Dev Blog: September 7th
The Free GM Update! Run any System on it!
The biggest change we have made to how the platform works: the Game Master tools are now free. Alongside that, a pile of fixes you found for us, and two of them will change numbers on your character sheet.
Running games is now free
The GM Notebook used to sit behind the GM Suite subscription. It does not any more. There is a new free plan called GM Starter, and it includes the whole toolset: the Notebook, world building, adventure and encounter builders, battle maps with fog of war and dynamic lighting, generators, music and ambience, handouts, session notes and the tabletop itself.
You turn it on by clicking GM Notebook in the menu. It asks once, you say yes, and you are in. No card, no trial, no countdown.
Free, forever
- The whole GM toolset
- One campaign at a time
- 250 MB for maps, art and audio
- Eight ready-made Einsol creatures
- You call the rolls yourself
$10 a month
- Unlimited campaigns
- 5 GB of storage
- The NPC Forge and the full creature library
- Co-GM and player sharing
- The table resolves attacks and damage for you
Your players never pay, on either plan for levels 0-5. That has not changed and it is not going to.
Bring your own rules
You can now open a table for any game, not just Einsol’s Razor. D&D, Blades in the Dark, Call of Cthulhu, Pathfinder, or the one you are writing yourself.
You get the map, dynamic lighting, line of sight and fog of war. Tokens with bars you name yourself, whether your game calls them Hit Points, Stress, Clocks or Harm. Dice, chat, turn order, handouts, music and scenes. Nothing resolves behind you: you call every outcome, exactly as you already do.
And on those tables, your players do not need accounts at all. You send them a link and they are at the table.
Worth knowing
Creatures belong to one game or the other. An Einsol creature carries numbers the app does arithmetic with, so it only works at an Einsol table. A creature you write for another system is your own stat block, in your own words, and works at any table that is not running Einsol. You pick which when you make one, and the app now asks instead of guessing.
Campaigns are optional now
This is the change most likely to surprise you if you have been using the Notebook a while. Adventures used to live inside campaigns. They do not any more.
There is one Adventures list with everything in it, and a campaign is a label you attach to the ones that belong to a longer arc. Nothing is hidden inside a campaign, and nothing needs one. Write a one-shot, run it tonight, never make a campaign at all.
What a campaign still does: it decides which rules its adventures run, it is what you invite a co-GM to, and it links to the Syndicates playing it.
Getting to the table took too many steps
Several things stood between you and a live map. They are gone.
You can open a table with nothing
No Syndicate, no campaign, no adventure, no prep. There is a Table page in the sidebar that opens a blank map, and “just me for now” is a real answer rather than a fallback. Opening a table from an adventure or an encounter used to demand a Syndicate first; that was left over from an older design and it is fixed.
Drag an image straight onto the map
Drop any picture from your computer onto the map and it becomes a token, right where you dropped it, named after the file. On an empty scene it asks first whether that is the map or a token. No creature record, no stat block, no setup. This has quietly worked for a while and was written down almost nowhere, which is our fault.
Quick NPC can put someone on the map
The Quick NPC tool rolls a stranger for you: name, job, demeanour, what they want, and a reaction roll. It could only talk about them or file them away. Now there is a Place on map button, so you click where they are standing and they are there. Saving them to your library is still a separate button, for the ones the table takes a liking to.
Sharing with other GMs
Co-GM sharing used to work on campaigns only. You can now share an adventure or a folder, and everything inside comes with it, including missions and cutscenes, which were being left behind. Connecting a Syndicate is done from the Notebook now instead of three different places.
Two rules fixes that change your numbers
Both of these make numbers go down, and both were wrong before. If a character suddenly hits less often or a bonus looks smaller, this is why, and the new number is the correct one.
Attack Rolls were using your Defense total
An Attack Roll should use your Reflex Modifier, which is Agility plus Cognition. It was using your Reflex Defense Roll total instead, which is that plus armour, Dodge, Parry, chips, gear, spell buffs and every feat that grants “+N to Reflex Defense Rolls”.
So it was never about a handful of feats. Wearing armour was raising your attack bonus. Taking the Dodge Action was raising your attack bonus. Every attack surface in the app read the wrong number.
Found by a tester
This one is entirely yours. The report was “when these feats give bonus to Reflex Defense Roll it’s giving a Bonus to attack rolls and it shouldn’t”, confirmed across five subclasses before anyone opened the code. We had been hunting a completely different thing that turned out not to exist. Thank you.
Some feat bonuses were counted twice
Reported from a table: a Warmonger’s Fight Smarter was rolling at +5 where it should have been +3. It was not a Warmonger problem. Thirty-five feats across thirteen subclasses were carrying a doubled bonus, because two different parts of the app were each adding the same pool pick.
In the same pass: Adept dice were doubling once a dice upgrade made a Subclass Die more than one physical die, and a persistent zone was rolling its contest when you placed it instead of once per Round, which affected seven fields across four subclasses.
Please check your sheets
If you have a character built on any of these, look at the affected numbers before your next session so nothing surprises you mid-fight. If a number still looks wrong after this, tell us, because now is exactly the moment to catch the next one.
Smaller things you might notice
- Tools that build Einsol content are tagged ER in the sidebar rather than hidden, so you can see what the platform does even when you are running something else. Opening one now explains itself instead of bouncing you to the home page.
- An adventure records which rules it runs when you create it, and that choice is permanent. To tell the same story under different rules, duplicate it and choose again on the copy.
- Cancelling a subscription used to tell you it renews on the date it actually ends. Now it says Ending, with the right date, and explains that you keep everything you have made.
- The guided tours were teaching things that stopped being true, including combat running on “initiative” rather than Momentum, and campaigns described as containers. Audited and rewritten.
- The Creature Repository and the generators now say which game their contents are for, so you find out before you spend time on something, rather than at the table.
What we know is still rough
- The creature library is thin. GM Starter includes eight ready-made creatures and we have not finished choosing them, so the Repository may look emptier than it should. In the meantime, dragging an image onto the map works with no library at all.
- Two things on the GM Suite list are marked Coming with launch rather than quietly hidden: sharing your books with your table, and early access to new releases. They are not built yet and we would rather say so.
- Importing adventures and encounters is still marked coming soon, and it still is.
What we most want from you: try running a table with no prep at all, and try one for a game that is not ours. Those two paths are the newest and the least walked, and you will find things we cannot. Keep the reports coming exactly as you have been. The two biggest fixes in this update came from tables, not from us.