This Google Sheets workbook can be used to create characters using any of the basic cultures, occupations, and cults in the rule book, as well as any of the playable races in the Glorantha Bestiary.
The workbook is divided into three main sheets that are intended for the user:
CharGen sheet - this is where character creation is done, filling in dice rolls, rune choices, culture, occupation, cult, and skill choices.
CharSheet is the presentation sheet - laid out as a traditional character sheet, details from CharGen are filled in automatically using formulas.
History is for character family background, with drop-down selections for summaries of every possibly outcome of the yearly history charts.
The remainder of the sheets are lookups and working space that the formulae and macros use to store the technicalities that most users will not need to worry about. The one exception is the Translate sheet, where language translations are stored.
Much of the functionality is implemented as traditional spreadsheet formulas, such as derived attributes like damage bonus, strike ranks, and category modifiers, as well as rune bonuses to characteristics.
If you want to convert this spreadsheet into Excel or LibreOffice, you can do so with maybe only a few formulas to fix, and fill in characteristics and skills manually.
Or, you can use it in Google Sheets by way of macros linked to buttons. Along the top row of CharGen are a number of buttons, most of which fill in or amend details based on the race, culture, occupation, and cults chosen in the first column.
Typical character creation workflow
Pick a race.
Pick Culture, Occupation, and Cult - these choices can be made later, as long as they are made before you click the respective buttons.
Click the "...▼" button in the Assign column. This fills in the correct number of dice and fixed additions for the chosen race. The dice for the default choice of "None" start out as 3D6 for all characteristics. In addition, if you chose an elf race, it will swap out the Beast rune for Plant. If you chose Baboon or Centaur, it will also swap out the hit location chart and hit location calculation table for correct versions for those races.
Click the button with the D6 image in the Random column. This generates random numbers below that are then translated into dice results in the Value column, in a range of 1-6 for most dice, but occasionally other dice for some races such as 1-4 for the CON die roll for Agimori.
Rolls can be re-assigned from one characteristic to another by selecting a characteristic in the Assign column, e.g. if you have a roll on a STR die that you want to assign to INT, then click on the drop-down and change STR to INT. This will result in too many dice for INT and not enough for STR, and this will be highlighted in red in the # column to the right. Fix this by assigning one of the INT dice back to STR.
The button on the Value column will sort the dice rolls so that they are grouped together again and in numerical order.
If you are using the "re-roll ones" rule, then for any roll that results in a 1 in the Value column, click on the value in the Random column and click the D6 button again. That will generate a new random value for that die. Sum totals are displayed in the Result column, and are replicated further across after the Runes.
Assign numbers to your Runes, if you have chosen a culture, then any bonus for that will automatically appear in the Culture column. The Choice column allows you to select 60, 40, and 20 for elemental runes, and 75 for power runes. The values that you put in the Adds column are summed up in the column heading so that you can keep track of the 50 allocated points. There are no constraints applied to any of the values in any of these columns, so feel free to put whatever values you want as agreed with the GM.
Once your runes have been assigned, you will see the bonus for the two highest elemental runes applied in the Rune Bonus column. If there is a tie for the highest rune, then the sheet cannot figure out which one to assign. Add an extra 0.1 to the rune that you want to be the highest to break the tie. If three runes are tied for highest, then add 0.2 and 0.1.
If you choose to apply the bonus for a rune to your CHA characteristic instead of the rune's normal characteristic, simply delete the rune name from next to the characteristic in the Rune column (W, not M). This will cause the bonus to automatically move to CHA. Deleting more than one rune name will not assign both bonuses, the second one will simply be lost!
The only characteristic values that are not figured in automatically are the +2 and -2 to SIZ and DEX for certain Praxian tribes. Enter these in the Perm Adds column. The Temp Adds column can be used in order to calculate the effects of characteristic boosting magic, although there are tick boxes to automatically calculate the rather complicated effects of the spirit spells such as Coordination and Strength. Changes to derived attributes are displayed on the CharSheet in a smaller font along side the normal, un-boosted values.
The next stage involves filling in the skills gained from race, culture, occupation, and cult. These are done by clicking the respective "...▼" buttons in the Skill Detail, Culture, Occupation, and Cult columns further along on the sheet. Skill Detail fills in race skills, such as Insight. The others are self-explanatory.
When clicking these buttons, wait for the macro to complete before clicking the next one. At the end of each, there may be a pop-up message box explaining certain choices or amendments that you might want to make, such as assigning specifically which Lore skill you get from certain occupations, or picking weapon skills if there is a choice. For example, your culture will have filled in cultural weapons, but your occupation might have just added a couple of numbers to the first few weapon skill slots. Move these numbers to the correct weapon, or manually add a new weapon name and move the number there. Delete and type the numbers, rather than cutting and pasting, as the formulas will be wrong otherwise.
The +20 and +15 bonuses to cult skills have their own column (Cult+), and the Choice column is for assigning your four +25 and five +10 personal skill bonuses.
Enter your passions in the Passion Detail column, and pick or type in values in the Choice and Bonus columns, including any bonuses from family background.
Switch over to the CharSheet tab, scroll down to the weapons section and pick the weapons that you want to display on the sheet. The CharGen sheet can track up to 10 melee weapons and five ranged weapons, and the CharSheet can display whichever of these you consider to be relevant to everyday play.
You're done!
Translating
The Translate tab contains all of the text cell contents in English, with columns for translated text in other languages. At present, only Spanish is done. Copy the contents of the Spanish column into the Translated Text column, and click the Translate! button. You can switch to the CharSheet tab and watch the translation in progress, things will break and show "N/A", then be fixed. Sometimes you get an error saying the sheet needs to be re-loaded, but it seems to work ok.
