
Show HN: Adventurekeep – A Toolkit for D&D - montagh451
https://adventurekeep.com
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montagh451
Hey everyone,

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.

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bananasbandanas
Looks very cool. Will definitely try it out for mapping out a scenario.

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.

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montagh451
Yes! This would be a great addition. Thank you!

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gatherhunterer
There is no explanation of how you use my email address before providing it.
If this is a free service then I assume that I am the product. There is no
privacy policy. Conventional wisdom would say that only a fool would enter
their address to that form. I could check the copyright or the whois and try
to track down some semblance of trustworthiness but on its face this is too
suspicious to trust with contact information.

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montagh451
Hi there sorry about that - to clarify, there _is_ a paid upgrade (the core
product is, and always will be, free). To be clear, we in no way sell your
information to 3rd parties.

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](https://adventurekeep.com/privacy)

~~~
gatherhunterer
I see the privacy policy is available through the site now, thanks for the
update.

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tomtheelder
I've thought a lot about making a tool like this, and you've accomplished a
lot of what I had in mind. It looks awesome!

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.

~~~
montagh451
This is great feedback! I've been considering adding power-user keyboard
navigation like you're describing, as I too would love to have these sorts of
interactions.

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!

~~~
berbec
A version using vi bindings would be amazing.

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zrobotics
Very cool- signed up, but am at work right now so I don't have time to delve
really deeply into it. The encounter generator looks pretty great, the few
tests I performed seemed to be reasonable encounters for the difficulty I set.
I'm currently running a campaign over Roll20, this looks like a very useful
tool to have running in the background since the compendium search on Roll20
is so slow.

Looking forward to giving this a better try during my next session!

~~~
montagh451
Great to hear! Thanks for checking it out.

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.

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xtracto
I played D&D 15 years ago back when I was at Uni. I enjoyed the experience
with an amazing DM, but later had a miserable experience with a bad DM.
Nowadays I dont have as much time as I wish I had but I would love to play
"casually"

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.

~~~
Aeolun
There is Roll20, which allows you to play in online campaigns.

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tomlagier
Hey friend, this looks awesome! I spent some time playing around with a
similar idea but ended up chasing it from a different angle (a tool you could
use to create arbitrary roleplaying systems, divorced from D&D).

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.

~~~
montagh451
Public/sharing options is something very high on my priority list. I wanted to
get the core functionality right before moving on to that feature set.

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!

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GeertJohan
Love the editor. Great tool to write stories. Please consider connecting with
D&D Beyond for things like items, characters, monsters, etc. They already have
so much content available (licensed D&D content and homebrew). And they have
implemented a lot of the rules. I'd love to use Adventurekeep for managing
storylines in my existing campaign at D&D Beyond.

~~~
montagh451
It's definitely something I'd love to do. I have some ideas on how to make
this work - unfortunately, D&D Beyond does not provide an API, so it won't be
trivial. I'll be posting updates as I make progress on this.

Thanks for the feedback!

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miah_
Check out [https://5e.tools/](https://5e.tools/) they have a great API.

~~~
trynewideas
Not a great idea to hook a prospective business to a piracy site, no matter
how good it is.

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ohyeshedid
I thought 5e went open license again?

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jamie_ca
Specifically, 5e.tools includes full results (class features, items, spells,
monsters, ...) from a large number of books, which are definitely not all open
content.

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cloudking
Seems like a great idea, some feedback:

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

~~~
montagh451
Thanks so much for the feedback! I'll take a closer look at these. Great
suggestions!

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Beltiras
I'm a bit surprised you ask for an email address and then proceed to do
OAuth2.0. Why not skip the ask-for-email and get it from the identity
provider?

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.

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k_
Looks nice! Seems like a good fit for interfacing with map tools like [0]

[0]: [https://deepnight.net/tools/rpg-map/](https://deepnight.net/tools/rpg-
map/)

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maltelau
Looks cool. I like that you're focusing on the usage that's important when
planning / running an adventure: In the moment, you need to be able to look up
things _fast_ , AND you also want those links to stay in your notes in a
readable way. I prioritized those same two use cases when writing an emacs org
mode extension for my own use [1].

[1] [https://gitlab.com/maltelau/org-lookup-
dnd](https://gitlab.com/maltelau/org-lookup-dnd)

~~~
montagh451
Wow this looks awesome. Thanks for sharing!

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wyck
Very cool, since this is HN I would be nice to see what you're using to create
this, is there a plugin system, roadmap, open source?

~~~
montagh451
The front end is built with react, backend is using using prisma and Apollo
Server.

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!

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vnxli
This looks great. Do you have a blog or something where you post updates?

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!

~~~
montagh451
I will be posting updates as they’re ready. Keep an eye out! I would like to
include some sort of blog format.

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mileycyrusXOXO
I'll have to keep this in mind for my next campaign. I wasn't very happy with
most the online tooling around DND either and spent a lot of time thinking
about what would make for a better system but never spent the time to make it.
Best of luck!

~~~
montagh451
This is exactly what drove me to build Adventurekeep. Try it out and let me
know what you think!

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gdevenyi
Amazing, would love to see a pathfinder (2) version (the D&D 3.5 spiritual
successor)

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thesquib
I can't login or signup for some reason so I guess I can't look at it today.

~~~
montagh451
Hey, I'm sorry to hear that. Could send an email to contact@adventurekeep.com?
I can try to get you sorted out.

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sakian
Do you give access to the PHB content or just the standard rule set?

~~~
montagh451
Just standard rule set at the moment. Hopefully can expand on this in the
future!

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SubiculumCode
Can you edit the monster stats for an encounter?

~~~
montagh451
I am actively working on robust custom monster support. Keep a look out for
that update soon!

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sansnomme
This looks really slick, what's the stack?

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montagh451
React for the front end, node/Apollo Server + prisma graphql for the back end.

EDIT: I should probably elaborate that the FE is actually next.js

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senectus1
damn this looks amazing.

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montagh451
Thank you! Thanks for checking it out

