Tuesday, December 14, 2021

Using Crusade Manager to track my Army

For as long as I have been collecting my miniatures I have been writing my own data sheets and creating army lists, even though it took decades to actually play a game!

As cool as it is to have some modern tools to generate army lists, it seems that none of the tools do a good job of tracking custom information about your miniatures, such as photos, or their battle history, etc.  The bad news is that some community generated tools might be forced out while 'official' tools have even less functionality!  (I hope this trend is reversed.)

So, years ago I had the foresight to capture as much information as I could about each game I played so that some day I could come back and compile it into a tool, if it were to ever come about.

Some day is today!



(Now Faustus has a cool datasheet, just like the 90s!)


It isn't a perfect solution, but a tool that is used for Crusade Narrative style games might have enough of the features.  I discovered Crusade Manager and it allows you to enter custom names, descriptions, and even portraits of your units/characters.  Additionally, while it was designed for Crusade games, its a bit of fun to use the built in experience points and rank trackers to 'estimate' what my characters overall experience would be (as if every game is part of my own 'personal' crusade).  Obviously I can't apply any crusade type bonuses to the battle-forged matched play type games or anything, but it's just fun to add my own narration to any random game I play in the future.

Maybe someday a better tool will come along for this, but for now this seems really great. The tool is free, though you do have to plug in data from your own codices (so that they don't get in trouble), but it seems ok.  I'm plugging them just so that maybe others reading this might benefit or tell me if they have better ideas.  Maybe the creators will add more features if more people use it this way?  I dunno, but its fun.

By the way, I had already created the "Battle of Sigmatus" personal campaign for myself (which I won! Sigmatus was Saved!) but maybe some day I'll play an actual real crusade.  I could even imagine playing a single narrative style game set in my 'personal crusade' and just allow the other player to pick some matching bonuses to 'catch up'.  The possibilities are endless, and the company under Leo Faustus of the Ultramarines is Legendary.

Theodesius is close to rank up!


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