Long story short, my regular tabletop group wanted to play Annalise remotely over the internet. When reading the rules, however, we couldn't find a good way to randomize and pass the secrets around.
So, I tossed together a really quick version of the site that takes secrets and then can assign them out to different players. One thing led to another and I decided that "why not make a full tabletop system to help facilitate the actual gameplay too?". Several months of tinkering on-and-off and here we are, the v1 of Annalise Helper.
Roll20 is great! It definitely allows you to pass out cards, but I couldn't quickly figure out a way to take input from other players and then pass them out without revealing the whole deck. This also scratched the itch of wanting to keep my programming skills up-to-date.
Plus, I figure a full-on Roll20 mod would be too far into the realm of game design.
None whatsoever. This site is in no way affiliated with the creator of Annalise. I'm just a fan of the game that wanted to make it a little easier to play over the internet.
Basically it's just to organize characters and games and to facilitate the invitation system. It's there to keep your data from being shown to other people.
On the account side, it's just what's necessary to facilitate your account, and all of that is stored in Auth0.
New Relic is installed to be able to help debug the app's performance and any errors it may generate.
The site doesn't collect any personally identifiable information in the analytics (though your email address will be visible to the site owners when you sign up for an account). Please feel free to sign up with an email alias - I personally recommend Fastmail's aliases, Simplelogin and Apple's "Hide my Email" feature are alternative options. You do generally want it to be available since the game invite system relies on sending an email (or having your friend send you a link).
Nope! The only emails we currently send are transactional (game invites, password resets, etc.). Occasionally we'll send update and promotional emails, but you can opt out of those on your profile page.
Buying a copy of Annalise, or otherwise supporting indie TTRPG developers is the highest form of thanks you can give me.
If you do want to pitch in to help with hosting costs: