New – Public 4e Monster Database
Share your monsters – new feature on DM Tools
I’ve been thinking about making a public database of all the monsters created on our DM Tools website. After a little work I managed to create a simple, straightforward search tool that allows you to search all public monsters created with our DM Tools.
This is a feature of the free DM Tools account – you don’t have to be a premium member to search the monster database.
Copy monsters to your account: I believe this is the cool thing about this new feature – you can copy a monster to your account. So if you see a monster you like and want to tweak it, or get the code to use on ObsidianPortal.com, just click “Copy to My Monster Cards” and the monster card that someone else created is in your account for you to change and use.
Copyrighted material: All you have to do to share a monster is click a checkbox and confirm that you are not using copyrighted material. So if you’re copying monsters from the Monster Manual – I do that all the time so I can have them in my campaign wiki – please don’t make the monster card public.
Do you have monsters you’d like to share?
Don’t have a DM Tools account?
Start Searching
To make sure I don’t get in copyright hell I made all the 1,500 monsters currently in our database ‘private’. So there’s not much in there right now. But I’m sure a lot of users will soon start sharing – let’s make this an awesome community tool for DMs!
Arete
kickass sir! There’s already some good quality monsters being shared on the database.
Thanks! It’s going to be a valuable tool. I just have to monitor it closely so I don’t get in trouble with people copying monster blocks straight from the books.
I have a monster request that I’m hoping someone will take up. I am a very busy DM and don’t have time to do this monster type justice, but if someone starts something I’d be happy to jump in and modify. The miniatures system WARMACHINE has a really cool concept with steam powered magical constructs. I think they would be really cool if done right for 4E fantasy and I’d like to add them to my campaign. If you are familiar with WM and want to give it a go, I’d be forever indebted.
I like the idea, and in fact I’m tempted to migrate all my Weekly What the Heck monsters over here to make it easier for people to use them and to save myself the html-wrangling I’ve been doing to format them. I already added my first one as a test.
However, I’m concerned about the potential for this site to get the same crackdown a couple other 4e tool sites did, especially when I note that there are already quite a few copyright violations in the database (at a glance, it looks like Deathjump Spider, Dire Rat (twice), Displacer Beast, Flameskull, Giant Rat (twice), Gibbering Mouther, Goblin Cutter, Goblin Warrior, Hobgoblin Archer, Hobgoblin Grunt, Imp, Kobold Minions, Kobold Slinger, and Rat Swarm (twice) are all straight from the Monster Manual (the names match, and the levels/roles appear to).
Can I get some reassurance that someone will be monitoring violations (I’m pretty sure the ones I listed have been there for at least 4 days now) and removing or “privatizing” them, or that I can back up my monsters locally in case this project has to be suddenly abandoned due to… “outside pressure”?
I don’t want to come off as evil or nasty – I’m just concerned because I would really like to harness this tool but I don’t want to see months of work evaporate if do.