Dragon's Quill

What is D&D?

Dungeons and Dragons is a role playing game where people take control of heroes in a fantasy world. Using improv, imagination and dicerolls they weave a collaborative story. The group is guided through this by the ’Dungeon master’ (DM). They prepare and describe the world, play all of its characters (including the creatures you’ll fight) and oversee the rules.

Problem

In my D&D groups, I’m the DM. Preparing game sessions can get pretty confusing. There’s a lot going on in our imaginary world and a lot of possible ways the group can choose to go. I like to write down the possible people they could meet or possible places they could visit at the top of my google document. When I'm actually writing out possible scenes and I need to look up details from a person, I eventually get lost and frustrated by all the scrolling.

Solution

This is why I created a system that uses digital index cards. The subjects of these cards can be linked to while writing out scenes so you can quickly find the relevant information. After creating a demo, I showed it to my target audience. In a subreddit dedicated to DM’s, I finally showed it to people other than my friends. They loved it. It got a lot more upvotes than the average post on this subreddit and people were asking me to keep them updated so they could use it when it goes live. Because this project needs a lot more backend work to be an actual shippable product, I kept it as a proof of concept. It was a great learning experience and if I find someone in the future who would like to help me, I might finish it.

My role and learnings

After taking an online React course, this was the first project I created. First I designed it in Figma and then developed it in React. It made me more comfortable with coding and really put me to the test of doing a project from beginning to end.

Website

A prototype of this project can be found here.