The Screen of Many

Landing Page
Notes Screen Separated By Category
Map Screen w/ Codex and Initiative Tracker

Inspiration

After years of being a frequent DM for many D&D games I was getting tried of having to open 7 different tabs and bring a set of three books whenever I went to go run a session. So I created a desktop app that helps heavily cut down on the equipment I need to bring.

What it does

The Screen Of Many is a Note Manager, Rulebook, Dice Roller, and Battlemap all rolled into one desktop application. The rules and notes are stored as JSON files, so you can easily have multiple notes per campaign or import rules material outside of the SRD. It also means that you can use The Screen of Many to run any TTRPG, not just 5E and not just D&D.

How I built it

I decided to really focus on the DMing experience, and tried not to reinvent the wheel on things that have been done better. I set it up as an electron app in order to prevent any latency issues, which can be a problem when using web-based software. The map is controlled using a Konva canvas, and the in-app codex uses Open-SRD to generate initial content files and Showdown to convert markdown text to html. Everything else is raw HTML, JS, CSS, and pain

Challenges I ran into

Getting Konva canvas to behave will never be an easy task, and there was a lot of trial and error even getting a basic version of a battlemap setup. Formatting the Codex entries was also a marathon of a task that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

The Codex is my favorite part of the entire application. It's by far the best looking thing I've ever designed, and the data page formatting was a learning experience in and of itself.