NPCGEN - Paolo Marcucci - marcucci@oat.ts.astro.it - 15 Oct 1993

Ok, here it is. A Shadowrun II compatible non player characters
generator.

It's a small program that can be improved in many ways (you are 
going to tell me how :). It runs on every DOS machine with 256 kb
of RAM (!). The screen window is limited to 40 columns x 16 rows
to let it run correctly on my hp95lx, but, with some efforts, it
can be tailored to 40x8 screens (Atari PCfolio) or others...

The cyberware database is in the file CYBER.DAT, that have to be
in the same directory of the NPCGEN.EXE program. It is an ASCII
file, quite clear, and can be expanded with new toys from sourcebooks
or home-made cyberware. Hope that it is clear enough...

Adding things to this file is simple, the only limitation is the 
starting column for each row:

Item name                        1
Essence cost                    20
Base price                      25
Street index                    35
Add x to Reaction               40
Add x dice to Initiative        45
Add x to Body                   50
Add x to Quickness              55
Add x to Strength               60
Add x to Charisma               65
Add x to Intelligence           70
Add x to Willpower              75

DO NOT MESS WITH STARTING COLUMNS!

Comments can be added by adding a ! at the beginning of the line.

Fell free to experiment, add your own cybertoys and share the
CYBER.DAT file.

Comments to marcucci@oat.ts.astro.it, thwaps to /dev/null.

*** LAST MINUTE IMPROVEMENT - 28/10/93 ***

After some useful suggestions, some bugs were corrected (i.e: no 1 initiative
dice, no race bonuses, etc...) and a brand new little program is added.
The program name is skilsoft.exe and is a very simple calculator for price
and size of sillsofts. The interface is the same of npcgen.exe. I think it
not necessary to explain the program workings... :)
