We're pleased to introduce a Technical Preview of a new feature to Roll20: The Compendium . The idea behind this new section of the website is simple. When you're playing a game, you often have to do a quick rules lookup. However, it can be slow and frustrating to have to flip through a physical rulebook (which is really designed more for teaching you how to play a game, not as an index of rules organized alphabetically). In addition, rules (such as the Bestiary) often reference other parts of the rulebook, leading to frequent back-and-forth page turning. We want the Compendium to solve this issue by serving as a quick, inter-linked reference guide to the rules you'll frequently want to access during gameplay. The Compendium is designed to be accessible both from desktop computers and mobile devices such as phones and tablets, so you can always carry it with you wherever you play -- and of course it's integrated directly into our new Roll20 for iPad and Roll20 for Android tablet apps. It's designed to be extremely easy to use, and it's not bogged down by ads or other distractions. We spent a lot of time crafting a design for it that maximized readability and the speed at which you can find information and get back to gaming. What can it do today? Today we're launching a Technical Preview of the Compendium . This is not the finished version, but a first step toward our ultimate goal. The Compendium today is launching with content from the Pathfinder SRD, including Spells, Bestiary, Rules, Classes, and more. We intend to continue to add additional Pathfinder content, and to further expand the Compendium to add books from other games with open content licenses as well (such as D&D 3.5, 13th Age, Dungeon World, and more). What will it do in the future? What makes the Compendium even better than a digital PDF is not only its separation of the rules onto their own pages (like an encyclopedia), but the fact that it is built on top of structured data. Rather than just a collection of text, the Compendium is designed to actually "know" that a Fireball Spell has a range of 120ft. That will allow us to build advanced search capabilities, where you can search for an entry based on its attributes rather than just free-form text. So for example you could see all the Spells with a range of 120ft. Or all the monsters in the Bestiary that have a CR of 5 and live in Desert environments. We want the Compendium to be a community effort, and as such we will operate it like a wiki, where anyone on the Roll20 site can contribute to keeping the content up-to-date, add new entries, and even new games (as long as they are open-content licensed). We're also looking into ways that we can allow you to build your own Compendiums for your own private games, your house rules, etc. Note that during the Technical Preview these editing features are currently disabled. We'll let you know when you're able to help contribute to the cause! Finally, perhaps the coolest facet of the Compendium will be its eventual integration directly with Roll20. Here's a preview of what we're planning to provide: As you can see, the structured data in the Compendium will allow us to offer "copy and paste" functionality where you can import Spells, and perhaps even entire monsters and NPCs, directly from the Compendium into your Roll20 Character Sheets, cutting down drastically on the amount of time it takes to fill out a sheet and get your game up and running. Today is just the beginning. Today is just the first step in a long journey toward creating a truly amazing piece of the Roll20 puzzle. We look forward to working with the whole community to create the ultimate rules reference for as many RPG systems as possible!
