Arbitrary Arcana - generate spellbooks for loot and arcana-based mayhem!

[anathemort]

Introducing Arbitrary Arcana, an extension to generate spellbooks for loot and arcana-based mayhem!

This extension is a fork and reinterpretation of fxg42's 5E Random Spellbook Generator (made with permission). It includes support for the 3.5E, PF1, and PFRPG2 rulesets, as well as more dynamic preference options.

You can find the extension on the forge, here:
https://forge.fantasygrounds.com/shop/items/724/view

Arbitrary Arcana adds a new button to the Items window to generate spellbooks using your weighted preferences. So, if you want a spellbook that prefers to use Bard spells, or those that deal thunder damage, or Conjuration spells that involve acid, you can create that with this extension! You can also specify how many spells per level you'd like to have, or get a random distribution at the press of a button. The generator will attempt to fill your request with available spells, ranking them by your combined preferences.

Secondarily, you can take the generated spellbook and drop it onto a NPC to give that entity all the spells in the book*!
* Note: in 5E, this is a destructive operation to support spell parsing. Exising spells and the Spellcasting trait are replaced. Innate Spellcasting is left untouched.

Arbitrary Arcana is part of the Fantasy Grounds Unofficial Developers Guild. Please use GitLab or this thread for reporting any issues, thanks!

Planned features:

• 4E Ritual support
• preference exclusion (inverse preference)

[Arimil508]

Hi love your extension really helps just making random spell books. I run pathfinder and I have a question With the weight system you use what is its upper bound. I.E what is the value that you would need to put to have it so that it would guarantee it pulls only from a certain source.
for example I am making a Necromancer wizard. So his source should be wizard[the highest weight] and necromancy should be the second highest that it favors. But a every time I generated one I see inflict light wounds which while being a necromancy spell is not a wizard spell but a cleric spell

[anathemort]

Hey there, thanks for asking. The weight calculation is very simplistic right now: all it does is add the weight value for each preference a spell matches, then numerically sorts the spells based on total weight "rank." So if you give Wizard a weight of 5 and Necromancy a weight of 2, Wizard+Necro spells will have a rank of 7 and end up "favored" by the selection mechanism. But if it runs out of such weighted spells to choose from, it ends up diving into just Necromancy spells from any source.

You might try a few times to take advantage of the random shuffling of spells, but what I really need to do is add the inverse preference so you can say things like "only Wizard spells, favoring Necromancy" or "all except Cleric spells." I'll be getting to this in the next couple of weeks, so look out for the next update!

[anathemort]

Arbitrary Arcana has been updated to v1.1.0:

* Added checkbox to exclude a preference criterion

By selecting this toggle, you can flag a criterion from being excluded. For example, if you set the School to be Necromancy and the Damage Type to be necrotic, but you select the Damage Type Exclusion checkbox, you can get Necromancy school spells that do not deal necrotic damage.

exclusion example.png

[CassMerry]

Hi, really love the concept but for some reason it sometimes fails to run, citing this error:
[ERROR] Script execution error: [string "scripts/manager_arbitrary_arcana.lua"]:168: attempt to compare number with nil
Not sure what's causing that but if you know that'd be great!

[Arimil508]

So I am having an issue for my main campaign. Basically it the extension loads but the button does not show up in the item window. I get no error but the compiler does show up on launch.
I checked compatibility with all my other extensions and on a fresh campaign it does not break.
I would prefer not to remake the campaign.
any help would be nice.
if there was a command to force the window to show up i might be able to do some more testing.
it could be just a graphical glitch or it could be that it is not really loading

[anathemort]

Hi, really love the concept but for some reason it sometimes fails to run, citing this error:
[ERROR] Script execution error: [string "scripts/manager_arbitrary_arcana.lua"]:168: attempt to compare number with nil
Not sure what's causing that but if you know that'd be great!

Hi, can you tell me what ruleset you're using?

[anathemort]

So I am having an issue for my main campaign. Basically it the extension loads but the button does not show up in the item window. I get no error but the compiler does show up on launch.
I checked compatibility with all my other extensions and on a fresh campaign it does not break.
I would prefer not to remake the campaign.
any help would be nice.
if there was a command to force the window to show up i might be able to do some more testing.
it could be just a graphical glitch or it could be that it is not really loading

You can open the window directly with a console command:

/openwindow arbitrary_arcana

However if you're getting a console error on launch I don't expect that it is working as intended. Can you share the error or the whole logs for investigation, as well as which ruleset you're using?

[Arimil508]

You can open the window directly with a console command:

/openwindow arbitrary_arcana

However if you're getting a console error on launch I don't expect that it is working as intended. Can you share the error or the whole logs for investigation, as well as which ruleset you're using?

The command you gave worked it brought up the menu but none of the drop downs had anything inside them. As for the console it does pop up but there is no error displayed on it just a list of loaded extensions. my ruleset is Pathfinder first edition.

[anathemort]

The command you gave worked it brought up the menu but none of the drop downs had anything inside them. As for the console it does pop up but there is no error displayed on it just a list of loaded extensions. my ruleset is Pathfinder first edition.

Thanks for the logs. I'll take a look at the extensions and see if I can fix the incompatibility!