This is going to be more of a ‘strategic’ post, in that I’m going to describe how I expect to solve the problem, rather than actually show my solution.
The simple reason for it: it’s going to be quite a bit of work, because there is little support for the question I’m asking.
Short form: read all the monsters, note (or tag) the ones that look like a good fit for each domain. Collate at the end.
Right now, the Echelon Reference Series data set has 4,312 monsters, 1,758 characters (most of which won’t be a great fit, but some might be), 288 monster templates (totally can be applicable), and 47 simple templates.
That’s a lot of reading.
However! Me being me, and having the right tools (and the stat blocks in accessible form), I can hopefully make this a little easier.
- Do some minimal parsing of the monster (and character) stat blocks
- Extract CR
- Extract HD (from the hit point line)
- Extract creature type and subtypes
- (maybe) Environment… I’m not sure it’ll be useful, but it shouldn’t be hard to get.
- Export the object descriptions/definitions to a big stack of HTML pages, with some index pages to keep me sane.
- Add a couple new worksheets to my Master List (Excel workbook that lists all the objects in the ERS, all the sources, prereqs for everything, and so on) with the monsters and their CR, HD, type, and subtypes (and environment, if I grab that)… and links to the HTML files.
- I now have a master list I can sort, spindle, fold, and mutilate to try to filter things down. I can add columns to make it easy to tag the domains of interest. I can click the file links to pop the HTML up and read it if I need to see more detail.
I can probably get this together in… oh, probably a day or so of effort. The scripting likely doesn’t take all that long, but the runtime will be quite a while. For templates, there isn’t a lot to parse that I can really make use of. I can still create a worksheet with the name and domain tags though.
Later, I can come back and parse some more of the stat block. I certainly want the various stats (useful for analysis) and I’d love to be able to get solid links to the various abilities (universal rules or class features, etc.). Feat and spell links are picked up more or less automatically already by regular text link logic, but it would be good to be able to attach them to specific fields. Once I’ve done that, I might add them to this worksheet, or more likely to a new one.
Note to Self: after generating this, take a copy for the edits, because next time I build the file, all the worksheets are replaced and I’ll lose any manual markup.