Dadi of the Mystic Arts: Much appreciation to this wonderful creator and his community for helping with feedback on the overall layout of things in the vault along with sort of being the main voice getting it out there that this even exists at all. Check out his Patreon if you want some neat homebrew stat blocks that use my template. He offers them in image form or Obsidian file form intended to be used with this vault depending on your tier.
Here are the community members from Dadi’s Discord who helped format and edit this vault:
Norm, First Wizard of the School of Syntax. The absolutely phenomenal work of getting all the stat blocks and a good chunk of other pages quickly formatted with his coding knowledge so that I only had to do an edit pass over them. I don’t truly know how much he cut down my formatting time, but I’d wager it turned a year(s) long task into a month(s) long task for sure.
Russel. Another wonderful contributor to helping provide formatted .md files for me to edit rather than having to do it all myself. Particularly the ones related to classes for this assistant.
Josh Plunkett: This creator and his hosting of a wonderful Obsidian TTRPG Tutorial Website along with the Obsidian TTRPG Discord community he also hosts have been wonderful help in my initial foray and learning of Obsidian. If you’re in need of some Obsidian advice, there’s a good chance Josh might have a video up about it already or someone in that Discord can help answer any questions you may have.
Anto - Icarus Games: All the props to this guy for not only having content I’ve happily used to level up my DMing in general, but also introducing me to various TTRPG tools and resources. The main contribution of his that got me to put him here though was his work on a wonderful table of statistics for the 5e24 Monster Manual. As someone who has attempted undergoing that task myself, I know it had to have taken many many hours perusing through 500+ stat blocks and plugging the numbers into a spreadsheet to produce that awesome table. If you’d like his chart, you can download it here. Just plop it into the attachments folder and backlink it with a ! in whatever file you want it to appear in.
Resources
Forgotten Adventures: If you’re looking for some top down token art to either plop onto the stat blocks instead of the official art or to use in whatever VTT you’re using, I cannot recommend them enough. They made the artwork that Foundry uses for the tokens that come with the 5e System and at least the base color of each token is free. It’s worth the few bucks a month to support their Patreon for access to login to their site with Patreon and get the Patreon download though for sure. Most tokens come with anywhere from 6 to 12 variant colorations and it’s all super high quality. Great mapmaking assets for things like DungeonDraft as well.
Scryfall: While technically this is a Magic the Gathering card database, you can download art crops of different cards here which can be super useful for character and creature art. The search has function where if you type “art:subject” and search, plenty of images are tagged and will pull up. For instance, if you want to see what zombie art is up, you can type “art:zombie” into the search bar and any card with zombies in the art should pull up. I recommend changing the “Cards” dropdown to “Unique art” for the widest search results.
Point Buy Calculator: This is the calculator my table uses for custom point buy since I DM with a table that goes from 6 to 16 instead of 8 to 15. You can go under Custom Rules to tweak how much each ability costs, what the min/max are, etc. Super useful for if you’re not using DnD Beyond for even just the base Point Buy system, but also for custom Point Buy.
Giffyglyph’s Monster Maker: Technically this has only been updated for 2014’s rules, so the math might need some tweaking for 2024 since things are a bit deadlier now, but it blends 4e monster building design with things like Ranks and Roles with the math of 5e. It’s a great tool for DMs who like brewing things from scratch and this + Anto’s statistics chart should allow a wonderful blend of tools for building. Sadly all of Giffyglyph’s tools, both the website and Foundry module, seem a bit outdated / not working. Technically the Foundry module was released after the 3.0.0 version I linked, but in practice it did not seem to line up with what’s in the 3.0.0 PDF to a degree that I found it usable. Some of my issues may have also been issues with a big Foundry update happening that messed with it, so feel free to check it out, but don’t be surprised if it doesn’t really work.
https://game-icons.net/: A wonderful site for making TTRPG icon images. You’ll see it used a few times throughout the vault, such as my creature type icons in The Corvid Compendium.
The Compendium of Forgotten Secrets: Probably one of my favorite third party supplements for the 2014 ruleset. I’ve pulled so much lore from it and will reference it a few times in The Corvid Compendium since, for instance, a few of my deities are inspired by ones from this
Dice Calculator: A great tool for figuring out what the average of a roll is. For instance if something is X (3d8) and you want to know what the X should be, just plug 3d8 in, it tells you the average is 13.5, round down to 13, and boom you now know it should read 13 (3d8). The one exception to this is if something returns a .99999999. For instance once you get into the territory of HP of using like 20d8, it’ll return an average of 89.999999. I’ve compared it to a few stat blocks and it appears you’d just use 90 in those cases for the average. It’s just that .5 (or .50000000000007 at higher dice counts) that you lop off and round down on. A basic rule of thumb here is that if you have an even number of dice, round up, but if you have an odd number of dice round down.