Poisson Magique is a Play-by-Post (PbP) RPG email gateway and Web interface for Role Playing Games.

It is a mail server to help with the GM tasks of modifying and forwarding emails in a PbP campaign, as the GM itself or as the different player (character or non-character).

Register an adventure by emailing:

pm-new-campaign@pm

Subject: Campaign Name

At this stage, the campaign has already started.

To add new player character, the GM sends an email to

pm-register-pc@pm

Subject: PC name (e.g., Alice Cooper)

the system replies with the email address for enrolment:

pm-enroll-72jase@pm (for Alice) etc.

Then other players email an empty email to the enrolment address and are signed up.

The GM sends emails to Alice@pm etc or special accounts:

pm-roll-dice@pm for dice rolls pm-register-npc@pm for NPCs

To send emails as other characters, the GM sends email to as-Alice or other characters (only once).

The game continues until the GM sends an email to pm-end. If a player sends an email to pm-end their email address is purged from the game.

See http://wiki.duboue.net/index.php/Poisson_Magique/Example for a full example.

For Spanish campaigns, the email goes to

pm-new-campaign-es@pm

and the system is set to Spanish from there on.

WIP, see http://poissonmagique.net for details.

To setup the local settings you will need:

• A working SMTP server that will relay messages for this server.
• A redis installation to be used by the systems
• To create a folder for the the mail queues, for example $HOME/run.

Create config/localsettings.py (see sample_localsettings.py).

The default listening port for the SMTP server is 1220 as specified in config/settings.py. This is the port you will need to configure in hubbed_hosts for exim4 (see below).

$ salmon start
$ salmon start --boot config.sender --pid run/sender.pid 

To render the end of game reports you will need the following packages installed:

• pandoc
• texlive
• texlive-latex-extra

These instructions are to set-up Poisson Magique on a Debian box (tested on Jessie) with direct internet connection and a fixed IP.

Let's call the machine HOSTNAME with an IP, HOSTIP. These instructions will enable you to run PossionMagique as an unprivileged user in the machine, without disruption local emails. For that, you will need a separate DNS name for PossionMagique, which we will call PM_NAME.

First, you need to set the PM_NAME DNS records so its MX records in point to HOSTIP.

You will need to configure the host with an internal bridge interface to avoid Exim to reject PM_NAME emails as pointing to localhost. To do that install the bridge-utils package and set a local IP in /etc/interfaces:

apt-get install bridge-utils

Add to /etc/rc.local

  brctl addbr brPM
  ifup brPM

Add to /etc/networking/interfaces

  auto brPM
  iface brPM inet static
    address 10.10.0.50
    netmask 255.255.255.240

(Then issue the two rc.local commands.)

In poissonmagique/config/localsettings.py you will be setting

server_name_config = 'your PM_DNS'
relay_name_config = 'localhost'

You might also want to set

is_silent_config = True

to avoid backscatter spam when using a hubbed host.

but your PM_DNS has to resolve locally to the bridge interface (10.10.0.50). So add that line to /etc/hosts:

10.10.0.50 your-PM_DNS

Finally, configure exim4 to be a relay for this SMTP, issue as root (or using sudo):

dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config

leave 'internet site; mail is sent and received directly using SMTP', set your email name (different from the name being used for PoissonMagique, usually HOSTNAME), listen on HOSTIP; 127.0.0.1, do not set PM_DNS as local domain, set it as a domain to relay emails for. Set 10.10.0.50 as an IP to relay emails.

Finally, add to /etc/exim4/hubbed_hosts (you might need to create that file):

PM_DNS: 10.10.0.50::1220

(you might need to add also mx.PM_DNS if use an mx.PM_DNS name alias in your MX records.)

Please note the double double colon, it is the required syntax for Exim.