This has been my secret pleasure for the past four years. Ever since I started playing D&D during the pandemic, I discovered my love for role playing and storytelling, but Beyond just wasn't cutting it for me. I wanted to make my own personal character creator and tracker that I could use for my games, so I set out to build Dwarven Academy (https://dwarven.academy/) and after two years of learning I decided to rebuild it all from the ground up, so The Elder Dragon's Tavern was born.

Try it out at https://elderdragonstavern.com/

This is an app to build and track D&D characters automatically, online, everywhere. It is integrated into Roll20 via a Chrome extension I wrote. I made it with the aim of automating all the book-keeping required in the game; and with the intent of being able to create lots of homebrew and tweak every single little thing about my characters. I like it because it's so flexible, down to the tiniest effect detail. Well, I like it because I built it, so I am certainly biased. I used it to create all characters I played over the past years, and to play all the campaigns I joined in that time, with the Roll20 extension.

It is built on top of a very simple firebase firestore database, which after years of use I've come to not enjoy particularly. Its limitations are sometimes fiddly and hidden away in obscure pieces of documentation. Sometimes it has network issues and doesn't properly push changes. I guess I chose it at the start because it was the easiest way to switch from prototyping (saving to local storage) to a cloud solution. All the stack is firebase to be honest and the rest is OK.

There is no backend: it's a complete frontend-based application. Even migration code is in the frontend. I just couldn't be bothered to set up an actual backend as I wanted to write things quickly for my own enjoyment. There are security rules on the firestore interface, of course.

Also, I dread social networks and marketing. I find it really draining and I don't want to invest all my time in advertising so after a first test with Dwarven Academy, I really didn't bother. As I said, I built this application mostly for myself but YOU can use it as well. It's free and available.

I've also been considering adding AI to it but honestly I asked myself... would I really benefit from it? Not sure. For now it seems too much work and cost for very little added value.