About The Keep

The Keep is Donationware! You may distribute it freely so long as you do not make any charge for doing so.

If you find the program useful, please consider making a donation which will help fund the continued development of The Keep and my other COC-related projects!

Cheers!
Alli

What is The Keep?

The program is intended to solve several problems.

1) Your campaign notes say its the 27th of March 1928... your players ask, "So what day of the week is it?"... YARGH! The display calendar to the left should make it very easy to answer that question.

2) Your handwriting is awful (like mine!), you keep losing scraps of paper (like me!) and you're generally disorganized (guess who!). The note area here stores whatever you type in a text file named for the Month and Year currently showing on the calendar. There's no need to "load" or "save", it all happens quickly and automatically.

3) Keeping track of characters can be a also be a chore while Keeping. The character management pane in the lower half of the program lets you keep track of any number of characters divided into any number of groups. You can load complete Byakhee 3.0 character files into The Keep, edit their values, organize them into groups and save them. The Keep constantly shows the order of attack for the currently loaded set of characters.

In addition to this, The Keep also comes bundled with several extensive sets of pre-built dated information. The "Exotic" data set covers bizarre, unexplained, occult and otherwise Fortean events of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The "Disasters" data set includes dates and information about a huge variety of horrible disasters - natural and man-made - during the same period. Also, the "Mythos" data set covers the same time period and features dated references to over 200 events in the history of the Mythos - referring to Lovecraft and other authors' works.

The Keep has a some very simple Keyboard Shortcuts that can be handy if you're Keeping with a laptop that has an inconvenient pointing device. Information about the shortcuts can be found in the About menu of the program.

The calendar and note-taking part of The Keep, minus the character management, is also available seperately. If you only want that feature, check out "Cthalender".

If you're upgrading from Cthalendar then don't forget to back up your "data" folder before you uninstall Cthalendar!

Using The Keep Calendar

Navigating through dates is easy. The single arrow buttons under the calendar view move forward/back by one month at a time. Note also that there is an additional "month" before January, called "year". This gives you a convenient slot to place notes that refer to a given year but for which no particular date is meaningful. See the Mythos, Disasters and Exotic sets for examples.

The three-arrow buttons move back/forward one Year at a time, preserving your current selected Month.

Clicking the central button below the calendar allows you to enter a Year to jump to.

Click any of the named month buttons at the far left to jump straight to that month. Any month (including the abstract "year" month at the top) for which some notes are recorded will be lit yellow, while others will just show gray or white.

The final method of calendar navigation is the "Next" and "Previous" buttons directly below the main editor box. They'll advance or retreat through time to the very next month for which you have any notes recorded, regardless of how few or how many months and years may lie in between.

Using Calendar Data Sets

Check the "Calendar" menu at the top left. You should see a number of Data Sets, eg "Mythos", "Disasters", "Notes".

Each of these represents a folder in The Keep's program directory in which one complete set of dated notes is stored. Using the Data Sets system you can separate your notes conveniently by topic, perhaps keeping prepared campaign notes in one Data Set and your actual Keepers journal of play in another. You can create as many Data Sets as you like.

The Create Set button will prompt you for a name for your new set. Best to keep it reasonably short and remember that since this will be used as a folder name, you can't have any slashes or other naughty-filename type characters in there.

The new Search option will rummage through your entire Data Set for any pages that contain the query string you enter (case insensitive). Results will be shown in a tab behind the main editor. Click any result line to load that entry and bring it to the front.

Lastly, the Export option will prompt you for a filename which will become a new textfile containing the entire contents of a single Data Set pasted into a one large file. This can be useful if you want to print out your notes.

Provided Calendar Data Sets

The "Exotic" (over 100 entries) and "Disasters" (also over 100 entries) data sets are expansions upon the "Timelines" pages that appear towards the back of Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu 5th edition rulebook. For many of the entries, accurate dates have been found and are noted. Some entries have been corrected for names, spelling and dates. Other entries are new to the list, but all draw on genuine news reports of their day.

The "Mythos" (over 200 entries) data set is an extract of James "JEB" Bowman's fantastic Cthulhu Mythos Timeline, corrected here and there for spelling. The Data Set covers the period 1880 to 1940.

The data sets, as presented here, are all constrained to a range of around 100 years surrounding 1900 as this covers the years that I use in my own games. You can, of course, expand upon the data into the past or the future as you see fit.

Using The Keep Character Management

The lower half of The Keep's window is devoted to Character Management. Characters are arranged into Sets in exactly the same was as the Calendar data is. Character Sets are totally independant from Calendar Data Sets. You can use the "Characters" menu to switch between configured sets of characters.

The Keep reads character data from Byakhee 3.0 character files (.COC files). Inside The Keep's program directory (normally C:\Program Files\The Keep\) you'll see a folder "chars". Inside this will be a number of folders named for your configured Character Sets. Each of these folders holds any amount of Byakhee files. If you make any changes to the content of these folders while The Keep is running, you can use the "Reload This Set" option on the "Characters" menu to get The Keep to pick up the alterations.

To add a character to The Keep, either copy the COC file into the appropriate "chars" subfolder manually, or use the "Import Character" option on the "Characters" menu. The file you select will be copied (not moved!) into the correct folder and the current set automatically reloaded.

At both the left and right side of the Character Management area, the complete list of characters in the current set are shown. On the left, the characters are shown in alphabetical order by name. On the right, they're shown in decreasing order of DEX, establishing the Order Of Attack during combat rounds. Click on a character name in either list to load their details into the central pane.

Character Details Pane

The Character Detail Pane shows two views. On the right, a clear and simple view of the character's primary Characterstics and their Combat Skills.

On the left is a folding tree view which shows the entire contents of their Byakhee character file. Click on any entry in the tree and its value will be shown in the field below. Changing the value in the field updates the character in memory, but does not save the changes back to the COC file until you exit The Keep, load a new Character Set or click the Save Changes button.

You can actually edit the character in Byakhee while it's displayed in The Keep. Just click the "Reload This Set" option on the "Characters" menu after you've made your changes to get The Keep to load the updated character.

The right side of the Character Details Pane shows a simplified view of the character's basic details. Their stats and combat details are shown. You can amend their stats, but not their weapons and combat skills. To alter combat skills, load the character back into Byakhee.

Acknowledgements

Much of the Information in the included data sets, draws on source material listed below:

• Wikipedia - The Free Encyclopedia
• The Cthulhu Mythos Timeline by James "JEB" Bowman, itself drawing on the Encyclopedia Cthulhiana and other sources.
• Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu 5th and 6th Edition Rulebooks
• Fortean Times and the works of Charles Fort (reproduced and annotated by "Mr X"), an endless resource of strange tales, weird news and bizarre history.

Thanks folks!

More thanks go to David Harvey for his marvellous Byakhee COC character generator.

And also to IDH Gallery for providing the very spooky photography used on this site!

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