Welcome to the Kanka Cookbook

This is an unofficial repository of references, guides, tips and examples intended as a complement to the Kanka Plugin Library and official documentation. It serves four primary purposes:

• Help Kanka users who are unfamiliar with CSS apply simple customizations to their campaign that are too specific to be featured as themes in the Plugin Library, and learn the basics of CSS in the process.

• Help CSS enthusiasts become familiar with Kanka’s styles and discover new CSS tricks.

• Propose advanced tweaks and techniques to work around common problems.

• Help would-be plugin makers become familiar with each type of plugin and master the more complex aspects of themes and character sheets.

All of this is done in my spare time as both a personal reference to aid my abysmal memory and a learning tool for the community at large. But let’s be honest, no one likes writing documentation, let alone keeping it up to date, so tips are a great form of encouragement if you feel so inclined!

Requests and commissions

For quick questions and small changes, you can get in touch with me on Discord (Salvatos#8502) in the Kanka server’s Help forum, where I am frequently helping out in my spare time. For more extensive help, you can commission me at my hourly rate. Just let me know what you are looking for on Discord or at [e-mail].

Below are some examples of the type of work I am typically commissioned for. The prices are just an estimated range (in Canadian dollars), which will vary based on the complexity of your request.

Extensive Campaign Customization (20-100$)

If you need help fully customizing your Kanka campaign’s appearance with CSS, either from scratch or substantially altering an existing theme, we’ll probably need to communicate back and forth about your wants and the results I’m able to achieve.

Keep in mind that I’m here to implement, not design: the more specific your requests the better, and mockups or references can help a lot.

Custom User Script (20-100$)

User scripts do not affect your campaign as a whole, but can be extremely useful when it comes to enhancing your own experience on Kanka. I personally use them mainly for navigation and to add features to the entity editor.

Some of my scripts even inspired new Kanka features that are now available to everyone (such as entity name indicators in advanced mentions) or led to fixes for long-standing bugs (such as entries not being saved while in the HTML view of the entity editor).

If there’s something you wish Kanka did differently and you don’t need it to be available to everyone who visits your campaign, it’s possible a user script can cover your needs!

Plugins and Themes (100-400$)

If you need help styling and/or programming complex attribute templates for your campaign, for example a new character sheet model for your TTRPG system of choice with conditional logic, I can probably help, but I will need both a visual model of the design to achieve and an exhaustive description of the attributes needed, with their calculations and conditions. Much simpler templates are also possible, of course.

I’m also known for developing themes that alter the way some things work pretty significantly, such as Horizontal Timelines and my various sidebar themes. Sometimes I’m able to achieve things that look like they would require a user script using CSS alone, making those features available to everyone who visits a campaign. Just let me know what you have in mind and I can tell you which approach is best suited for it.

Documentation (40-100$)

If there is a complex topic that is not covered by the Kanka guides, blog, knowledge base, tutorial videos or documentation, I may be able to write a tutorial guide for you, given some indications as to what you want it to feature and focus on. I’m not always the best at explaining things, so I suggest you first take a look at my existing guides on this site to see if they make any sense to you ;)

My plugins

My user scripts

Group commissions

Larger-scale projects, especially character sheets, can be cost-prohibitive since we all have limits to how much we can or want to spend on a hobby, and there are only so many shortcuts I can take to keep development time and cost down. As such, I always encourage people to seek out other potential funders for themes or templates that would benefit other users, for example those who play the same TTRPG systems or in similar settings.

As long as everyone involved agrees on the specifications, I am more than happy to collect payment from multiple sources, and even to expand and improve a plugin over an extended period as more people join the "cause".