A belated update on our Hyborian Age Dust Devils Revenged hack Rpg Kingdoms in Flames. In this part, I'll discuss the technology and tools we use. 

This article is a part of the series of articles will document my online rpg campaign Kingdoms in Flames, a rpg set in the Hyborian Age as depicted by Robert E. Howard in his Conan short stories. It is a campaign, meaning that it is a series of stories, each spanning one or more play sessions. It's online, meaning that we will be playing over the 'net with tools such as Skype , TeamSpeak , OpenRpg and Vassal Engine . It uses the rules of Dust Devils rpg. The setting is the Hyborian Age from Conan stories, in particular the Kingdom(s) of Koth and nearby areas.

As listed above, we are now pretty much set on using a sizable array of applications to rpg over the net. This wasn't my first choice; I would have liked to have as few desktop applications as we could. But unfortunately, there just wasn't one application to handle it all.

What do we need? 

To select the tools to use I had to make a list of things we were gonna do in the game. From my previous experience I knew that Skype or TeamSpeak would be best fitted for communication. It's so much easier to speak than type, at least for us. And, as we had already used Skype in another game, that decision was pretty easy. That said, there are a couple of things that have me considering TeamSpeak: as I game on my laptop with a Wi-Fi connection, there are occasionally some hiccups related to the Skype's conference call feature and it's bandwidth use. I think that with TeamSpeak we could lower the bandwidth the speech uses. But, as Skype is that much more easy to install, I haven't yet forced the change upon my players.

Of the rpg-specific programs I really was not sure what we would need. Dust Devils uses playing cards and poker chips; not really OpenRpg 's forte. The character sheets are sparse with only a few values. For me it seems that OpenRpg is really good when you need a map or some other graphical representation or if you have lots of information files or links to share with the players. OpenRpg can handle both, the shared map tool is good and the node system handles the information sharing pretty good.

For poker hands, I made some tests with OpenRpg's playing cards plug-in, but that did not seem very intuitive so I gave that up. The way the plug-in uses cards is in the chat which is not the way you want if you are using a GUI in my opinion. You should be able to drag the cards and put them in different positions in your desktop. I then turned to the numerous Flash apps and javaApplets that provided playing card table kind of functionality, but did not manage to find anything quite useful.