Hello everybody! Today we’re going to take a look at a new solution for importing your
DnDBeyond characters, items, spells, and monsters into Foundry that comes to us from
the developer Mr. Primate. Mr. Primate was a huge contributor to the codebase for character
parsing in the VTTA DnDBeyond Importer and has now developed his own solution that has
a number of improvements including automated spell and item import along with a monster
import that doesn’t involve installing an extension or connecting it to Foundry.
The only con being that it doesn’t (and he has no plans to) handle importing entire adventures.
If you’re wondering why we’re taking a look at a new importer be sure to check the description for
a link to a YouTube community post I made about the issue. I will also try and post
updates there or in a pinned comment as they happen. For now, VTTA’s adventure import still
mostly works so if you can get it running that may still be an option for you.
But let’s not focus on all of that and get right to the good stuff: importing our characters! Well,
first we have to install the module, but THEN, right to importing our characters! All we’ve
got to do is go to our Add-On Modules tab, hit ‘Install Module’ and search for the D&D Beyond
Importer. Make sure you’re selecting the one that has ‘MrPrimate’ as the listed developer.
While we’re here we’re also going to install the Iconizer module which looks at the items
we’re importing and tries to automatically find the appropriate icon so your character sheet
isn’t filled with mystery man icons. Iconizer is still technically under the VTTA umbrella
but you’ll notice that you’re, at least at the time of this recording,
not able to install it from the module manager. Go read my YT community post to find out why.
There’s a fix to this as well that comes to us from, you guessed it, Mr. Primate.
He’s forked it and provided an installable Manifest URL that I’ll put in the description
as well and has sought to take over the package in the module manager but as of this recording
it hasn’t happened yet. I’ll leave a note in a pinned comment if that happens to change.
There’s some other cool modules that work well with the new importer but we’re going to take
a look at those later. Let’s start simple by launching our world and activating the Importer,
clicking yes to activate its dependencies and activating Iconizer as well.
Then we can jump into the module settings and get everything configured.
We’ll start with the essential DnDBeyond Importer settings. First we’re going to set an image upload
directory for imported images. I’ll create a new directory to store them but you can keep
them wherever you’d like. Just be sure you do set something here as otherwise you may get an error
when we try to import our characters. Then we’re going to set which compendium we want everything
to import into. If you have a custom module that lets you share compendia between your worlds
you can change this dropdown to select the relevant compendium. If you don’t
have that you’re free to use the compendia that the module made for you automatically.
With those settings configured that’s all you need for basic character imports where
your spells and items will come in as well. We’ll take a look at the rest of
the settings in a moment. For now let’s take a quick look at Iconizer’s settings.
I leave almost all of these settings at their defaults but let’s go over what they do quickly:
The first setting is the ‘Icon replacement policy’ which you can set to replace all icons,
replace only default icons (so anything using the mystery man icon),
or do not replace any icons. This is the one setting I change and I set it to ‘Replace
only default icons’ because I only want items without icons to be changed.
Then we have the ‘Icon database policy’ which tells Iconizer where it should look to find
what items should get what icons. You can use the predefined database Iconizer comes
with or you can use it and a custom database, or just a custom database that you’ve made.
You can also change the base dictionary which lets you change the type of icons you’re using.
The default is Foundry Icons but you can also use World of Warcraft icons either
locally or through WoWHead.com. We’ll leave this as Foundry Icons as well.
The Icon Prefix setting is only important if you’re using another base dictionary
than the default Foundry one and is used to identify where you have your
custom icons if you’re storing them locally. We can ignore this though.
Now it’s time for the moment you’ve all been waiting for!
We’re going to import our first character. All we have to do is go to our Actor’s Directory hit
‘Create Actor’ or open an actor that we already have that we want to become our character. It
doesn’t matter what it’s named as all of that will be overwritten in a moment. With the
character sheet open you’ll see a “B” with yellow text underneath it. If you still have the VTTA
importer installed you’ll also see a “B” with red text. We want the yellow one so I’ll click that.
Then we can enter the URL to our character sheet on DnDBeyond in the URL field. You’ll want to
make sure your character is public by clicking the ‘Gear’ icon here, going to preferences,
and then scrolling down to the ‘Character Privacy’ dropdown and setting it to public.
We can see it has detected our character and then if we hit ‘Start Import’ it will pull in
all of our character’s attributes, inventory, features, prepared spells, and biography.
