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Remember Links to Wisdom? At the time, a blog post had caught my attention and I ended up creating a wiki with a tiny bit of software around it in order to try and help solve the problem.
Well, it happened again. The blog post A database of old-school monsters caught my attention. There, Gavin says he wants an “online old-school monster database, *with tags*.”
A database of old-school monsters
It just so happened that I had some code lying around that would provide Campaign Wiki with tags. I gave it a try, and it worked.
Then I looked around for monsters to add to the wiki. I didn’t want to start with the The Hypertext d20 SRD or the Pathfinder SRD – I wanted *old school*. I remembered that Dan Proctor kindly doesn’t just host PDF files, he also provides text files for his stuff—the Open Game Content Library. So I went there, got the Labyrinth Lord monsters and the *Advanced Edition Companion* monsters, saved the Word document as text files and started using a lot of regular-expression based search and replace and keyboard macros to semi-automatically go through it all, split it into files and upload the stuff using some shell scripting. Yay for Perl, Emacs and the shell. 🙂
The result: Campaign:Monsters! A wiki for all of us. Add monsters that allow free distribution – Open Gaming Content, Creative Commons, your own stuff (if you’re willing to make it free), add tags, and make it grow. Use it to browse, find some inspiration, prepare your adventures and populate your wandering monster tables.
#RPG #Old School #Wikis
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Awesome! A request - for those of us running 1e/2e, would it be possible to get an entry for morale on a 1-20 scale? LL uses 2d6 morale.
– -C 2011-10-25 05:15 UTC
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Also, it would be super helpful if something like this existed for spells.
– -C 2011-10-25 06:23 UTC
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Morale on a 1-20 scale is easy to add but requires people knowing the actual numbers to edit all the pages. Sounds like a long term project to me. 😄
– Alex Schroeder 2011-10-25 07:16 UTC
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Not to be a grumpy old man here but shouldn’t the entries include their source? Both for legal reasons and to give crdeit where credit is due.
Otherwise I’m loving it.
– JDJarvis 2011-10-25 11:21 UTC
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Actually they don’t need to include their *source* per se, they need to have an appropriate OGL. I don’t think that requires me to paste the link on every single page of the wiki – but every monster entry should have a link to the standard OGL, the Labyrinth Lord OGL, the Advanced Edition Companion Labyrinth Lord OGL, the Tomb of Horrors Complete OGL, or equivalent.
If you note any entries missing a link to their respective license, let me know – this is definitely something that I want to keep straight.
– Alex Schroeder 2011-10-25 12:11 UTC
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Let’s say someone screwed up added a monster and didn’t title the page correctly, like I just did, how’s that get fixed?
re: http://campaignwiki.org/wiki/Monsters/2011-10-25
http://campaignwiki.org/wiki/Monsters/2011-10-25
– JDJarvis 2011-10-25 13:03 UTC
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You just edit the page and delete its content. This marks the page for deletion and it will be removed by a maintenance job in 14 days. At the same time, paste your stuff elsewhere. That’s what I did and now your monster resides here: CW:Monsters/Devouring_Sentinel
CW:Monsters/Devouring_Sentinel
– Alex Schroeder 2011-10-25 13:34 UTC
