Bringing content in and out

Your fourth roadside shrine, your third bandit lieutenant, the guard captain who's the same as the last guard captain but angrier. Duplicate, rename, change two lines.

The copy is a copy: editing it never touches the original.

The things you rebuild every campaign. The tavern you always use. The pantheon. The starting village. The setup for the system you run most.

Your shelf never contains anyone else's private notes or tags — a saved item carries the thing, not other people's thinking about it.

The same screen takes a player's Import a 5e character sheet (ice5e) upload. The sheet arrives as an unclaimed Player character — abilities and personality as fields, equipment as Props tagged with the character's name, spell slots as Reserves — and you hand it over the usual way: offer it from the roster and read out the claim code.

Rules math stays behind on purpose; the import tells you what it dropped, and importing a spell pack first is what gives the character's spells their full text.

Exporting the Campaign template takes your whole setup — starting fields, Center Stage stats, starting Reserves and the Bit catalog — without any of the actual content. It's your system, ready to drop into the next game.

That's what the D&D 5e pack is: someone's setup, exported. Not the app's opinion about which game you play.

Import the same template again with corrections and it updates what's there by name rather than adding a second copy of everything. Fix a typo in a field, re-import, done.

It never touches character data. Values your players have typed, and Reserves and Bits already on their sheets, survive a re-import untouched — even if the field's type changed underneath them.

The importer is built to never blow up in your hands mid-session, which means it degrades instead of refusing. A field type it doesn't recognise becomes plain text. An icon it doesn't know becomes a plain dot. A cost naming a pool that isn't there gets dropped. A repeated name quietly wins.

Every one of those is on purpose — and together they mean a wrong file can import "successfully" and tell you nothing.

So if you're bringing in a pack from outside, check it first:

tests/validate_import_file.php reports what won't arrive and what will arrive as something else. And content built for this app should pick its icons from json_import_files/docs/ICONS.md rather than from Lucide's full set — this app takes a curated list, and a few names deliberately differ, so an icon chosen off the wider list silently lands on a dot.

Content Packs is a small catalog of ready-made exports — some free, one or two a one-time purchase — that import exactly the way any other export file does.

It's also the reference for building your own: the Campaign template export above is the pack format, so anything you export here is already shareable as one.

It asks. Copy leaves the original on your shelf, so the same character can start in two campaigns. Move attaches it for good.

Copy is the safer default and the right one if you're not sure — a spare on the shelf costs nothing.

There's a reader for Alchemy's export files. It's one-way: it brings a sheet in and never sends anything back out.

Expect to tidy up afterwards. It's a different app with different ideas about what a character is, so it does its best and then hands you a sheet to check — and the campaign you're importing into may want fields Alchemy never had.