Realm Works Campaign Manager (Lone Wolf Development)

[XSiberia]

Hey all, the same folks that brought us ArmyBuilder and HeroLab are about to release Realm Works, intended to be a product for GMs and players to manage an RPG campaign. I think it has a lot of potential for hosting CM'd VBAM campaigns, especially if the CM has a penchant for story telling. The app releases in July 2013, but they're working on a KickStarter to get cloud hosting up as well. Right now GM controls fog of war that is exposed to all player's equally. However, I asked the devs about having different exosure to different player accounts and got back an encouraging answer:

Lone Wolf Development says:
Hi Joshua.

Setting the visibility of individual items per-player is a priority for us, but the first release of Realm Works won’t provide this ability. The ability to reveal material to individual players is already designed into the infrastructure of how we manage everything internally. However, there's a fair bit of complexity in exposing all the controls cleanly for the GM within the UI, especially when you want to reveal “ItemX” to one subset of players, “ItemY” to a different subset of players, etc. So that's why the feature is not going to be included in V1.0. It should be integrated relatively soon after initial release, since the hardest pieces are already handled.

If they'll put this in, and a built in dice roller to boot, then it's perfect.

[Charles Lewis]

I used to be a big user of armybuilder back in the day of my heavy minis gaming. Even though I'm still on their email mailing list, I pretty much ignore them and saw the announcement of Realm Works come and go...I take it I should give it a closer look.

[XSiberia]

A little more on this, as I had some follow-up questions for the devs on features that would support hidden movement. Their response makes this even more attractive (I'm now backing):

Tracking hidden movement for individual players should be readily doable once we add the per-player reveal logic. It will be even easier once we add what we call tokens on the maps, which is slated for a few months after the initial launch.

The implementation for this is supposed to let CMs host their campaigns on LoneWolf's cloud for some sort of subscription fee. Users will have free accounts. If they could just add a dice roller, this won;t be perfect, but it may well become the best solution of online game hosting.