Covenant Excel Sheet

Hey there.
So we are a troup of new players and we found a very nice Character Creation excel sheet (that I assume a lot of you use) made by chaomancer.

Ofc, our first instinct was to search for a convenant excel sheet, but that we couldn't find.
I wounder if anyone here uses one and would like to share it :slight_smile:

We started making our own but as we are new players, I'm pretty sure we are doing a lot of bad things.

I'm not aware of one, but that doesn't mean that one is out there. I know this post redirects you away from what you asked, too.

I know many people here, including myself, use MetaCreator for managing multiple characters, and also covenants. Although, I can certainly understand not wanting to spend money for it. Covenant tracking is an accounting exercise with a large number of moving targets, it's not a terribly fun process so I'm happy to hand it over to a piece of software to make the process easier to manage.

Here's a link to the price list.

I strongly recommend Metacreator too, both for characters and covenants. Frees up lots of time to prepare stories instead of making lots of calculations...

I, on the other hand, recommend staying far away from Metacreator. It will cause you endless frustration.

But do you have a recommendation?

I ended up creating a wiki with scripts to handle a whole range of things - mostly NPC tracking.

For the covenant itself, it really depends on whether or not you intend to use every single option in the Covenants book. I'd actually recommend against it unless your group really really like accounting.

What happened in the saga I play in is our covenant was incredibly undefined until I found myself on a long-haul flight to China and bored out of my skull, so I went through and did the covenants population, income, expenses, etc. I messed it up terribly, but at least we got an idea of how many people lived in the covenant.

From there, though, we hand-wave most of the financial and loyalty-related stuff. We still have the occasional story about it, but for the most part it isn't stuff we bother with.

The things you really need to track for the covenant are:

  • the library - a straight excel spreadsheet or wiki table is more than sufficient
  • the vis sources and income - a simple excel spreadsheet is also fine here
  • stats for important grogs / covenfolk - some character sheets, or a simple spreadsheet if you're only tracking minimal data

We also use the expanded laboratory rules from the covenants book, and we handle the 'upkeep' stat by simply setting a fixed limit that the covenant can support per magus. We're wealthy, so upkeep of +2 is fine and upkeep of +3 might prompt the occasional lab-maintenance story. +4 is not allowed.

What I did do that's horribly complex is build a mostly-automated NPC tracking wiki. New characters get added to the wiki when they're introduced to the saga, and the wiki automatically updates age, abilities, arts, etc. and generates a list of notifications for the SG(s) of any NPCs that are getting worryingly old or what-have-you. Each in-game year there's a single field on a single page for 'current year' - updating this value cascades through the rest of the wiki and updates everything else.

It is really amusing sometimes - the party meet some 10-year-old kid in a nearby village who then gets forgotten about. Someone then goes 'hey, remember that kid? lets include him in the next story!' only to discover that he's grown up and probably has a 10 year old kid of his own by now.

Pen and Paper.

Or a simple word document. I use text pad and spell check in the browser. I recommend simple humble basics that put you more in touch with the game. Sure, it makes some stuff hard. But that forces you to examine it. Is this crap really worth it or is it just bookkeeping for the sake of bookkeeping? Sometimes all those little details matter and can be fun. Sometimes they're just fluff and they don't really matter to the story and maybe even get in the way.

I use WORD. Quite easy really. You just need an EXCEL spreadsheet to add up XP and you can easily calculate age and all that stuff.

We tried Metacreator and we didn't like it that much, we did preferred chaomancer excel sheet, a lot.
Main reason is it's is to change and configure if it's excel (take in mind that in our troup we are all coders/tech people :stuck_out_tongue: )

We are doing one excel sheet for covenant, and is going quite well, but we are new to the game :slight_smile:

Thanks Kid Gloves for the hints on what to track. We are still trying everything, until our head will explode :stuck_out_tongue: