The Sieve

launch party!

I wrote some (free and open source) tools that are ready for public consumption!

Dice Grid

The simplest is Dice Grid (source)

There’s a lot of different online dice rollers out there. I think they all have a bad user experience. Some make you click multiple times to add various dice to a tray that you roll, some make you type in formulas, some make you roll one die at a time, etc.

Dice-grid pre-rolls d8s for you (because the most common big-roll for me is hit dice, which is d8), and the only interface operation is to click another size. It generates 12 rolls of that dice size in the white rectangles, and then does various summing operations. The blue numbers sum the columns, the red numbers sum the rows, and the green numbers sum each grouping of 6.

In this way, you can ‘read the tea leaves’ however you want.

• Need to roll up 4 ghouls? Click d8 and use the first 4 blue numbers.

• Need to roll 6d6 for a fireball? Click d6 and read off the first green number.

• Need 5 bugbears? Click d8 and record the 4 red numbers, then click it again and record the first one.

• Need d100? Click the d10 and read the first column of 2 white numbers.

• Need to make 10 attacks? Click d20 and read off the first 10 white numbers.

Inventory Manager

Inventory management is a frequent pain-point in my games. Players often want to shuffle around equipment, but trying to remember to erase an item on one sheet and add it to another is error-prone. Magic items get lost in the throes of inebriation. The game grinds to a halt as I describe an extremely complicated magic item and the players have to keep stopping me to write it down.

So I wrote TTRPG Inventory (source) to fix that.

It runs on an abstract understanding of “characters”, which can have “containers” which have “items”. There are normal items (white), treasure items (green), unidentified magic items (purple), and raw coin (yellow). Items have weights using configurable units (lbs in the above picture), and containers have capacities. Should work equally well for slots, lbs, coins, stone-weight, etc.

Items can be identified (if the creator supplies a secret name/description), treasure can be liquidated to cash, and everything can be transferred around or re-ordered within containers. Everything updates in real-time.

No account required, your data is tied to whatever URL suffix you want to use. I have a sample up at https://ttrpg-inventory.web.app/test, so if you want to use this at your table, just change test to whatever you want and share that with your players (who are expected to access it from their phones).

If you’re nervous about me hosting your data, the repo is open source and it’s easy to self-host.

The Sieve

The biggest project is a couple of ideas rolled into one. I hate PDFs. They’re miserable to edit, they tend to be poorly bookmarked, they’re hard to actually provide review and feedback on.

I love markdown. It’s technically code, so all of the collaborative code-sharing and code-reviewing tools (like git, github, diff tools, and LLMs, auto-complete engine, language servers, linting engines, vim, etc) work frictionlessly on it.

But, markdown kind of sucks for producing a well-formatted, printable tabletop artifact. So I created a markdown renderer that renders formatted tabletop adventures.

edit: I packaged it as a native desktop app

I converted the (cc-by-sa) adventure Chaotic Caves into markdown (here), and then rendered it with The Sieve

The engine defaults to 5.5x8” (half-letter) pages, so it should be perfect for printing off as a booklet (which is my use case). You also get a full table of contents for free.

There’s currently support for boxed-text, in-line images, tables, switching between one-column and two-column, auto-column balancing, bold, italics, and stat blocks.

I’ve started editing the chaotic caves revised to give a sense of what the editing process looks like, and how I slowly workshop a room. You can see an individual edit history across commits: https://github.com/beaurancourt/the-sieve/commits/main/modules/chaotic-caves-revised/chaotic-caves-revised.md

More importantly, I want for this to serve as a review community (hence the name). The modules directory is open for pull requests for you to submit your own adventures that I (and other community members) can help you improve. I’ll build out more automated review processes (linting, AI review, etc) as well as provide manual feedback as we build out a set of best practices together. Looking forward to see if anyone takes me up on the offer. Enjoy! ❤️