How to use D&D Easy

D&D Easy is a toolkit for Dungeon Masters. It uses Claude to write table-ready content (realms, adventures, characters) and OpenAI to draw images (maps and item handouts). Everything it produces is original and SRD-aware — not official Wizards of the Coast content. See Licenses & content for SRD attribution and how your imported material is handled.

✦ Quick start

1. On the home page, pick what you want to create from the six tabs: Realm, Adventure, Characters, Items, Maps, or Library.
2. Fill in the options. Almost everything is optional — a one-line description is enough to get going.
3. Press the Generate button at the bottom of the form and watch the result stream into the Scrying Glass on the right.
4. Use the buttons above the output to copy, download, or print what you made.

✦ Workflow guides

Step-by-step pop-up tours for common DM prep paths — from a no-AI one-nighter to a long-running campaign. Each guide switches Workshop tabs for you and includes manual alternatives where AI is optional.

Or open the workshop and click Workflow guides in the sidebar.

✦ Realm

Builds a setting document at whatever scale you choose — from a whole world down to a local cluster of villages. Describe the place you imagine, generate, and you get an organized write-up with geography, peoples, politics, trade, story hooks, and a DM cheatsheet. You can also have it draw a matching realm map image.

After generating, the realm is saved automatically as a Creation File (CF) — a named summary kept in your browser. CFs appear as a dropdown on the Realm and Adventure tabs, so new generations can stay consistent with settings you made earlier.

✦ Adventure

Writes a playable adventure module. Pick a length — Short for part of a session or One-nighter for a full evening — then optionally set tone, level range, party size, a villain, and how combat-heavy it should be (the 1–5 slider). Choose a CF to anchor the adventure in one of your saved settings. Adventures you generate are also saved as CFs automatically. The app can also automatically generate battle maps and item handouts for key scenes it finds in the finished adventure.

✦ Heroes

Creates a ready-to-play party of pre-made heroes with stats, gear, and hooks, using SRD-open options only. Tell it how many heroes you need and any preferences, and hand the results to your players.

✦ Items — management and handouts

Items work in two places. The Items page is your item library: create normal equipment and magic items (with rarity, attunement, and stat bonuses), search and sort them, and add any item to a hero's gear — the sheet gets its own copy, so treasure handed out stays put even if you edit the library later. Items from books you own go here too; like all your data they stay private on this device.

The workshop's Items tab generates handout images of objects: letters and scrolls, potions, weapons, armor, tools, chests, jewelry, food, relics, and more. Pick an item type, describe the object, and optionally set its look, materials, age, and wear. Great for dropping on the table when the party finds something.

✦ Maps

Draws two kinds of maps: locale / overland maps (full-color, atlas-style with cities, routes, and clear water) and battle maps (top-down graph-paper style for miniatures). Generate either or both. You can set image size (landscape, portrait, or square), detail quality, and whether distances read in imperial or metric units. Finished images download as PNG — ready for virtual tabletops or printing.

✦ Library — your configuration database

The Library is the UI for your configuration management database (CMDB). Every result, character, item, party, and campaign is a Creation File (CF) with exactly one class (for example character.sheet, item.magic, campaign.record). Campaigns are the structural root: they link other CFs by id only — never copies. Generated content still saves once to your library; linking just records the id on the open campaign.

The Library holds two kinds of data:

• Included rules (SRD) — browse spells, monsters, classes, equipment, and rules from the bundled SRD corpus (Rule tomes shelf and Browse rule tomes). SRD equipment and magic items are read-only CFs (item.srd-equipment, item.srd-magic) you can reference on hero sheets and in the SRD browser. Hero pickers use a bundled spell/class index. This is the only rules reference D&D Easy hosts. It is read-only and never needs backing up.
• Yours — everything you import or make, saved once and managed the same way: heroes, items, fellowship notes from books you own (typed or uploaded, including a D&D Beyond character JSON you saved yourself), CFs you write, and results the generators produce. Things made in the app carry a Creation tag so you can tell them apart from imported files. Stored in this browser on this device only, never uploaded to a server.

Your imports and creations should never live only in the browser. Set an auto-save folder in the Library (one click): point it at a local directory or a cloud-synced folder like OneDrive, Google Drive, or Dropbox, and every change is written there automatically — no manual exporting. Alongside the main backup file, each party member is also written as their own portable .md hero sheet in a characters folder — grab any one of those files to bring a single hero into an adventure, another party, or a Virtual Table session on any device. Saving is strictly one-way: the app writes to your folder but never reads from it on its own. To bring data into the app (for example on a new device), use Restore backup under "Where is my data?" and pick the file yourself. Browsers without folder access (Firefox, Safari) can use Export backup the same way. Open any entry to preview it in the Scrying Glass, copy its Markdown, or download files.

✦ Campaigns — running more than one group

If you run several groups, create one campaign per group on the Campaigns page. A campaign links that group's fellowship, heroes, items, and the CFs and results that belong to its story (links are id references — the same realm CF can serve two campaigns), and it keeps its own Virtual Table. Open a campaign from the title-bar switcher and the map, tokens, fog, and initiative come back exactly as that group left them; the other group's table is shelved safely. While a campaign is open, the Library can show just its content, and anything new you create links to it automatically. Deleting a campaign only removes the container — the party, CFs, and results stay in your library.

✦ Campaign workflow — prep & run

Use this guide when you are running (or starting) a campaign: how campaigns, The Library, the Fantasy Forge, The Tavern, and the Virtual Table work together today — and what is planned next.

✦ The Tavern — heroes & fellowships in one place

The Tavern is where your heroes live. Generate a ready-made party with AI, create a sheet with the built-in editor (SRD species, classes, and spells are one click; options from your own books go in Notes), import a portable .md hero file, or copy members out of a saved fellowship. Sort and search your heroes, edit them any time, and download any one as its own .md file. When a group forms, select heroes and click Create party — or add them to an existing fellowship. Fellowships are the unit the rest of the app uses: link one to a campaign, keep campaign notes on it, and load it onto the Virtual Table. Deleting a hero never touches fellowships it already joined (they keep their own copy), and deleting a fellowship never deletes your heroes.

✦ Saving, printing, and making booklets

• Copy Markdown — copies the raw text; paste it into Obsidian, Notion, Google Docs, or Word.
• Download .md / .html — saves the document as a file. The HTML version is styled and ready to open in any browser.
• Print — opens your browser's print dialog with text and images formatted together. Choose Save as PDF as the destination to make a PDF.
• Adventures and realms render as a cover page plus one chapter-sheet per section. Print each to PDF and merge the PDFs in your viewer to bind realm + adventure into a single booklet.

✦ Content & your purchased books

Built-in generators use SRD-open rules only. If you own other D&D books, you can type character notes from your D&D Beyond sheet, upload a character .json you saved yourself, or paste a party file — that material stays on this device in your browser, not in a shared library other users can browse. We do not connect to D&D Beyond or sell paywalled Wizards of the Coast content.

For a step-by-step walkthrough of bringing purchased book content in legally — character options, imported parties, and published adventures — take the Using books you own tutorial. Full attribution and policy details: Licenses & content.

✦ Tips & troubleshooting

• Generation takes a little while — text streams in live, and images can take up to a minute. The progress checklist in the Scrying Glasspanel shows what is happening.
• Not happy with a result? Adjust your description and generate again. More specific descriptions give more specific results.
• An error mentioning a missing API key means the server hosting the app has not been configured with its Anthropic / OpenAI keys — that is a setup issue for whoever runs the app, not something players can fix.
• If an image fails to generate, try again — occasional hiccups from the image service are normal and the app retries automatically.

Back to the workshop