Let’s open that window back up real quick and go over what our options are though.
The ‘Update Selection’ options here control what parts of our character sheet will be
updated when we hit start import and you can include or exclude any of them.
The ‘Update Configuration’ settings are a little more interesting.
First we have ‘Use icons from the SRD compendium’.
This will try to find the same item in the SRD compendia and use that icon.
It makes the import take a bit longer but will get you more icons in the end.
Then we have ‘Use spell school icons from D&DBeyond’ which means if there’s no icon
then the spell will use the icon for that magic school like this one from DnDBeyond.
Next is ‘Use equipment icons from DnDBeyond’ which will use icons from
DnDBeyond if there’s not already an icon available.
And lastly we have ‘Use DnDBeyond generic item images,
if available’ which like the spell setting will use the icon for that category of item
if there is one if there’s no other icon like on the Clockwork Amulet here.
We also have some advanced configuration settings that are pretty fully explained in their text.
There’s two that I do want to mention though and that’s the last two options here that concern
Active Effects and Dynamic Active Effects. If you’re a big user of Dynamic Active Effects and
the Dynamic Active Effects SRD module you’ll want to check these last two boxes to ensure
that your items aren’t replaced with ones that don’t have active effects information
and that any additional active effects you’ve put on items or your character aren’t overwritten.
Mr. Primate does hope to begin including active effects information on import but
that’s not currently available. I’ll mention it in a pinned comment down below if it does.
The eagle eyed amongst you might have also noticed this little ‘Notes’ section here that mentions if
you want to get the full spell lists for clerics, druids, and paladins to set the ‘Cobalt cookie’.
This is where the Importer gets really interesting. So what is this
‘Cobalt cookie’? When you log into DnDBeyond it creates a cookie and stores it on your
machine so that it can verify who you are and what you own as you navigate around the site.
That’s what the Cobalt cookie is and because it’s used to verify who you are you should never give
anyone your cookie or share a screenshot where it is visible because it would enable them to
use your account. Like the snacks I hide under my floorboards this cookie should be secret.
With all of the appropriate warnings out of the way let’s take a look at how we can get
our cookie. First off you’ll need to head to DnDBeyond.com and ensure that you’re logged
in. Then if you’re using Chrome, Edge, or Firefox right click anywhere on the page
and click ‘Inspect Element’. If the window appears to the side like this
click on the three dot menu and change to the option with the filled bar at the bottom. Then
click the ‘Application’ tab if you’re on Chrome or Edge and the ‘Storage’ tab if you’re on Firefox.
Once you’ve done that find the ‘Cookies’ section and open it up and select the ‘DnDBeyond.com’
item. Then in the ‘filter’ search type in ‘cobalt’. From there just double click on
the value and copy it with CTRL C (or CMD if you’re on a Mac) and close the developer console.
Now we’ll just head back to Foundry, click on ‘Configure Settings’, then ‘Module Settings’ and
paste it in the DDB Cobalt Cookie field. Hit ‘Save Changes’ and we’re good to go! Let’s head back
to the character importer and see what happens when we try to import now. As you can see I have
all of the spells that Hobbs has access to whether I’ve prepared them or not. The correct spells
are marked as prepared however. This will make playing as any spell caster who prepares spells
much easier. If you’re ever importing and get an API error run through this process again as
DnDBeyond has most likely updated your cookie and you’ll need to update it in the settings as well.
If you want a more automated way of doing this I’ll have a link in the description to
a Chrome extension that Mr. Primate developed that should copy it for you automatically but
it does involve putting your Chrome set up in a developer mode and adding the extension manually.
With that done let’s go to the compendium tab and check out the ‘DDB Spells’ compendium. It’s empty.
So is the DDB Features compendium. But our character definitely has spells and class
features so what gives? With Mr. Primate’s Importer the compendia aren’t filled when
you import a character. Instead we have the DDB Muncher tool to populate our compendia.
Let’s click on that button down here now.
We’ve got a handful of options here, let’s break them down now:
‘Update Existing Things’ is pretty obvious, it will update spells, items,
and monsters that have already been munched. ‘Use SRD compendium things instead of importing’
will grab items, spells, or monsters from the SRD instead of DnDBeyond
‘Use icons from the SRD compendiums’ and ‘Use iconizer’ both do exactly what it says on the tin
And the last two options determine how the importer will handle images from DnDBeyond. If you
check the first one it will download the images and store them in the directory we set up which
takes a bit longer but does give you access to all of the images. The second option will just link to
the DnDBeyond images instead of downloading them which will make the process go faster.
