s an XML specification or custom file type for storing things related to the Palladium Megaverse®, mostly for character sheets. However, the idea is to be able to create and share (offline as well as online) custom races, O.C.C.s, rune weapons, spells, vehicles, etc.
The Palladium Megaverse® is my favorite place to play but boy, does it take a lot of work to play in it! One hope for this project is that it will help all things Palladium become a little more accessible to a much wider audience without sacrificing any of the character complexity and flexibility.
If you’re interested in helping shape this file structure, please head on over to https://github.com/traek/mvml for more details. As developer skills go, this is a pretty lightweight project; XML development experience is helpful (but not necessary). As knowledge of the Palladium Megaverse® goes, yours should be second-to-none. We will try to account for every nuance of published rules and present the raw data such that any program can interpret how it wants to. We will need to know how it works (and how they relate) so we can best store them for anyone to use.
By not baking the rules into the language, we keep away from anything that would compete with Palladium Books’ ability to sell their amazing books as well as let people account for their crazy house rules. It also allows us to exchange character information regardless of whether we’re still playing the 1st Edition Palladium FRPG rules or we’ve moved on to Rifts Ultimate Edition. Please join me!