This is week 2 of gamemastering with the iPad (despite my having belatedly posted on week one yesterday…)  All of the same programs are in use: PDF Reader and Diceshaker the two primary.  All three game books are on the iPad for the reader, as were the adventure notes and NPC character sheets.

The adventure pitted the group against Blood Bay pirates whom they had to escape, using the dilapidated Latham 47.02 seaplane of Roald Amundsen (search posts for a more historically accurate version of the explorer than that in the Hollow Earth corebook.)  Mass volleys of flintlock fire had me roll the attack from pirates against the heroes as their plane was taxiing from the Blood Bay wharf, so i did a bunch of swapping from notes to the Secrets of the Surface World sourcebook (nicely formatted with a table of contents to get to the right areas of the book quickly) for stats on cannons from the pirate frigates, as well as stats for their plane (as I had forgotten to swap over the writeup on the Latham and my friend’s internet was down so I couldn’t pull it off this blog site), then back to the die roller.

I don’t think it took any more time than it would have to have shuffled through pages of the physical book, look at notes on the computer screen and roll actual dice (or on the laptop, for that matter.)

The incredible battery life of the iPad is a plus, as well:  last week the device was at a 48% charge and I kept tapping the screen from time to time to keep the notes up — a three hour session left me with about 20%.  This week, I let the thing power off from time to time, firing it up only when needed (this takes a second or two max) and used about 10% of the charge for a three hour session.

Overall, GMing a Hollow Earth Expedition game on the iPad turned out to be extremely easy, and for the most part, it didn’t slow down play.  Next week, we’ll be giving it a good kicking with my Battlestar Galactica campaign, where I normally have close to a dozen NPCs written up in one file, the fleet ships in another, game notes, etc. and I have to roll much more often for Cortex-based games than for HEX’s Ubitquity.