Central Character Info

# Central Character Info (All GMs)

Vital information for each character (PCs, NPCs, GMs...) is kept in LaTeX/Lists/characters.tex --- their name, stats, badge info.... In that file you put a `\newchar\Ccharacter{data}` entry for each character. (That's the only place you ever use \newchar.) \Ccharacter is a macro (control sequence) that will "remember" the data for you; it must be unique. (Starting \C is just a convention.) The {data} is a bunch of information whose format is described in characters.tex and defined in LaTeX/Styles/custom.sty, where your Production Czar can fiddle with it (if they do, they should document it here!).

Player-relevant information for the character is then defined in LaTeX/Lists/players.tex --- player name, character gender (since that's usually set from player), player address and phone and so on. In that file you put a `\player\Ccharacter{data}` entry for each character (if you don't, their player info will all be left blank). \Ccharacter are the same macros you set up with \newchar in characters.tex. The format of {data} is described in players.tex and is also defined in LaTeX/Styles/custom.sty where the Czar can fiddle with it.

When you want to reference some of that information about a character, in a charsheet or bluesheet or ability card or whatever, you can do it through their macro. This ensures that whenever you change the information, everything that uses it updates automatically.

For each field in the data (as described in characters.tex and players.tex), \Ccharacter{field} gets it. That is,

    \Ccorpse{first} becomes "Ima"
    \Ccorpse{last} becomes "Corpse"
    \Ccorpse{middle} becomes "" (blank)
    \Ccorpse{number} becomes 000001

While the Template doesn't force you to use these, if you do they'll keep your character sheets, other sheets, memory packets, etc, all in sync with each other automatically. If your game has multiple runs this is especially useful.

Further, you can say things like \Ccorpse{first last} to get "Ima Corpse." If you want to be really wacky, you could do
`\Cbond{I'm last. {\em first} last, that is.}`
to get (presumably) "I'm Bond. {\em James} Bond, that is." (Be careful not to do that if you have a "that" info field.)

Some combinations like that occur a lot --- for instance, you get the full character name with `\Cjones{prefix first middle last suffix}`. That's a bit of a pain to type, so LaTeX/Styles/custom.sty also defines "combo" fields, which your Czar can modify and add to (and document it here!). The ones the Template defines by default are

    	"char" for "prefix first middle last suffix"
    	"map" for "char (player)"

and "formal" and "informal," which are special. "formal" turns into the last name, unless there isn't one, in which case it's the first name; "informal" is the other way around. Why use these? Because that way if you say \Cbob{formal} but \Cbob doesn't have a last name, you'll get "Bob," whereas \Cbob{last} would be blank and probably look funny. So if you're using the first or last name without the other, you usually want to use "informal" or "formal" instead of "first" or "last." For instance, someone's titled name is probably \Cjones{prefix formal} (Dr. Jones, Dr. Bob...).

Since the full character name is the most commonly used thing, \Cjones{ } by itself is the same as \Cjones{char}, which is the same as \Cjones{prefix first middle last suffix}, i.e. the character's full name.

Most sheets, and many other .tex files, want to have a \name{ } entry. For a character sheet, it should be given the character macro --- Jones' sheet says \name{\Cjones}, Ima Corpse's sheet says \name{\Ccorpse}. A bluesheet or greensheet might say \name{MIT Assassins' Guild} or might also use a macro, \name{\Bassassins}, or whatever. Whatever is given as the \name is available thereafter as \me. That is, after saying \name{\Ccorpse},

      \me{ } becomes \Ccorpse{ } becomes Ima Corpse
      \me{map} becomes \Ccorpse{map} becomes Ima Corpse (NPC)

If you haven't set \name anywhere, \me{anything} becomes "Unowned." For instance, most cards put \me{ } in the upper left corner, so you know which character they're for. Don't put spaces around the \name argument; they'll pass along to \me and end up making spurious spaces.

[Note for Production Czar only: after setting \me, \name calls \doname if you have such a macro defined in your style; for instance, sheets.sty has \doname make the pretty header at the top of the sheet, using \me to find the name.]

There's a special kind of "combo" field to do pronouns. One of the fields in the \player data is gender: M, F, or N for male, female, or neuter. (Any other character is taken as 'ambiguous'; it's also ambiguous if you didn't specify a gender at all.) The pronoun combos use this to see what to expand into: \Cjones{they} is "he" if Jones is male, "she" if female, "it" neuter, and "he/she" for ambiguous; \Cjones{They} is He or She or It or He/She. You can gender-swap by prefixing an @: \Cjones{@they} is "she" if Jones is male, "he" if female, "it" neuter, and "she/he" for ambiguous. As always, your Production Czar can add more.

You might well not want to use these even if you're always using the rest of the stuff in this file; this is aimed mostly at short games with multiple runs, which often have characters change genders between runs --- it's a pain to change all the pronouns in all the sheets by hand.

    pronoun		male		female		neuter
    -----		----		------		------
    they		he		she		it
    them		him		her		it
    their		his		her		its
    theirs		his		hers		its
    theirself	himself		herself		itself
    spouse		husband		wife		mate
    child		son		daughter	offspring
    sibling		brother		sister          sibling
    kid		boy		girl		kid
    parent		father		mother		parent
    parentsib       uncle           aunt            parentsibling
    sibchild        nephew          niece           siblingchild
    monarch		king		queen		monarch
    heir		prince		princess	heir
    person		man		woman		person
    people		men		women		people
    sex		male		female		neuter
    (@pronoun)	(female form)	(male form)	(neuter form)

For instance,
`\Cwilma{map}: \Cwilma{they's} \Cfred{first's} \Cwilma{spouse}.`
evaluates to "Wilma P. Flintstone (Laura Baldwin): she's Fred's wife."
since \Cwilma is marked as {F; Laura Baldwin} in Lists/players.tex. If you suddenly recast Jamie Morris as Wilma and decide to make the Flintstones gay rather than cross-cast, you just make that {M; Jamie Morris} and the character name {William, Flintstone, P.} and the line turns itself into
"William P. Flintstone (Jamie Morris): he's Fred's husband."
On the other hand, `\Cjones{their @spouse}` evaluates to "his wife" since \Cjones is marked as {M; Jeremy Brown}; this is a good thing to write if we don't have a character for Jones' spouse, and would like to assume a heterosexual marriage. If we recast to {F; somebody} it will turn itself into "her husband".

If you want to put something gender-specific in a sheet, but it's not general enough to be worth putting in custom.sty, you can use \newpronoun to make a local new pronoun:
`\newpronoun{male use}{female use}{neuter use}{callit}{Callit}`
where 'callit' and 'Callit' must be letters-only; then you can use those as pronouns as above. E.g.
`\newpronoun{real stud}{hot babe}{sexy person}{astud}{Astud}`
then "\Cjones{they} is a \Cjones{astud}." (Watch out for loops; making the "callit" be "stud" would mean \Cjones{stud} for male \Cjones becomes \Cjones{real stud} becomes \Cjones{real stud stud} becomes....)