Basic Fantasy Creature List Spreadsheet by Mike Roop

Creating game materials? Monsters, spells, classes, adventures? This is the place!
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leon
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Re: Basic Fantasy Creature List Spreadsheet by Mike Roop

Post by leon »

Similar to Rudgar, I wanted a list of short monster summaries to copy-paste. I'd been using a dump of Mike Roop's spreadsheet to a text file with a few monsters from the field guides added by hand. Then I got the bug to get everything. The ODS file attached has every monster from core and the three field guides. I created it by writing a PHP script that loads the Flat ODT files as XML DOM objects and pulls the stats table out xpath queries. That saved a lot of time, though I did have to go over the entries to clean up edge cases. I've also included the script in case it's interesting to anyone else.

The spreadsheet answers my need, but I thought I'd share in case someone wants to use it to port the content back into the original creature list.
Attachments
extract-monsters.txt
(3.61 KiB) Downloaded 114 times
Basic-Fantasy-Monster-Extraction-r1.ods
(229.39 KiB) Downloaded 100 times
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Skiouros
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Re: Basic Fantasy Creature List Spreadsheet by Mike Roop

Post by Skiouros »

First, thank you to all who have contributed to this wonderful game, most of all to Solomoriah for leading the entire project. I have been reading the forums for a while, looking for ways that I might contribute. Recently I had a go at the latest versions of the Core Rules and the two completed Field Guides with Python to see if I could put together a spreadsheet of all the monsters. I am attaching that spreadsheet here, in csv (readable by almost any spreadsheet program, including Excel) and ods (LibreOffice Calc) formats. I hope that people will find it useful.

The entire spreadsheet is assembled in Python directly from the Core Rules and the first two Field Guides -- I have not hand-entered anything. So if you want to make changes to the spreadsheet, you're certainly welcome to, but then they might become out of date or be overwritten with the next revision. I'd recommend instead that if you have any suggestions or ideas for changes, please just let me know. That way I could incorporate them into the Python code, so that they would continue into future revisions. In any case, I welcome any constructive feedback and ideas. And I realize that any spreadsheet like this almost invariably contains errors, so any corrections that you can point out would be very helpful. I'd like to make this as useful as possible to as many people as possible.

A few notes:

1. I changed daggers to + and double-daggers to ++, since the daggers don't seem to come through in the spreadsheets.

2. The "Number of HD" column is designed for sorting the monsters by HD. Since sorting isn't really feasible when a range of possible HD are given, I decided simply to use the first number of HD that is given (which is usually the lowest). There are other possibilities for this, but in order to be able to sort by HD, a single number is needed. I'm certainly open to ideas for how to do this better. (Oh and in the spreadsheet, 0 HD simply means "less than 1 HD". That seemed the most expedient for sorting purposes.)

3. I put the two stat-lines (the first with parentheses and the second with a colon) in the spreadsheet based on what I read in the style guide and based on people's comments on how they have used the Basic Fantasy Creature List Spreadsheet by Mike Roop.

4. I wasn't sure what to name the files, since I don't know whether they will be used, and if they are, where they will fit in. I'd be glad to name them according to the appropriate conventions if they turn out to be useful.

Thanks, and enjoy!
Attachments
monster-stats.ods
(77.14 KiB) Downloaded 50 times
monster-stats.csv
(234.74 KiB) Downloaded 49 times
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JugglinDan
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Re: Basic Fantasy Creature List Spreadsheet by Mike Roop

Post by JugglinDan »

You could export two HD columns - min and max. Where entries have just one value, you put the same number in both columns.

Also, for the ods file, it would render more nicely if the columns containing mixed numbers and text (Armour Class, Hit Dice etc) were all strings. You can force this by prefixing the values with a single quote. That way Calc treats them all as text, instead of some values being left justified and some right.

Excellent work though, a good reference for finding creatures across all the bestiary sources.
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Skiouros
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Re: Basic Fantasy Creature List Spreadsheet by Mike Roop

Post by Skiouros »

JugglinDan, thanks for the tips and ideas! I wasn't aware of the single quote string rule in Calc, and I agree that that'd help with the formatting (if it doesn't interfere with the sorting). I'll try it out!

Good idea on the min and max as well. Right now all that is in there is the min, but maybe a max column could be handy too.

Thanks!
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Solomoriah
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Re: Basic Fantasy Creature List Spreadsheet by Mike Roop

Post by Solomoriah »

Great work! But I'm confused by one thing here... monster stats don't have daggers anymore. AC values should have (s) or (m) after them for monsters requiring silver or magical weapons to hit.
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Skiouros
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Re: Basic Fantasy Creature List Spreadsheet by Mike Roop

Post by Skiouros »

Thanks -- glad you like it! As for the daggers, the Core Rules no longer have them, but the two Field Guides still do. It'd probably be a simple "find and replace" to switch them though, along with changing the explanation of the symbols (which is on page 1 of both Field Guides).
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AlMan
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Re: Basic Fantasy Creature List Spreadsheet by Mike Roop

Post by AlMan »

The Field Guides have not been updated,yet. They are going to be updated soon.
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Solomoriah
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Re: Basic Fantasy Creature List Spreadsheet by Mike Roop

Post by Solomoriah »

I'm not even sure what we're going to do with them, to be honest.

We're going to have to work hard to contact all the contributors.
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