Game Master Buddy

In an age of mass media - table top role playing games are a wonderful alternative. For Game Master's there is a tremendous amount of effort needed to run games. This website / tool is meant to help.

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Inspiration

I am currently running Curse of Strahd and spent A TON of time finding and 3d printing dnd miniatures. I built a spreadsheet to share with others but over time it has fallen out of date. I wanted to make something that would have more permanence in terms of value for other GMs

What it does

This is a website which lists 3d print assets by campaign, chaption and page # for each creature in a campaign. Additionally it lists the quantity of creatures.

How we built it

The website and team from 5e.tools has compiled the campaign and creature data into JSON files. Using Bolt we built a backend system to parse these files to get the count of creatures (including an agentic system to build rich descriptions of the creatures), pull in 3d model references from Thingiverse and Printables and connect the datapoints together in a custom content management system. Finally we used Bolt to built a beautifully usable, responsive, tracked front end for our users.

Challenges we ran into

Bolt doesn't work great for Python but we wanted to use it for an Agentic workflow so we were flying blind for a while under that backend was completed (i.e. for some reason the interface refused to connect to our repo). Vibe coding hits different and it can be very tempting to start over at times or rebase. Sometimes we ran into a rats nest of code because of how poorly we were prompting. A ton of this work was exploratory and the data quality wasn't always perfect.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting the website launched and completing the list of models for Curse of Strahd was awesome. It's a fairly static website and but it's useful resource and foundation for other tremendous features so I'm excited about that.

What we learned

Doing a deep dive into Agents working with a niche dataset like DND modules was awesome. It's amazing to be able to ask a question about a campaign and get a list of facts along with references.

What's next for GMBuddy

We're going to continue our work compiling assets for other campaigns, add in functionality for user generated campaigns/model lists/checklists, and explore virtual tours of 3d structures.

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