Index of /harp

This directory will always contain my latest version of the updated HARP Character sheet spreadsheet for Libre Office: 00-HARPCS-latest.ots

NOTE: This spreadsheet is for HARP 2004. I don't have the 2013 books, so haven't updated it for them. It's probably about 95+% compatible with the new HARP, but there are some differences - e.g. some of the talents are different and/or have different costs, like Eloquence. It probably wouldn't take more than a day or so to update it for HARP 2013

It's mostly standard Rules-As-Written HARP 2004 but with a few "quirks" from my own house rules. DPs default to 50 + 2/level, but that's easy to change. Also, I have a homebrew Create Focus spell to create and upgrade Focus Items, so having a focus is not just a flat +5, they can be scaled up to +25)...my version of Magestaff also has options for focus bonus too. There's a focus field on the Stats page for that, just under the PP and Spell adder fields

The current version is known to work with Libre Office 5 and 6, and probably works with earlier versions too.

The spreadsheet was originally by Johnathan Dale for Microsoft Excel. It was converted to Open Office by Loïc Joly. Allen Maher then did a lot of work on it adding races, skills, spells and talents etc from Cyradon, Harper's Bazaar, Codex and more.

The spreadsheet wasn't updated for many years after that, AFAICT. The last version of Open Office it was known to work with was 2.4 or thereabouts. It certainly didn't work with Libre Office 5 when I tried it.

I converted it to Libre Office 5 in April 2017 when I started a new HARP game. I fixed a lot of bugs, and have updated and improved it since. See the (hidden by default) Revision Notes sheet in the spreadsheet for details of my updates since 2017-12-19 (unfortunately, I didn't bother keeping a changelog before then).

I've still got quite a few plans for more improvements to make -- one of the most important changes being re-implementing the way that cultural and professional free ranks are handled. The current method works but is a huge amount of work to add a new profession or culture. Unfortunately, fixing this is also going to be a huge amount of work, so I keep putting it off :-(

Overall, I'll be making the spreadsheet less dependant on stuff in spreadsheet cells, replacing cell formulae etc with Basic macros wherever it makes sense to do so.

I probably should just write a new character generator program in Python or something...but then I'd have to do a lot of fiddly GUI-related work, which bores me to tears. The spreadsheet allows me to avoid that, even if it is less than ideal for this task.

The file "HARPCharGenDoc.pdf" is the documentation for Allen Maher's version of the spreadsheet as at 2008. I haven't updated that...I probably should do that one day, but the documentation is about 99% accurate as it is. Most of my changes have been "behind-the-scenes".

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This directory will contain other HARP related stuff from time to time. I have a lot of homebrew stuff, and notes, and perl and other scripts I've written to do HARP-related stuff.

I've also got a greatly expanded and modified Damage Dice system, inspired by the one in Harper's Bazaar Annual 2005, but written from scratch by myself.

I mostly wrote it because it's much easier to write a program to do simple calculations than it is to type up all the crit tables...also there are copyright issues with distributing computerised copies of the HARP tables that don't exist for mathematical calculations. I've written this up in a nicely formatted LaTeX document, and also wrote a perl script to implement it. No GUI, command-line only, but that's what I prefer. I'll post those here one day too.