Charred Black

The unofficial, online, Burning Wheel Gold (+Codex) character burner. Adapted from Charred.

Project Structure

Dockerfile and Dockerfile.dev - Container definition files. The dev container has automated reloading if you mount the container's filesystem to the host machine. If you are unfamiliar with Docker, this app uses Sinatra and you can probably get by with a bundle install and ruby ./src/app.rb.
src/data - Binaries and data files for lifepaths live here, see dark_elf and wizard directory for well-defined examples
src/lib - Ruby scripts for caching, PDF generation, and data loading
src/public - Javascript and CSS
src/views - HTML templates
src/app.rb - The webapp, uses Sinatra

Beliefs

I welcome community contributions, and you are welcome to fork this source code if you want to go your own way. As the maintainer, here's what you can expect from me when I judge contributions.

Do One Thing Well

Charred Black is a character creation utility. You are welcome to use the data, source code, or character files in the creation of other gaming tools, but let's keep this tool focused on one thing and do it really well.

Stick To Published Material

In order to keep the scope of my maintainership finite, I'm not planning to accept community-made lifepaths et al. for inclusion in this codebase. Each additional data set increases Charred Black's startup time and memory requirements. The design of your lifepath requirements and emotional attributes may not be supported by the editor, or may be convoluted to implement. Most importantly, deciding to include any community-made content makes me an arbiter of quality, and I'd prefer not to have the Enmity Clause invoked because I rejected someone's homebrew.

However, I am working on a solution for uploading lifepaths et. al which would be stored locally in your browser and not permanently on a server. This way, you can create data files to use with this tool and share them with your friends. If someone else wants to keep a repository or forum thread of data files known to work with Charred Black, I am happy to link to it in this documentation and from the website itself. I don't want to discourage contributions, I just want do one thing well.

Keep It Mostly Stateless

Charred Black uses an in-memory cache to allow users to upload JSON and then download .char and .pdf files. I don't know how the original Charred handled this, but the tradeoffs of this approach are:

Works as expected without an update to the frontend
PDF generation happens entirely in one process, limiting the amount of futzing you have to do with distributed systems
Because the cache is in memory, you can't scale processes horizontally

The cache has a limited number of keys, and only the first 16kb of data are used, with the aim of making this this app useless for nefarious purposes. The average size of a 4-lifepath character is around 4kb, so this should be more than enough. If you're trying to do something weird and your character file is bigger than this, consider using a pencil and paper.

More guidelines:

Only JSON should be stored in the cache.
Cached items should be invalidated upon access (by using the delete method to get the data) to restrict the usefulness of this app to bad actors.
Only .pdf and .char file formats should be returned as responses when getting data out of the cache. I'll consider other formats on a case-by-case basis: for example, I'd be open to a format which could be used with Roll20.

Contribution Best Practices

Capital Case

No matter what's in the book, always use Capital Case for skills, traits, lifepaths and settings.

Path Of Spite Subsetting
Never A Moment Of Peace
Ages Of The Etharch
Reeks Of Alcohol

Hyphens

The word after the hyphen is not capitalized.

Rabble-rouser
Burden Of The Crown-wise

Lifepath Example

Some notes:

The best way to create new lifepaths is by following the same advice that Burning Wheel gives you: look at something similar that already exists and adapt it.
In the stat block below, you'd get both a mental and physical stat point for taking this lifpath. If you want either/or, use [1, "pm"].

{
  "Example Setting": {
    "Example Lifepath": {
      "time": 1,
      "res": 1,
      "stat": [
        [
          1,
          "m"
        ],
        [
          1,
          "p"
        ]
      ],
      "skills": [
        [
          3,
          "JSON-wise"
        ],
        [
          1,
          "General"
        ]
      ],
      "traits": [
        1,
        "Plucky"
      ],
      "requires": "",
      "requires_expr": [
      ],
      "leads": [
        "Peasant",
        "Villager",
        "City",
        "Court",
        "Servitude",
        "Outcast",
        "Soldier",
        "Seafaring",
        "Religious"
      ],
      "key_leads": [
        "Peasant Setting",
        "Villager Setting",
        "City Dweller Setting",
        "Noble Court Subsetting",
        "Servitude And Captive Setting",
        "Outcast Subsetting",
        "Professional Soldier Subsetting",
        "Seafaring Setting",
        "Religious Subsetting"
      ]
    }
  }
}

modality/charred-black