Orne Archives

This is the home site for the Orne Archives, an iOS app for logging the Arkham Horror Card Game. The app is designed to help you with campaign and scenario setup as well as to provide a campaign log. The app is designed to allow users to customize their usage and almost all aspects of the campaign guide can be customized by writing templates. At the end of your campaign, you can export the campaign log as an html file which can be posted. Everything required to reproduce the in-app formatting is available so your posted logs will retain their formatting. On the other hand, all of the formatting is standard html/css styling and so you can adjust this to match your preferences. Samples of such postings can be found on the pages where I test the template files (see the Templates section).

Material available at this site:

• App Help: provides some help for users of the app. Many of the screens can be discovered using the “Tutorial Campaign” provided in the app. The help here focuses on aspects of the app that won’ be visited by that tutorial.
• Templates: provides the most current versions of templates that I am currently using so you can see how I am using the app. You can also use these as starting points for writing your own templates if they do not match your preferences (or if you wish to have them in a different language). Links to resources in writing your own templates are also in this section. You can also find links to the output of the templates to verify that they are not missing material from the Campaign Guide. However, be aware that these tests will seriously spoil the campaigns (as they explicitly list every branch of the campaign and the resulting outcomes).
• News: provides some insight into what I am working on. If you have a feature that you would like developed, please email me and I will look into whether it can be done.

I also try to track my current progress in updating the app here in the News section.

App Help

Settings

My guess is that the Settings () page is probably the most obtuse part of the Orne Archives app (but once it is actually released, maybe it will turn out that I am wrong). There are three things you can do on the Settings () page:

• You can decide which versions of the template files you wish to keep in the Orne Archives. If you have more than one version for a particular campaign, scenario, or investigator, you will be prompted to select which one you wish to use each time you select that campaign, scenario, or investigator. Having exactly one template for each campaign, scenario, and investigator will save you a step when choosing that template.
• You can decide whether to display or hide the Narrative Text from the Campaign Guide. Toggling this does not change what information is being retained, only what is being made visible (using cascading style sheets). As a result, you can turn off the narrative text while playing the campaign (if you know the campaign well enough that you skip it) and then toggle it back on when posting the final log on a website (so the campaign log reads more like a narrative).
• You can decide to use the Alternative Style Sheet which will display the internal log that the Orne Archives creates as it processes the template file. This will be most useful for Template writers as they try to debug their template files, but you may want to toggle this to see where material is being omitted. As with the narrative material, this toggle simply affects what is being made visible (again, through the use of cascading style sheets).

Artwork

I am not much of an artist, so you may notice that the copyrighted icons are stick figure versions of the real thing. When you post the final logs to the Internet, you can fill the img folder with nicer versions of the icons to provide you with nicer output (and you can rewrite the stylesheets as well). It is also possible to open png files with the Orne Archives and they will be placed in the images folder of the app (which will make the in-app icons nicer). The encounter set icons should be roughly 55 pixels by 55 pixels and the chaos tokens should be roughly 70 pixels by 70 pixels. If I receive significant feedback from users who want an easier method of loading batches of icons, I will work on making the process more seamless (I have asked Fantasy Flight for permission load scanned versions of the icons into the app, but have not heard back).

Languages

The Orne Archives app is largely localized which means that if you are interested in helping provide translations of the app text into other languages, please contact me and we can work out what needs to be done. As for the templates, they are text files and so you should be able to write them in any language with a supported character set. If you discover that there are problems with translating the templates (for example, characters being malformed or issues with right-to-left languages), let me know and we can try to solve the problem.

Feedback and Continued Development

If you find the app useful or wish it implemented a particular feature, please send me an email at orne@monsterworks.com or a private message on Board Game Geek (where my username is eeyogre). Getting feedback is a strong motivator for me to put effort into further development of the app and is the only reason I would have to implement features that I personally do not use (for example, I like pulling tokens from a bag enough that I do not use the Chaos Bag feature of the app myself, but one beta-tester suggested it).

At some point, I may add a “buy me a beer” feature that will allow you to shower me with money, but all of the Orne Archives’ functionality will continue to be free to access in the future and I have no plans to implement in-app purchases that affect the Orne Archives’ functionality or produce a premium version at a different price point.

Templates

Templates are text files that users can edit to provide the level of detail they wish to have during their campaign. If you just want to add more templates to your app, you can do this below. If you are interested in writing a template, please read the Template Guide. If you have written a template and want to post it here, please contact me.

The Orne Archives use template files for Campaigns, Scenarios, and Investigators. These will most often be released as Tomes which contain a group of associated templates in a single file. Loading templates will never overwrite any files currently stored in the app, they will simply add more versions. If you have more than one version for a particular campaign, scenario, or investigator, you will be prompted to select which one you wish to use each time you select that campaign, scenario, or investigator. You can go to the Settings () page in the app and Manage which versions you wish to retain in the Orne Archives.

Templates are only read once (when they are selected). This has two consequences (one good and one bad). The good consequence is that you will not break any of your existing campaign logs by deleting a template file. The bad consequence is that existing campaign logs cannot take advantages of any corrections included in a newer template.

Below are the templates I wrote for my personal use. Note that both the web version link and the orne version link redirect to the same file, the only difference is the orne version has a custom scheme that iOS will redirect to the Orne Archives to make loading that template easier.

• If you open the web version link, you will get a text file that you can read and edit.
• If you open the orne version link on a device with the Orne Archives installed, you will be prompted to open the template in the Orne Archives. Opening it in the app will install the template (without deleting any existing templates).
• If you open the test link, you will be taken to a page where you can examine the branches that were encoded into the template and see the output that results from taking different branches. These contain fairly serious spoilers for the campaigns.

You can also email yourself templates as attachments. If you open the email on an iOS device with Orne Archives installed, Mail should give you the option to open the attachment in the Orne Archives. Opening the template will install it (again, without deleting any existing templates).

I am endeavoring to assemble the following templates for each campaign, but for now, I am focusing on the Full templates.

• Minimal: just contains the log entries for the campaign. You will still need the Campaign Guide for additional rules, narrative, and setup.
• Full: contains the narrative, setup, and log entries for the campaign. You can toggle the visibility of the narrative text on the Settings () page in the app if you want a more condensed version. You will still need the Campaign Guide for additional rules.
• Expanded: contains the narrative, setup, and log entries for the campaign, as well as things like which cards you should retain from a given scenario for use in future scenarios in the campaign so you won’t need to dig an individual card out of a scenario later in the campaign. Obviously, this will result in spoiling the return of that card later in the campaign. As with the Full version, you can toggle the visibility of the narrative text on the Settings () page in the app if you want a more condensed version.

Below are the personal tome files that I use in my copy of the Orne Archives. If you wish to see the results of various paths through the campaign, you can follow the tests link.

Tutorial	web	orne
Against The Wendigo	web	orne	tests
Winter Winds	web	orne	tests
The Night of the Zealot (& Return)	web	orne	tests
The Dunwich Legacy	web	orne	tests

News

Right now, all my efforts are going to cleaning up the app so that it can be released through the App Store. I need to make sure I remove any copyrighted material, that the website is accurate, and to make sure the campaign tests are accurate. Hoping for a release by the end of July. Once I get done with that, my future plans are:

• Continue to add tested templates. In particular, I hope to develop templates for all of the Fantasy Flight campaigns and stand alone scenarios as well as more of the fan-made material at Arkham Central.
• Providing more guidance on writing templates on the Template Guide page.
• Adding iCloud integration to make it easier to transfer logs from one iOS device to another (currently this requires using Mail).
• Adding better file support (to make it easier to load png/css/font files).