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A GM Tool I Need

My Wednesday Drednaught game has arrived in a large city, Athkatla, the City of Coin, a city of politics and intrigue.  In such scenarios, as well as many others, the depth of the worlds is reflected in the numerous NPCs and their relationships, organizations, and goals.  Capturing, organizing, and defining a large number of related NPCs can be a real challenge, Unfortunately the tool I need for this job does not exist.

What I need is a social network tool that allows me to manually add nodes, define their relationships to other nodes, and allows me to capture pertinent information and their image as part of their node.  The whole interface needs to allow me to change focus of the central node for when they pop up in game.  As an added feature, it would allow me to display a full size version of their portrait on a second screen.  Displaying NPC stats in a secondary screen would also be a nice feature.  An XML template for defining stats would provide game-to-game flexibility.  Compatability with data from other tools, like PCGen, HerolLab, and Chummer would also be very handy.

More importantly, this application should be useful on multiple platforms.  Java is an obvious choice for multi-platform graphical interface.  This could be run on Chromebooks, Macs, Linux, and Windows.

Will I build such a tool?  I don't know.  I have some time now, and maybe if I find a similar tool I can modify, I might give it a try.  Too bad it doesn't already exist.


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