The Core Worlds

The Great SRD XML Project

When I arrived home from tonights game of Settlers of "I haven't finished writing the scenario!" Catan, I found a couple of nice emails waiting for me. Paul had found my blog when I trackbacked to his entry on the Dork Tower Bookstore strip.

He found my ideas about converting parts of the SRD to XML format interesting but had a few questions.

You don't mention what version of D&D you are going to use.

As its the current version (and the version I play), I want to get 3.5 done. Converting the old 3.0 might be an option at a later date.

Also, is it going to be strictly stuff from core rulebooks, or are third party feats, spells, etc also going to be part of your system (perhaps the origin of the feat or spell itself might be an XML category?)

Initially I want to get the 3.5 SRDs converted, these are the core of the game, and the parts that people in my position (I don't want to buy it again already!) are likely to want. However, once the core is converted, it would be great to expand it further, there is plenty of open game content out there and having as much of it as possible in one place would be great.

Having another XML tag was always the idea for identifying the source (and, like the <components> tag, it could be reused if a spell (or etc) appeared in multiple sources.)

Paul very kindly put a pointer to the project in his blog (thanks Paul!), but was concerned he wasn't qualified to help. I don't know what his reasons for this were, but please don't think you need strong technical skills or experience with XML. The format is very easy to syntax check, so even if you make a mistake it is easy to find the problem and fix it. The more hands to help out with this the easier it will be.

Posted by at 10:40 PM. You can comment on this entry.