This page is for tools that I've built for gurps, role playing games in general, fiddling with GCS files and drawing maps.

This is a simple Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file that will assist you in building a dungeon map in Inkscape or any other SVG-compatible drawing program. The result will be a simple black and white file similar to maps in many RPG books. The only colored thing in the file is the array of grid lines in the Graph layer (see below). These are blue with a slight hint of purple and are transparently blended over the top of everything else.

• Base: The bottom layer is a black square, so anything you haven't filled in is black. Off to the left is a gray square that serves as the base for the tool box (see below).
• Dungeon: This layer has three sub-layers for different components of the map. From bottom to top, these are Corridors/Rooms, Objects, and Doors/Stairs/Walls. These are intended to contain the items they're named for. In addition, these layers also contain the same components from the tool box (see below).
• Graph: This layer is a grid of lines that coincide with a grid I set up in Inkscape to help with snapping objects in place. I wanted the files to look like they were drawn on graph paper.
• Hex Grid: This layer is a hex grid that's very similar to Graph layer. Since hexes are useful in GURPS, but can be less handy when drawing maps, it starts out hidden. If you want a hex grid for the final map, go ahead and hide the Graph layer and un-hide this one.
• Text: The top layer is for text that shouldn't have grid lines over it.

Off to the left side of the drawing area, this file contains a collection of ready-made parts you can copy and paste into the map. There are three sections, Doors, Stairs and Objects. Everything in the tool box has some invisible white space around it, so the parts can be easily manipulated into the grid.

Doors contains various kinds of doors, ranging from regular doors to double doors to trap doors.

Stairs contains two sizes of stairs facing in all directions.

Objects contains an assortment of items you can drop on the map, like columns, pit traps and mine car rails.

These are very simple. You just draw white shapes with a 1 pixel-wide white stroke. If you want to keep things simple, just draw rectangles aligned to the grid.

You can draw these as 2 pixel wide black lines with square caps, not butt caps. Butt caps will be too short in most cases.

I've built a GCS export template to produce DokuWiki markup based on the syntax of the wrap and plaintext plugins, here. The customized version for Islands of War is here.

That is downloaded and processed on the command line with this bash script:

build-gcs-export-template.sh

#!/bin/bash
DOKU_BASE_URL='http://localhost/islandsofwar'
wget -q -O - http://localhost/islandsofwar/wiki/tools/gcs/character_sheet_template?do=export_raw |sed 's/ /&nbsp;/g' |sed -e 's/</&lt;/g' -e 's/>/&gt;/g' |sed 's/$/ <br>/'

The processed version is used to export a GCS character sheet as html and viewed in your browser. Finally, you can copy-and-paste what is displayed in the browser into DokuWiki as page source.

I wish there were an easier process for doing this, but GCS' export method leaves much to be desired in the way of configurability. It's designed to produce HTML only. It isn't easy to shoehorn it into doing something else.

For your convenience, here's the processed version of the template.

There are a few easily added snippets for pages listed here. Anything linked from that page will show up in the list available through the snippets editor button.

• - This is the 800×800 template file.
• - This is the 800×800 graph paper-like file I built the template from.