Introduction (All GMs)

This is the Assassin Game Template v1-6-0 (version info here). In order for a team to use this package successfully, you should declare one person to be Production Czar, and put them in charge of understanding this documentation in depth. The html docs will note if they're Czar-specific; most are for all GMs.

Warranty: the Template is free software; you didn't pay us anything, and neither did anyone else. As such, it comes with this firm guarantee: If it breaks, you get to keep both pieces.

Getting started

• Czar: you must first set up the Template
• GMs: you must each edit your dotfiles to use the Template

Other things you definitely want to know

• Customizing the Template for your game: There is documentation specifically aimed at the Czar including general information, basic setup, and potential customizations. The Czar needs to look there now.
• The mechanics of writing character sheets (read that one first) and everything else using the Template. You should also read some notes on using latex successfully.
• Typesetting and printing misc things; practice a bit before production, especially since you want to preview things well in advance for sanity-checking.
• Producing character packets automagically; again, practice this before actual production time.

Note that Template is aimed at Athena. If you're elsewhere, you'll be able to use most of it (you may have to download some latex packages from CTAN), but you probably can't get all the benefits of the perl scripts without hacking on them.

Recent Issues (external docs)

The Template is self-documenting as much as possible. When issues are discovered with a release that's gone out, they rather have to be documented externally, so there's an http://web.mit.edu/jemorris/Template/issues.html page for this kind of thing.

Issues covered may be actual Template bugs or troubles with Athena and the tools (like latex) the Template relies on. Some long-standing matters, like cluster printers disobeying tray selections, may be documented both there and inside the Template.

The issues page will try to supply a description of a problem's symptoms, a diagnosis, and a patch or workaround. So look there when you have a problem to see if there's already a treatment. New entries on the page will generally be announced to the template-gms list and to the GM lists for games who've told us they're using the Template.

Other things you may find useful

• table of contents of these docs
• reading these docs without a browser
• a glossary of Template macros
• Some mass-editing scripts that enable you to pull all of one extractable field out of all character sheets, analyze it, tweak it, and then stuff it back in. This is great for sanity checking, making sure the right people have the right bluesheet, etc.
• directions on how to use the postscript campus map
• automatic generation (and optionally assignment) of random numbers for item numbers, badge numbers, etc.

About the Template

Blame for the Template lies here.

Please send bug reports to template-dev@mit.edu, especially if it's something important for gamewriting in progress. Include as much information as possible --- exact Template version, what you're doing, any changes you've made to the files involved, what should happen, what goes wrong --- but not game secrets, we'd like to be able to play! We'll try to get you a fix ASAP.

General discussion of the Template takes place on template-gms@mit.edu; your Czar, at least, wants to be on this list. At your athena prompt,

 blanche template-gms -a $USER 

For faster conversations, you can subscribe to the template-gms zephyr class (again, your Czar at least, probably wants to).

 zctl add template-gms \* \* 

 zwrite -c template-gms