Deck of Many Monsters

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Contents 1 History 2 Solution 3 Implementation 4 Improvements

History

One thing I like to do to make DMing easier is create index cards of Monster and NPC stats. This makes it easier than have 2 or 3 books open while trying to run combat.

I originally just wrote down stats on a 4x6 index card, but that ended up with me doing a lot of writing. Soon after, I created a simple template in OpenOffice that I would fill in and print out. That worked pretty well but I wanted something a little more flexible and hopefully with less typing. I thought it would be neat to be able to pump a bunch of data through some kind of display template and generate hundreds of monster cards in a few seconds.

Solution

1. Provide monster/NPC stats in some kind of XML format
2. Translate that format into a FO document(s) using XSLT
3. Process the document(s) using Apache FOP to generate PDFs

Implementation

Using Ant I do the following:

1. For now I am using the Monster XML document from http://www.andargor.com/ (monsters.xml)
2. I pump that data through an XSL template to clean up the data a bit (monsters_clean.xsl outputs to monsters_clean.xml)
3. I pump the "clean" data through another XSL template to generate a FO document (monsters-fo.xsl outputs to monsters.fo)
4. I process monsters.fo using Apache FOP to generate monsters.pdf

Improvements

Standard Data Format 

The basic idea is to let people create their own layout templates or improve on existing ones. Even the new standard stat block needs to be able to access some attributes that are currently stored as a block text in monsters.xml instead of individual elements.