Importing books and homebrew: file, text and Homebrewery

The homebrew importer step by step: a PDF with text, Markdown, TXT, pasted text or a Homebrewery brew, and choosing module, adventure, world or document.

To bring a book's content (species, subclasses, feats, spells, items, creatures, chapters of an adventure or a world) into Roliando there is a single importer, the homebrew one. It reads three origins: a file of your own (PDF with text, Markdown or TXT), pasted text and a Homebrewery brew, by its link or by searching for it. It is a reader of what you bring: Roliando includes no books and offers nowhere to download them.

Where it is

Inside a D&D module, in More, Import homebrew. It also opens from the Bazaar, with the import button of a Homebrewery result (Bazaar: shared repositories of systems, modules and packs), and from the Workshop (Modules); see Module builder.

Requirements and permissions

An account that creates modules. The plan limits how many modules of your own you can have: if you are at the cap, you import into one you already have (Plans, limits and downgrading). What is imported stays in a private, unpublished module.

Step by step

The importer has three steps: Source, Review and Destination.

Under Where it comes from choose Homebrewery, File or Paste.
Homebrewery. Paste the share link (homebrewery.naturalcrit.com/share/…) or the brew's id and press Fetch; the edit link does not work, since only its author opens it. Or search by title or author with Search The Vault, with the D&D 5e only filter. A brew over 3 MB is not fetched.
File. Choose a PDF, .md or .txt: a PDF is read here, in your browser, and is not uploaded; a scanned PDF has no text to read. Paste: the markdown from Homebrewery's /source or the text from GM Binder, and Analyze.
Press next: the importer shows what it recognised. Each entry can be included or not, Renamed and moved to another category; Show original shows the text it came from. Ones that already exist in the module with the same name are not ticked.
Choose what the book is under Import as: D&D module, Adventure, World for a campaign or Document. The importer proposes one (you can change it before importing), and world and document come in hidden.
Choose the destination and confirm. An adventure opens in the adventure builder (Adventure builder); a world, in the campaign's World Book (The World: your campaign wiki).

How it recognises things

The importer classifies by what each section contains, not by its title: a feat by its prerequisite line, a spell by its level and school, a species by its size and speed. The clues and how to write it so it reads first time are in File formats for importing, with an example you can download. The book's languages become the module's game languages. Images are copied to your storage if you leave that ticked (Storage and quotas).

Adventures with their maps

An adventure already laid out as JSON, with its index and images, does not go through here: it is imported from the Library, in Import adventure (JSON). See Importing content and Modules and adventures.

Known limits

A PDF with complex layout (columns, boxes, backgrounds) loses structure; a scanned PDF cannot be read because there is no OCR.
The best is Homebrewery as text or your own Markdown, which keeps bold, italics and headings.
You import material you already own: do not share or publish third-party content without the right to do so.

Frequent problems

"That looks like an edit link." Use the share one.

"Nothing found to import." Nothing to import was found in that text. Try another type of book or check that the text has the clues in File formats for importing.

"I can't bring in another module." You are at your plan's cap; import into an existing one.