ScrapYard Armory

MercRoster is a new BattleTech force management tool found on SourceForge.  Don’t let the name fool you.  This tool set is not for mercenary commands alone.  Any force, be they house, periphery or Clan can find a use for this new tool.  I’ve just started playing around with it and am impressed with the potential.

So what is MercRoster?  Simply put, it is an online tool that helps you manage your BattleTech force through a campaign.  More importantly, it helps the players and game masters tell a story.

Here are a few examples including my own Wolf and Blake campaign.

• The Flaming Devil Monkeys
• Grosskreutzs Kavallerie
• Wolf’s Dragoons

Have a Look

Here are a few screenshots on MercRoster in action.  You can track your personnel, equipment, kills.  You can customize logs, ranks (make them house specific!), equipment types and more.

Sounds Great But I Don’t Have Hosting…

The achilles heel of MercRoster is the fact that each instance will only serve one command and you have to have your own hosting solution (with database) in order to use it.

Not many gamers have these tools readily at hand but there are ways around it.  If you don’t have a need to host your campaign on the internet you can use the computer you use today to run a local webserver.  It’s not as hard as you might think.

• Windows Apache MySQL PHP (WAMP)
• Mac Apache MySQL PHP

Just as a note, Apache is the web server, MySQL is a database, and PHP is the server side scripting language that does the real magic.  The installation instructions are quite good.  If there is enough interest I’ll do a compete installation tutorial in a future post.

It’s still early in development but I already like what I see.  If you have the time and the interest I suggest checking it out.  The more feedback the developers get the better!