Last week, I mentioned the SW Monster Database project. At long last, it is finished. After the links below, I'll talk a bit about the spreadsheet.
To download an MS Excel version, click here.
To download an Open Office version, click here.
To add your own creation to the database, click here.
After looking around a bit, you may feel a bit underwhelmed.
Gee John, for all the build-up, it's a list of stats with no monster descriptions.
I get that. I struggled with how to get the descriptions in the spreadsheet easily, but everything up to this point would be days of copy and paste. I'm a bit embarassed to say that as someone that has passing familiarity with awk, sed, bash scripting, and VBA macros. Someone with more skill than me should be able to do it easily.
If you can, please do so. I welcome anything that will make this resource better.
Having said that, I believe I can get the descriptions included without manually pasting them into the submission form. We'll see how that goes. The beauty of the project is that it can grow and continue to add features.
What we can do now is make all kinds of useful tables. Some of the most obvious include a list of monsters by Challenge Level. Download and then Sort by CL and then by Num.
Guess what Challenge Level has the most monsters? CL 5. There are 104 monsters in the SRD with a CL 5. After that, there are 98 monsters with CL 8. Here's the full count.
CL | Count |
0 | 2 |
A | 10 |
B | 12 |
1 | 50 |
2 | 77 |
3 | 88 |
4 | 93 |
5 | 104 |
6 | 75 |
7 | 75 |
8 | 98 |
9 | 74 |
10 | 65 |
11 | 48 |
12 | 52 |
13 | 59 |
14 | 18 |
15 | 31 |
16 | 14 |
17 | 26 |
18 | 8 |
19 | 9 |
20 | 11 |
21 | 3 |
22 | 4 |
23 | 7 |
24 | 3 |
25 | 2 |
26 | 4 |
27 | 3 |
28 | 4 |
29 | 1 |
30 | 8 |
31 | 3 |
32 | 2 |
33 | 4 |
34 | 4 |
35 | 1 |
36 | 1 |
37 | 2 |
38 | 2 |
39 | 1 |
40 | 5 |
42 | 1 |
varies | 12 |
Most of those varies entries are followers of a specific demon or devil. Later on, I plan to publish a few of those, with full stats.
Other possibilities have been mentioned on G+ already, but with this kind of spreadsheet, you can right a pretty good monster generator. Nothing beats writing one from scratch, but sometimes I need something that is "good enough" for right now. After all, a random encounter is truly random when even you don't know what the next monster around the corner will be.
I'll be adding more to this, but I'll be back to the S&W Magic project for the most part.