Then we have a ‘Spell Munching’ specific setting of using the DnDBeyond spell school icon if
no other icon is available. Let’s go ahead and hit
‘Spell Munch’. It will begin fetching all of the spells from DnDBeyond,
setting them up as Foundry spells, and placing them in the ‘DDB Spells’ compendia here.
If we open that up we can see all of our spells have been imported without any of the old hassle.
Next up we have the ‘Item Munch’ section and a couple settings specific to it which are
both pretty self-explanatory. Let’s do an ‘Item Munch’ and sit back and relax
while it does all of the work importing the hundreds of items that are out there
for us. If we check out the DDB Items compendium it’s got everything we’d expect. Easy peasy.
The functionality for doing the same thing with class features isn’t available
yet but it should be coming soon and work similarly to the spell and item munchers.
Lastly we have monsters. This is the only functionality that is restricted behind Mr.
Primate’s Patreon tier. I’ve already subscribed and I recommend you do too. Any of the tiers
will get you access to the monster muncher but only the top tier will be able to munch
every monster automatically, at least for now. Mr. Primate is planning on lifting
that restriction near the end of the month for all Patreon tiers. If you’re on one of
the lower tiers you can import about five monsters at a time by searching for them.
But first, we have to enter our Patreon key to get access to the feature. I’m going to copy
mine and go to the ‘Module Settings’ and paste it in the ‘Patreon Supporter Beta Key’ field.
Let’s talk about one other field in here before we go and that’s the ‘DDB Campaign URL or ID’ field.
If you’re in a campaign where someone is sharing their DnDBeyond content with you you can paste in
the campaign URL and the importer should be able to pull in that content as well. Pretty cool.
Let’s hit ‘Save Changes’ and go back to the Monster muncher.
I’m going to search for Mind Flayers and we can see it has parsed a number of monsters and is
going through the process of downloading them, generating the appropriate foundry character
types and setting up their images. If we go to the ‘Actors Directory’ though there’s nothing there.
That’s because when you or your players access your Foundry game they download
everything that’s in the ‘Actors’ or ‘Item’ directories. With the amount of items, spells,
and monsters we’re importing that could turn out to be quite a lot of data and so Mr.
Primate sends everything to the compendia and we can import what we want from there like so.
This ‘Mind Flayer Psion’ has its art from DnDBeyond and all of the appropriate features
and spells that it should have. If we import it and drag it onto the map
we can see that it even has a more refined token that’s focused on the face of the monster.
We can send attacks like this ‘Tentacle’ to the chat, make an attack roll, damage, and do
our intelligence saving throws without having to set up any of it ourselves which is just awesome.
I do want to say that monster importing is a recently added feature to the importer
so there are assuredly some misconfigured or even down right wrong monster imports for sure.
If you find one be sure to go to Mr. Primate’s Discord and let him know in
the monster-parsing-fail channel. But please, if you do so be polite, list out the monster
that’s having an issue, what it is, and it will be dealt with as soon as possible.
That covers just about everything that you can do with the importer as it is
but I mentioned another couple of cool modules that you could use at the start of this video.
Let’s take a look at those now. The first one is called Tokenizer and many of you may
be familiar with it. You can use it to make pog style tokens for actors right in Foundry.
I’ve got a link in the description to my video on using Tokenizer which will go over
everything you need to know. The only thing that’s really different is that Mr. Primate’s
fork is the version on the module list now but it should work just about the same.
The next module is the ‘Magic Items’ module from a developer that’s frequently featured
on this channel: Simone who is also responsible for Dice So Nice amongst
many other great modules. The Magic Items module lets you assign a spell to an item like the wand
of magic missiles so you can easily cast it. When you have the Magic Items module installed
whenever you import an item like this wand of magic missiles for example the importer
will automatically grab the correct spell and assign it to the item. Then all you have to do
is equip the item and the spell should appear in your spellbook at the bottom of the list.
That should cover just about everything there is to know about the new DnDBeyond
Importer from Mr. Primate as well as a couple of other modules. I hope that it’s been helpful
and everyone is able to get back to their games as quickly as possible. Be sure to keep an eye
in the pinned comments for any important updates and I’ll see you in the next one.