Characters

Grimoire has a built-in character builder. You install a sheet for your game, build characters on it, and the sheet does the arithmetic as you fill it in — modifiers, saves, totals, spell slots. Characters sits under Campaigns in the sidebar, with each character shown as a card with its art.

The builder is schema-driven: a sheet is a document describing its fields, the values worked out from them, and how it is drawn. There is no game-specific code in Grimoire, so the same engine draws D&D, Draw Steel, Pathfinder, Cairn, or a system you invent this evening.

Not the same as campaign PDF sheets

A campaign member can still upload a PDF or image character sheet to a campaign (see Campaigns). The character builder is separate: its sheets are live, calculate their own values, and live under Characters.

Sheets in the catalogue

The community add-ons repository carries ten sheets, each under the licence its game is published with:

System	Layout	Content pack
Dungeons & Dragons 5e (2024)	Custom	D&D 5e SRD 5.2
Draw Steel	Custom, after the printed sheet	Draw Steel: Heroes
Pathfinder 2e	Custom	Pathfinder Player Core
Pathfinder 1e	Custom, after the 2009 sheet
Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition	Custom
Traveller (Mongoose 2nd Edition)	Custom
Cosmere RPG	Custom
Dungeon Crawler Carl	Custom, after the printed sheet
Cairn	Default
Basic Fantasy RPG	Default

A custom sheet follows its published original's content and order. A default sheet is drawn in plain sections — perfectly usable, and all a rules-light game needs. Each works out the arithmetic its system actually uses: D&D scales proficiency into saves and passive Perception, Pathfinder adds your level only once you are trained, Traveller gives every skill a DM against each characteristic.

Installing a sheet

Characters → Manage sheets opens on Sheets:

• Browse sheets lists the community catalogue, with each sheet's licence and credit shown before you install it.
• Paste a sheet takes one you wrote or were sent: the sheet itself (JSON or YAML - without anchors and aliases), and optionally its layout HTML and stylesheet.

Sheets are per user, like themes — installing one changes nothing for anyone else, so no admin approval is involved, and guests can install them too. A downloaded sheet is checked against the catalogue's digest and validated before it is stored, and nothing in a sheet runs. Uninstalling a sheet keeps the characters built on it: they open showing their stored values until you install it again.

Building a character

New character asks for a name, the sheet, and optionally a campaign. Then fill in the sheet. Edits save as you type.

• Derived values recalculate live. A modifier updates the instant its score changes.
• Warnings appear when the sheet notices something — more spells prepared than your maximum, say. They never block saving.
• Art sits in the sheet's header: click the empty thumbnail to add some. Some sheets also draw it large on a page - the D&D 5e sheet puts it on Spells & Details.
• Click the art to see it properly. It opens large, and on your own character this is where you replace or remove it and choose its framing: click or drag on the picture to pick the part that stays in view, and zoom in. The header, your character list and the sheet all keep that point showing, so tall art keeps its head.
• Some sheets hold other pictures - a knight's coat of arms, a ship. Add, replace or remove one where the sheet shows it (PNG, JPEG, WebP or GIF, 5 MB).
• Picked entries open. Click a feat or a spell to read the whole entry.
• Choices fill in the rest. On the D&D 5e sheet, picking a class sets your saves, hit dice and spellcasting ability, then asks for its skill choices; picking a background adds its skills and origin feat. Swap the pick and only what it added comes off again.

You can set any value

Everything a sheet works out is a suggestion — the table is the authority, not the formula:

• A value filled in from your choices is marked auto. Type over it and it is yours; the reset button beside it hands it back.
• A calculated value — Armour Class, a save DC — can be clicked and set, and everything built on it follows.
• All values, in the sheet's header, lists everything the character stores and calculates, whatever the sheet's layout shows.

None of this needs content installed. With no class or species loaded — a homebrew class you are playing from your own notes, say — every one of these is an ordinary field you fill in.

What the builder does not do

Grimoire keeps your character's record and does its arithmetic. It does not run a game's character creation procedure — careers, lifepaths, rolling on random tables. Those belong at the table with the book; the sheet holds what they produced.

Characters and campaigns

Put a character in a campaign and everyone at that table can read its sheet — so a GM can see what the party is playing. Only the player who made it can edit it, unless they let the GM edit.

You can put a character in any campaign you are at the table for:

• One you run — a GM campaign, or a personal campaign you keep for your own notes as a player.
• One you have joined. A pending invitation does not count until you accept it.

Choose the campaign when you create the character, change it any time from the dropdown under the character's name in the sheet's header, or press Add character in the Characters card on the campaign's page. No campaign makes the sheet private again.

A GM can put their own characters in a campaign they run too — NPCs, or the whole party of a solo game — and a GM-only campaign with no players works the same way.

On the campaign page

The campaign's page has a Characters card listing every character in the campaign, grouped under the player who owns it: the GM first, then you, then everyone else. Click a character to open its sheet.

Each player shows only the characters they are playing now. Their retired and fallen characters fold away behind a past characters toggle under their name, so a player on their tenth character still takes up one line until you want the history.

Letting the GM edit

Tick Let the GM edit in the sheet's header and the campaign's GM can edit your character too — fix a typo, take off hit points, add the loot they handed out. It is off for every new character, and works the same whatever sheet the character is built on.

