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Keywords

Many games will use a system of keywords to track player progress. Keywords are like player-facing variables, the player is expected to keep a note of them. The game will instruct them Gain the keyword X or say If you have the keyword X, turn to Y.

The <keyword> tag

Gordian can help you keep track of your keywords using the <keyword> tag (you can abbreviate this as <k>). This will be replaced in your output with:

If you have marked up your keywords in this way you can check the Keyword Report to see a list of all your keywords and the passages they appear in. A keyword that is only used a single time will have a warning against it.

The <keywords> tag

You can use the <keywords> tag to generate a list of keywords to include in your game, for example in a checklist page (e.g. in gb-rear). There are three ways to use the tag.

This will take the keywords from the list of marked keywords, and lay it out in columns. Gordian will pick the number of columns to fit the page.

You can supply a list of keywords (separated by commas) in the body of the tag. In this case these keywords will be output instead of the ones in the story. You can use this if you have not marked your keywords, or if you need to include keywords that don't appear in the current game.

You can supply your list of keywords as valid JSON. In this case you can pass a column count using the cols element, in which case the resulting keyword list will use that number of columns instead of the automatically calculated number. In this case the entries will be divided as evenly as possible between the columns. You can specify the number of columns without using the JSON markup by adding a cols attribute to the tag:

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Checkboxes

Checkboxes are another way of tracking game progress. A set of checkboxes attached to a passage can be used to track the number of times a section has been visited (or to count some other sort of event that can happen in any series, time passing, monsters defeated, runes found).

The <checkboxes> tag

Gordian can generate checkboxes for you using the <checkboxes> tag. This tag takes a number indicating how many checkboxes you want.

Produces:

The <checkbox-list> tag

Just as a keyword list is useful to help players track keywords, a checkbox list can allow multiple people to play the same paper game, by ticking boxes on the list rather than the actual sections. This will also probably save wear on the paper from marking and erasing boxes. You can use the <checkbox-list> tag to generate a list of passage numbers and checkboxes. There are two ways to use the tag.

This will search the story for passages containing the <checkboxes> tag, and produce a layout of passage numbers and checkboxes in columns, much like the keywords tag. Gordian will pick the number of columns to fit the page.

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You can supply your list of checkboxes as valid JSON. In this case you can pass a column count using the cols element, in which case the resulting list will use that number of columns instead of the automatically calculated number. The checkboxes key should be an array of arrays, each of which has the passage number as the first element and the number of checkboxes as the second. You can specify the number of columns without using the JSON markup by adding a cols attribute to the tag: