Show HN: Adventurekeep – A Toolkit for D&D
adventurekeep.com
adventurekeep.com
I've been playing Dungeons & Dragons for several years now, and have been in search of a set of tools that work cohesively together. Nothing I found quite fit the vision I had in mind, so I decided to build a toolkit myself.
Adventurekeep is a toolkit for planning and running sessions of D&D. It allows for planning combat encounters, quickly referencing rules, wiki-style smart linking, and simple drag-and-drop page management.
I drew inspiration for the site from productivity tools like Notion, with its super-powered text editor, and took that concept to make it more tabletop gaming focused.
This is really just the beginning of my vision for Adventurekeep. I have a lot of great ideas in the works like a live player view, and robust sharing capabilities. If you're a D&D player, or have a general interest in tabletop gaming, please check it out and let me know what you think! I'd love to hear from you.
One thing I immediately wanted was a way to link certain lines to different pages. For example, I might come up with a character or other feature of a city on the spot for my players, and want to add it to that citys page to keep track of it for future reference. But I might also want to keep a linear log of what happened (or didn't) to my players. It would be nice if there was a way to link an entry from the city page to the log so I don't need to duplicate manually and everything is kept consistent if I later revise the entry in the city page.
https://monk-e-boy.github.io/dungeon-mapper/
Very simple to share parts of a dungeon and as the players explore reveal more of it by msg-ing them the new URL
One tool that I would love to have, and that every DM I know would as well: integrated music handling. I'd love to upload music files, and be able to embed looped playlists of them within area descriptions or encounter descriptions.
I apologize there is no privacy policy in place at the moment. I will get that in place ASAP.
EDIT: You can find our privacy policy here: https://adventurekeep.com/privacy
That's a bit judgmental isn't it? What if I don't care as much as you about my email address being shared?
One piece of feedback that would make or break this tool for me: I would love to see better keyboard interactions. In my ideal version of this, quick search would pull up on some keybind, and then once I search for something, I would be able to use my arrow keys to scroll down the list of results without clicking.
For me this is basically getting at what I think is _the_ killer feature for an app like this: super-efficient navigation/search. Mouse interactions are simply too slow for me to incorporate them into live DMing.
I'd love to know what other sorts of keyboard interactions you would like to see. I will look into this and keep you posted!
In addition, I think being able to set up some sort of quick jump-to-page system where you can tag pages that you use a lot and jump to them with one key press/combo would be amazing.
Looking forward to giving this a better try during my next session!
I have some improvements coming to the encounter generator coming very soon! At the moment, you can only import monsters from the SRD (aka, basic ruleset). But I'm working on robust support for custom monsters, and customizing existing monsters.
The other day I was thinking about some kind of online service that would let you join a D&D like distributed party. It would be cool to have the experience with good DMs and maybe even pay them something per game.
I hope you get an opportunity to play again. D&D is such a unique experience that everyone should be able to participate in.
Sounds like a virtual tabletop, of which there are many, some with fully licensed support for D&D and other major TTRPGs (Roll20, Fantasy Grounds, etc.)
Was just digging around because I was curious how you were doing some things, particularly loading the character and monster data. If I'm understanding this correctly, you've got it all packed into just 391kb of JS which blows my mind!
That said, I think your webpack might be slightly misconfigured for that output bundle - I'm seeing what appears to be the same JS requested twice, under `%5BpageId%5D.js` and `%5BcharacterId%5D.js`.
One feature that I'd love to see added would be the ability to make certain pages, characters, or sections public.
The suggested creatures for an encounter don't seem to be taking the level into account - I'm getting mostly CR 1/8 - 3 for any environment I select, with a single character of level 14.
Overall, great job. Really like the UX, and I think that the quick search is a crucial improvement to existing tools. Being able to quickly search for things and link to other stuff is huge. I'm sure we'll be able to embed other content types soon as well.
As for the js bundles, everything including webpack is managed by next.js, and it handles code splitting at the route level. I'd like to converge the /page and /character pages to reduce the network calls, but unfortunately its out of my control right now.
I will take a look at the encounter ratings. Thanks for letting me know!
Thanks for the feedback!
[1] https://dnd.wizards.com/articles/features/systems-reference-...
1) on Android Chrome when selecting text, the native copy/paste popup overlaps your text editing popup.
2) would be nice to have a tutorial with a sample adventure and how to reference/link
3) full character sheets on edit details
EDIT: I like the idea and some of the execution. I have multiple UX suggestions that I will need time to collect (when not at work). One thing that was particularly jarring was the modal that pops up when you click an entity instead of the information being inlined in the frame. One feature I would highly recommend is the ability to make maps and reveal them piecemeal to players. I think this can really be something to open roleplaying up for a larger audience.
There is no plugin system currently, but something I'm open to! I think that could be a great way to let people make Adventurekeep into what they really want it to be.
I do have an internal roadmap. If there's broader interest, I could clean it up and make it a public Trello board.
The application is not currently open source. But that could change if I were to introduce something akin to a plugin system.
Thanks for the questions!
I'm going to write my next adventure segment here and see if it flows better than googledocs. This feels like an online OneNote tool but it's free and not owned by MSFT so big plus.
It looks great and so far has been super intuitive to add/edit campaign parts. Job well done!
EDIT: I should probably elaborate that the FE is actually next.js