D&D 3.5 is a big hurdle, indeed, and one of the big reasons that I feel this needs to be developed bottom up from the representation. Straight point-buy systems will be easy, but dealing with both point buy and level-based systems is the problem.

Ahhh... I grok the RFC thing now.

OpenRPG I see as defective simply in that it won't work on my system, and in general seems pretty fragile. I've had breakage about three-four separate times, installing stable packages on Ubuntu. Grapevine is actually pretty awesome (despite being written in Visual Basic), but it's abandonware at this point, and strongly tied to the Old WOD LARP system, Mind's Eye Theater. It's usable for tabletop WOD, but mainly through user-defined traits and other kludges. Penguinvine is a reimplementation of it for Linux in C++, but it both looks pretty stalled and is remarkably buggy, and shares Grapevine's single-RPG limitation.

That's really the big one... All of the products I've seen that have anything like Grapevine's scope in setting-management are tied to specific systems (or families of systems). The implementation of "Rumors" in Grapevine just blew me away when I ran into it, and I'd love to have something like that in any RPG I needed it for, without having to kluge it in Grapevine/Hero Lab/whatever.

I'm not particularly interested adding networking to this; I want it to be a game management system, not a tool for running games online. Part of the goal is, certainly, being able to export character sheets and rumors for internet/print distribution; also, far in the future, some sort of read-only update format might be useful (So you could give someone a read-only subset of what gameworld files are accessible to their character, say.)

I agree that OO has a number of advantages for roleplaying game representation, although in this case, it'll most likely be easiest and clearest to stick to fairly simple objects with few (if any) attached methods. Most of the OO I've done is from school (in C++ and Java), but I've got the Camel book, and I've used other people's OO libraries in Perl.

You're right about the product review... I'm searching for them right now, and I've already downloaded PCgen.

while(<DATA>){for(split(' ',$_)){$_=reverse;print "$_ ";}}
print "\b.\n";
__DATA__
tsuJ rehtonA lreP rekcaH
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