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Web Scraping and Data Mining for GMs, Part 1

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Web Scraping and Data Mining for GMs, Part 1 A Brief Introduction I'm planning on running an AD&D 2nd edition campaign, and I'd like to be able to programatically access information about monsters in my world. TSR released a bunch of monsters for 2nd edition in their Monstrous Compendium series. I own most of these books in pdf, and could theoretically grab all the monsters information from those PDFs, but there is an easier way. These days, web scraping is an essential skill for programmers, and sometimes, for Game Masters. If, like me, you're a GM with some basic programming skill, you can scrape a lot of useful data. At one time, lomion.de was where you went if you wanted to see AD&D 2nd edition monster information online. Unfortunately, that site is no longer in existence. Enter The Wayback Machine : a project by archive.org to make older websites accessible. They have an archive of lomion.de , and a very liberal scraping p...
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Rethinking Monster Mythology

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I remember when TSR's Monster Mythology for AD&D 2nd Edition came out. I was excited. I felt that the support for religion in AD&D was pretty bad. Sure, I could create my own deities, and I did, but I was reaching a point in my life where I'd rather run things than create things. At the time, I was working full time and going to school full time. It was a lot. So I was always happy for more material for my table that would let me just play rather than create. I bought it as soon as I could, got it home, and read it. I was so disappointed. It's not terrible. It is a solidy useful bit of lore. But to my eyes, it was just so damned by the numbers. Religion, if you've never noticed, is incredibly weird, and the TSR pantheons weren't. Gods in Pantheons belonged in neat little categories. They had a particular sphere of influence, and that was the sum total of their existence. This is eminently gameable of course. Gods belong to a pantheon, and they have part...
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