Down the grapevine

I am always looking for new gadgets to help me run my campaigns. Today I was looking for some and not only found a World of Darkness mass roleplay chat but I also found a neat little tool called Grapevine.

At first it unsettled me how... basic it looked. The icons of the characters look like scavenged (And OWoD) spritework. In fact I had to double check to make sure it was NWoD compatible since it had choices to have Demon and Wraith characters, hinting that the tool is pretty damn old. However when looking over other tools I noticed that none of them actually made it easy for GM's to insert their own merits into the program but supplied a static list. This sucked because some GM's like to homebrew new merits or new books will come out and may have a merit everybody in your group wants.

Grapevine beats this by requiring you to insert all of the sheet elements in yourself from both a list and a "Add custom entity" button allowing you to add specialties, merits, anything you need to the sheet. This is of course time intensive but a blessing I could not find in any other chronicle tool of the six I know of. It even has a space for intensive XP tracking, a lengthy Item library that can be pulled from, a list of rote spells for a mage game, a rumor system, and all sorts of goodies.

Its built mainly for GM's that run large games extremely often. Such as the lads that run the WoD RP chat. Importantly, I had very few crashes when poking around the program. Other chroni9cle tools tend to crash when trying to assign items and equipment. However the only time I suffered a terminal crash was accidentally trying to assign weapons when I had no characters selected.

All in all, Grapevine is a amazing tool set and its very useful if you have time to burn and you want to have a complete WoD tool library at your fingertips, able to assign rumors to play dates and create a full set of items for any use. Its such a find!