• The GM edits the sheet itself: its values, the character's name, its art and the pictures on it. Where the character is played, its status, and this setting stay yours, and only you can delete the character.
• Only the GM who runs the campaign gets in. The other players at the table still just read the sheet.
• Moving the character to another campaign turns it off, so a new GM has to be let in again.
• It is only offered when the campaign has a GM besides you — not for a character in no campaign or in your own personal campaign.

More than one character

Characters die, retire, and get replaced, so a player can have any number of characters in the same campaign. Instead of deleting the old one, set its status — the second dropdown in the sheet's header — to Retired or Dead. It stays readable, greyed out on the Characters page and listed after the characters still being played, and on the campaign page it moves under that player's past characters.

Content packs and rulesets

Fields like a class or a spell list open a catalog you can search and filter. A character references an entry rather than copying it, so an erratum reaches every character that chose it. Anything the catalog lacks can be added by hand with Add custom.

The catalog is filled by two things, both managed under Characters → Manage sheets → Content:

• Content packs are a system's published content — the SRD's spells, classes and feats. They are server-wide, so an admin installs them, from Browse content packs. Anyone can browse, so a GM can see what a pack offers before asking for it. Each file is checked against the catalogue's digest.
• Rulesets are editable sets of content. A ruleset belonging to a campaign is read by everyone at that table and edited by the GM who runs it; a ruleset for the server is available in every game and only an admin can create one. Two games in the same system can therefore allow different content. A personal ruleset, labelled Only you, is yours alone — nobody else can read it, admins included.

Getting content into a ruleset:

• Import a content pack in a click once it is installed. Its licence and credit are copied along with it.
• Fork an entry to change it. Pack content is read-only, so editing a spell means taking a copy, which remembers where it came from.
• Write one by hand, or Import a document someone exported (JSON or YAML). An import keeps what you already have unless you choose to replace it.

Deleting an entry never damages a character: the sheet shows it as missing, and it reads correctly again if the entry comes back.

Installing packs by hand

An admin can also copy a pack's directory into character-content/ inside the data directory, then use Settings → Add-ons → Content packs → Reload from disk.

Sharing a character

Export in the sheet's header writes a self-contained file: every entry the character uses is embedded, and the sheet definition travels with it, so it opens on a server that has neither the pack nor the ruleset. The art, its framing and any other pictures on the sheet travel with it too. Import it from Characters → Import a character. The receiving server prefers its own copy of each entry, so a shared character picks up local corrections. Anything the file carries that the server lacks goes into a new personal ruleset for the person importing it, so it is never shared with anyone else — though a party the character joins still sees the sheet whole.

Importing from other tools

Characters → Import a character also reads characters built in other tools, through character importers - community add-ons. There are hundreds of character builders, each changing its format on its own schedule, so Grimoire knows none of them itself: each is a small community definition that can be fixed without a Grimoire release.

Getting one. The dialog lists the importers you have and, under More importers, the ones you could add. One that only reads files you upload - Forge Steel and Pathbuilder are both this kind - you can Install yourself, for your account only, just like a sheet. One that fetches from a link or runs a script needs an admin: they see Install for everyone, everyone else sees Ask an admin to install this.

Drop a file on the dialog or choose one, and Grimoire works out which importer it belongs to from its extension and contents. An importer that reads links adds a paste box. Read it as is only needed when two importers both claim a file. The dialog lists the importers your server has, and the sheet each one builds on.

Importer	Reads	Builds on
Forge Steel	.ds-hero files from Forge Steel's Export	Draw Steel
Pathbuilder 2e	Menu → Export → Export JSON - open its link in your browser, save the page as a .json file, and upload that	Pathfinder 2e

• The sheet comes with it. If you have not installed the importer's sheet, the import installs it from the catalogue.
• Picks become references. A class, a spell or a feat is matched by name against your content packs and rulesets, as if you had picked it yourself. Anything your content lacks is kept as a custom entry, with the export's description where it has one.
• Derived values stay derived. Stamina, hit points, AC and speed follow from your class, kit and ancestry, so the import doesn't freeze them.
• It's a one-time copy. Editing the character never reaches back to the tool it came from.

Some sources need something from you - an API key for a private character, say. An importer that does shows the field once it is chosen; if an import turns out to need it, the dialog picks that importer, marks the field, and offers Try again. What you type goes with that one import and is never stored.

Pathbuilder links

Pathbuilder's site only answers browsers, so Grimoire can't fetch an Export JSON link for you. Open the link, save the page, and upload the file.

Writing your own sheets and content packs

A sheet you write works exactly like a catalogue one — paste it under Manage sheets → Paste a sheet. To share it with everyone, contribute it to the community repository:

• Adding a character sheet — a walkthrough from the first field to the pull request.
• Character sheet reference — every field type, formula function, layout directive, HTML tag and CSS property a sheet can use.
• Adding a content pack — the spells, classes and feats a sheet draws from, and the licensing they need.

Content for one table rather than everyone belongs in a ruleset instead, which needs no pull request.

Using a different catalogue (admin)

The sheet and content-pack catalogues follow the add-on index set under Settings → Add-ons. That setting takes a comma-separated list, so you can offer several catalogues at once — the official one alongside a friend's fork. Sheets from every source appear together, labelled with where they came from, and a source that cannot be reached is called out rather than quietly left out.

A source can also be a private repository, for licensed or non-SRD sheets and content packs that should stay within your table. Give it an access token and its sheets and packs install and update like any others - see Using a private repository.