In my last post, I mentioned that I’d be spending some time on building gaming tools. I achieved a bunch of things on my roadmap but in this post I want to tell you about a particular itch I had, and how I’ve built a new thing to scratch it.

I play skirmish wargames like Necromunda and Mordheim. In these games, there’s quite a bit of admin to do outside the actual playing of the game. Of course, you need to maintain your gang or band by hiring new members, buying weapons and equipment and the like, and there are brilliant sites and apps that manage those gangs like yaktribe.games and battlescribe.

In addition to the core admin of maintaining your listing, these games often have dice rolling admin to do. Income, injury, and marketplace rolls. These rolls are best done in public and with a witness as they’re pretty campaign shaping. This is where I often run into a problem. I want to spend my time at the local game store actually playing games, or at least socialising, not doing admin. When it’s getting late, I want to run for the early bus, not make those post-battle rolls.

Enter the City In Darkness Campaign Manager!

While keeping your gang roster on your site of choice, you can now make those public rolls using this campaign manager. Getting Started:

1. Sign Up with your email (no password required) at https://www.cityindarkness.com/
2. Create a Campaign and share it with your fellow participants.
3. Add your Forces (I call gangs, mobs, armies, whatever; forces).
4. Make Rolls and enjoy!

Why should you use it? It’s a tool designed to make your wargame campaigns smoother and more transparent.

• Public Rolls: Everyone sees the outcomes, ensuring transparency.
• Accountability: Only admins can delete rolls, and the system handles all rolls.
• Automated Rolls: Automatically handle pre/post-game rolls for income, recruitment, and injuries.

Actually, that last point is partially wishful thinking. By automatically, I mean the dice will be rolled automatically, but you do need to tell me what dice need to be rolled and provide the explanation of what you’re actually rolling. What I have built so far is the bare minimum and I’d love to hear suggestions on making this handle more stuff. My motivation here is to augment all these other list building tools out there, not replace them, so suggestions along those lines would be wonderful. To this end, I’ve started a discord ( https://discord.gg/rCbbHapf3B, because everyone needs another discord server to join) where you can get support and make suggestions.

So ideally, with this tool, you can save precious game day time and keep everything fair and square. Perfect for ensuring everyone’s on the same page!

No more hush-hush dice rolls or waiting around. Get right into the action! We hope this becomes a valuable asset for your gaming group. Happy campaigning!