Magic Chronicle

Magic Chronicle Magic Chronicle is a dedicated solo roleplaying and journaling app for Windows, Mac, and Linux that works with any solo RPG system and which, by virtue of having everything you need to play a TTRPG solo, is also a powerful worldbuilding tool, electronic GM screen, and system-agnostic character sheet builder. Using Magic Chronicle's customizable panel layout, you can rearrange its many powerful tools to put whatever specific tools you need within arms reach at all times. Solo Roleplaying Note: Monster illustrations are not included with Magic Chronicle. You will have to add images from your own collection of cool fantasy illustrations. As a solo roleplaying journal, you'll most likely want to keep the Chronicle panel as the main panel of your chronicle, a word processor in which you can write down your exploits while keeping other helpful panels like the dice roller, skills panel, and HP panel handy. These panels share data from your built-in, fully customizable character sheet, but are much smaller and more compact than the full thing, allowing you to instantly send a skill roll, attack roll, saving throw, or whatever your system's got to the built-in dice roller and edit HP based on the results without having to tab back and forth between your chronicle and a full character sheet. A built-in oracle system allows you to create "oracle decks," drawing results from them as though they were cards. If you then use the reshuffle option, the most recently drawn card will be shuffled back into the deck, which makes the deck work exactly like a dice table. This is also the default behavior if you don't pick any option, so oracle decks will automatically work like rollable oracle tables. If you like, however, you can instead decrease the result, removing one of its copies from the deck. For example, say you have a d100 style oracle where results 6-10 are a goblin attack. That's a weight of 5 corresponding to a goblin attack, and decreasing that result will remove one of those results, dropping the weight down to 4 and making that result less likely going forward. You can also take the discard option, reducing the weight of that result all the way to 0, ensuring it won't be drawn again until you reset the deck. This allows you to avoid repetition, especially on smaller oracles with only 10-20 results on them. You can also add in sub-decks, to allow for oracles whose results point you to other oracles. Maybe your goblin forest encounter deck has sub-decks for goblin encounters and for forest encounters. You can then use the decrease and discard options to change the weight of all forest encounters when you draw them in this specific goblin forest. The sub-deck's weight is separate from the weight of individual options in the sub-deck, so you can have a forest encounter deck with a hundred options and still only shuffle five of those options into a specific forest's encounter deck. This gives you a level of control over repetition and encounters that's just not possible with rollable tables, and not practical with physical cards because of the sheer number of different cards required. GM Screen In order to facilitate solo roleplayers keeping track of all the NPCs, locations, and world lore they might need, Magic Chronicle had to have the features of a fully fleshed out electronic GM screen, which means it can also just be used as that directly. You can drop in a rules .pdf into a rulebook panel, add arbitrary images to image viewer panels, and copy/paste arbitrary text into lore articles in lore panels. This means you can have a complete .pdf copy of your system of choice in one tab, scans of helpful diagrams in corner panels where they're always visible, and a searchable database of frequently used rules copied into lore articles - usable for any kind of broad GM lore, not just world lore specifically. If the very first thing you type into the search panel to find a relevant rules article doesn't come up, add that thing as a tag, and next time you'll find it instantly. If the rule you need isn't in there and you have to dig it up out of the rule book, copy/paste it into the lore database and you'll be able to search it up in the future. The lore database can be imported and exported separately from the rest of your project and a lore database import adds to your existing project without overwriting anything unless it's an exact match on the title, type, and system. This means that, although I can't give you the rules for existing solo systems directly, someone from that community can export a lore database containing those rules and pass them around. The hopefully obvious caveat to that is that you will have to figure out to what extent any specific solo system's creators are okay with whatever extent of rules sharing you put into a specific lore database. Probably they don't mind if you drop in a half-dozen or so frequently referenced and easily forgotten rules (hit location charts, bonuses for success thresholds, grapple rules, that kind of thing) but would prefer you not copy/paste the entire rulebook into a database of two hundred lore articles and share it around for free. Navigating this kind of thing has been part of how the internet has worked for 30 years now, Magic Chronicle is obviously not a license to ignore the established norms for this kind of thing. Worldbuilding In order to work for either solo roleplaying or as an electronic GM screen, Magic Chronicle needs to have world maps with built-in location markers and polygonal region markers with connections to lore articles that make it easy to keep track of where things are located and what information is relevant to them, an NPC library that lets you add pictures and descriptions with tags into a searchable NPC database, and the aforementioned lore database that is, as you'd expect, just as usable for world lore articles as it is for game mechanics lore articles. So basically I made Temu World Anvil on accident. Don't get the wrong idea, as a solo roleplaying app, its primary goal, Magic Chronicle is much better than World Anvil. But if you're only here as a worldbuilder, then Magic Chronicle is a nearly-as-good version of World Anvil that costs a one time payment of $30, and which is hosted entirely on your local machine, not subject to data storage restrictions or an ongoing monthly hosting fee because it's all on your hard drive. You can export a Magic Chronicle project and load the file on any device that has Magic Chronicle on it, but if you want a worldbuilding platform that will not just keep things organized and pretty for personal use but which is easily shareable and visually impressive unto itself, then you're still hostage to World Anvil's monthly fees or $650 lifetime membership cost. If all you need is a lore wiki and character library for personal reference hooked up to an editable map and calendar, though, Magic Chronicle has you covered for $30. Esoteric Panels "Esoteric panels" are expected to have a niche audience, but will probably be really appreciated by the people who want them. The core project comes with two: The calendar panel is a fully editable calendar that allows you to define hours, days, weeks, months, years, and ages, and will advance the date with automatic headers of the appropriate size for a new day, week, month, year, or age whenever you hit CTRL/CMD+SHIFT+ENTER in the Chronicle word processor, and will advance the hour whenever you hit CTRL/CMD+SHIFT+. in the Chronicle, so you can automatically advance short or long rests through a customizable calendar. Add in Forgotten Realms tendays or your own calendar based on lunar phases or constellations or whatever, and the system will auto-generate headers with appropriate dates when you take a rest. The abilities panel lets you assemble ability trees from powers pulled from your powers database. By itself, the powers database is a searcable database like the lore database that lets you quickly look up the exact rules for Blinding Smite or whatever, but you can also use powers from that database to assemble ability trees ranging from the straightforward to something sphere grid-like in scope. Honestly, I'm not sure why we don't have printable ability trees that work like this, but Magic Chronicle's digital format allows you to not only mark off which abilities you've learned, but also fit them into an ability tree far too massive to fit onto a sheet of A4. Magic Chronicle Apprentice Magic Chronicle now has a free demo version containing just the essentials: A word processor, dice roller, and system-agnostic character sheet. If you're nervous about paying for the full version all at once, try Magic Chronicle Apprentice for free, and when you need the more advanced features, you can add them in piecemeal for $5 or $10 at a time.