AD&D Bestiary

A reference you can search mid-conversation without losing your place.

Web Personal project

Who uses it

My own tabletop group, plus whoever found it after it was shared in a community forum for the game. It is public with nothing to sign into, so no count is kept — the group I can actually account for is mine.

How long it took

Four days.

Still maintained

Stable.

Where it runs

adnd-bestiary.fochizzy.workers.dev

The problem it solves

Running an older edition of a tabletop game means looking things up constantly, in books with indexes that assume you already know the name of what you want. Every lookup stops the game while everyone waits.

How it works

The whole reference is indexed in advance, so a search returns an answer immediately rather than searching as you type.
A partial or half-remembered name is enough to find the entry.
It is built to be read on a phone next to a table, not only on a desk.

What this is built with

Each part, and what it does, in plain terms.

Hosting

Where the site actually runs. These run on Cloudflare, the same service that carries traffic for a large share of the web, so pages load from whichever of its locations is nearest the reader.

A web page people use

The site itself, the screens people click through. It opens in an ordinary browser, so there is nothing for anyone to install.

An index built in advance so a large reference can be used quickly. It finds an entry from a partial word instead of making someone scroll.