The Tome of Vast Knowledge (TOVK) is an excellent program, and ideally
I'd like to use it on my DM's notebook during AD&D sessions.
One feature that would be VERY useful would be the ability create a
unified monster index (from all the published monster lists).
Currently I am stuck with the Monstrous Compendium II index that does
not refer to my other supplements (Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, etc...).
A similar argument can be applied to spells. Note that in my use of
these programs, TOVK is an accessory to TSR materials, NOT a
replacement.
This program is severely crippled by the lack of official TSR data.
The intro to TOVK explains much of this, and TSR's recent net policy is
familiar to most readers of this newsgroup.
There must be some ways around this:
(1) Include the AD&D specific data on MPGN, without posting TOVK and
Builder updates to this site.
Michael Hermann (hermann@kirk.fmi.uni-passau.de) has done just this
with his new version of ADDCHAR:
ftp.mpgn.com /Gaming/ADND/Programs/ADD_Char/addchar4.zip
(2) Include vital data only.
There are numerous spell lists floating around (for example) which do
not contain spell descriptions and thus necessitate the use of TSR
materials.
A good example is The Ultimate Spelldatabase, which includes a tab
delimited file of spells in the format:
"Invisibility to Animals","1","Alteration","Player's Handbook 2nd Ed,
Players Handbook 1st Ed","Animal","clerical"
This could easily be applied to the monster databases.
I'd be VERY happy to work with a Monstrous Compendium database that
just included monster name, book, page, location, frequency. A unified,
database driven index like this would be invaluable, and probably not
bother TSR.
So, what do you think? Is this allowed within TSR's copyright policy?
If so, has anyone out there compiled such a list? I'm very happy to
receive email replies to this query.
ioreth@geocities.com
(
geocities.com/ioreth)