fictzio/rpg-markdown

Markdown dialect for game content and plots. Main purpose to create a flexible way to update content on the fly in most editors and facilitate extraction of game data for use in scripts, macros, virtual tabletops etc.

RPG Markdown

! November 2020, I'm bringing this to life again!

RPG Markdown is an effort to create structured guidelines for writing game content. The goal is readable, easy to write and parsable for extraction of data to game entities.

RPG Markdown is based on patterns commonly used in TTRPG game texts.

RPG Markdown recomends patterns that a writer should follow to allow parser to extract game data from a text.

Consider RPG Markdown a dialect of standard markdown.

Some uses for RPG Markdown

• Create source material for games and stories.
• Structure a plot.
• Save transcripts of dialogs and game session activity.
• Write manuscripts for plays, LARPs or NPC dialog in an adventure.
• Extract data about a game enteties for use in bots, virtual tabletops, scripts and macros.

RPG Markdown should

• Render well in regular markdown parsers.
• Read well in Markdown editor.
• Have syntax that is recognisable to cretors of TTRPG game content.

The foundation

RPG Markdown is a based on Markdown language by John Grüber.

To allow for writing of dialogs RPG Markdown uses the Markdown dialect Fountain which allows for writing of screenplays.

It also suggests how to use Front Matter to enrich the markdown content.

Markdown inspiration

• Commonmark
• Kramdown
• Maruku
• MultiMarkdown
• Pandocs Markdown
• Github flavored markdown, GFM
• PHP Markdown Extra
• Mermaid, charts and diagrams
• Reveal JS, presentation decks on markdown
• Homebrewery, DnD niceness from markdown
• FicDown, interactive fiction written in markdown

And many more that I haven't mentioned yet. I'll keep adding.

The parser

The first parser was built as an extension of Dominic Baggotts markdown parser which renders to both HTML and JSON. The JSON part is the result of the syntax differientals which tags certain content as data.

2020-03-03, Using Remark and MDSVEX (Svelte and Markdown) to create rollable tables and lists.

2020-11-19, I just started work on rebuilding the parser to work with the Unified Collective and especially the markdown parser Remark. One goal is to structure RPG Markdown as an AST

Current status

2021-03-03, Got a working example of RPG markdown used for rollable tables and lists. Interactive fiction half working.

2021-01-21, RPG Markdown is to some extent used in the character sheet module for FictionBoard Actor Module

2020-11-29, The RPG Markdown concept is being used in my virtual tabletop project FictionBoard. It's still in an early phase of development and I just restarted work on the parser and dialect specification.

Contributing

Please feel free to comment on the project, make suggestion and other input.

rpg-markdown's Issues

Create better RPG Markdown examples

Create Fountain writeup of a chat dialog with actions