An Online Field Guide

[ThorinSchmidt]

TL/DR: I've been working on this thing. Solo said I should post it in the Forums. So I did. Link at the bottom.


I've been working on my own Dungeon23 project, and I'm using Google's Colab Notebook, which is a watered-down version of Python's Jupyter Notebook. That's just for context.

One of the things I've been doing is adding entries for all the monsters I'm using in the dungeon, since Colab uses Markdown and Hyperlinks to aid in navigation. I mentioned this to Solo, and asked if he thought it would be useful/interesting.

He told me to start a thread on the Workshop. So here it is. I am including a link to the actual notebook for everyone to take a look. The link gives you editing privileges so anyone who wants to help is welcome to do so, and will of course get credit for when this eventually becomes fancy.

That's the key right now. I am a believer in Iterative Design and MVP development. (Minimum Viable Product) So right now, the project will just be making an online notebook with all the Stats and text, and no art. All of the monsters are in a big alphabetical list down the left side, and that's good enough for now, but soon, (actually next thing) I'll add a hyperlinked index/TOC at the top, and add hyperlinks to and from the individual entries.

I would like to turn this into a nicer, fancier kind of thing, like either an interactive website, or even online database, but that's for later (MVP, remember?). Anyhow, look, enjoy, comment.

Oh, and this is very much WIP. All I have done so far is copy the entries from my dungeon project, so there are LOTS of missing entries!

https://colab.research.google.com/drive ... sp=sharing

[JugglinDan]

You might want to have a look at the OSR Bestiary. It's on GitLab and has all entries from 3rd edition core rules, and field guides 1 & 2. The entries are all in RST files which should be quite tractable if you wanted to automate getting the data into your notebook system.

[ThorinSchmidt]

Hmmm. Well, I didn't know about that project. I'm not a big fan of reinventing wheels. That site really seems to have everything I was initially trying to produce. I DID eventually want to make a hyperlinked version of the Monster Index, which is by HD, and create a similar one by Creature Type. (I know there is a spreadsheet, but it is rather outdated at this point. Maybe I'll skip the collection of data and use the RST files...

ponder ponder.

[JugglinDan]

Sorry, I didn't mean to throw a spanner in the works. I've just had a quick poke around in the GitLab repo. It looks like the OSR Bestiary is quite data driven. It looks like it might be possible to amend the _tags.csv files to add tags for other searchable dimensions like HD. I'm tempted to clone the repo, then write a Python script to parse the RST files and append the HD tag to the _tags.csv file. Hopefully this will enable search by HD with quite minimal effort.

Of course, it might not work but it's worth a try.

[ThorinSchmidt]

yeah, it could also use more tagging. so many entries don't have any tags. Terrain tags would also be useful. And of course, this is all for 3e. the 4e changes are not enormous, but there are some significant ones: like dragons and elementals.

[JugglinDan]

I've forked the repo on GitLab and have configured the build pipeline to create the static pages.

https://gitlab.com/dc231/osr-bestiary
https://dc231.gitlab.io/osr-bestiary/

Starting a project to add extra tags and update the creatures to 4th edition. Gotta have those Barklings!

First though I want to make the attributions are up to date for both the OGL and CC material. The current site that I forked clearly indicates the Basic Fantasy project as the source of the information, but it doesn’t actually mention any of the licences.

So it looks like the next step is to start adding tasks to the list.

Also, terrain tags would be awesome. That's a great idea.

[ThorinSchmidt]

Just a quick update: I'e gotten the entries done completely up to Doppelgangers.
There are others farther down the alphabet, but those are mostly from cross-references.