Meet Your Cloud Spellbook

You have years of TTRPG PDFs piled up. Rulebooks, campaigns, splatbooks, supplements you bought five Bundles of Holding ago. Battlemaps. Tokens. They live somewhere on a hard drive at home, and the one you actually need is always on the other computer when game night starts.

Grimoire fixes that. Drop your library into one folder, point your hosted instance at it, and every page of every PDF is indexed for full-text search within minutes. Looking up a goblin stat block on your phone at the table is now three taps and a search box.

And because Grimoire is a campaign tracker too, you can run the whole thing from one place: session schedules, GM notes, player notes, linked rulebooks, and a tagged map gallery ready to drag straight into your VTT.

Why Grimoire Makes Life Easier

• Find the rule, not the book. Search "fireball" and jump to the page in the right rulebook. SQLite full-text indexing across every PDF page.
• Fast on a phone, not just a desktop. Pages render server-side as WebP images, so a 400-page rulebook loads as fast as a single page.
• One place for the whole campaign. Session schedules, shared GM notes, private player notes, linked resources, and player availability tracking, all in one tool.
• Maps and tokens, properly organised. Tag battlemaps by environment, sort tokens by monster type, download full-res when it's time to drop one into Foundry or Roll20.
• OPDS for your e-reader. Each user generates a personal OPDS feed URL for Panels, Chunky, KOReader, or any OPDS client. Read your books on a Kobo at the gaming table.

Product Highlights

Library auto-detection. Top-level folders under books/ become game systems. Subfolders named core, supplements, adventures, handouts, or homebrew get auto-categorised. System-agnostic shelves work too, for zines, art books, and rulesets that span multiple systems.

Multi-user from day one. Three roles built in: admin (full control), GM (read everything plus campaign creation), and player (read access plus private notes). Optional pre-seeded accounts via a users.json drop-in. Per-user explicit-content filtering for tables that mix age groups.

GM session scheduling. Weekly, biweekly, monthly (nth weekday), or custom date list. Session note stubs auto-create the day before each game. Players mark their availability ahead of time so the GM knows who's coming before session zero.

Bookmarks, highlights, and favourites. Per-user page and text-selection bookmarks with inline highlights, plus quick favourites for systems, books, maps, and tokens that you reference every session.

Tag your library with a JSON drop-in. Pop a tags.json file into any maps or tokens folder and Grimoire auto-applies tags on the next rescan. Edit metadata in the UI for one-off changes, or version-control the JSON for repeatable library builds.

Technical Specifications

• 📚 Library structure: books/, maps/, tokens/ top-level folders, system-aware categorisation
• 🔍 Search: SQLite FTS5 full-text indexing of every PDF page
• 📖 Reader: server-side WebP rendering, pinch-zoom, swipe navigation, spread mode, native PDF fallback
• 👥 Auth: built-in JWT with admin / GM / player roles, optional users.json pre-seeding, bcrypt password hashing
• 📅 Campaigns: GM and personal modes, recurring schedules, shared and private notes
• 📱 OPDS: 1.2 catalog, per-user feed URLs with revocable tokens
• 🐍 Stack: Python 3.12 / FastAPI backend, React 18 frontend, SQLite database, PyMuPDF for PDF rendering
• 🔐 License: GPL-3.0

Let ElfHosted Handle the Heavy Lifting for Grimoire

• Zero ops. No Docker compose to maintain, no SECRET_KEY to rotate, no reverse proxy to configure. We run it, you read it.
• Beefy first scan. PDF-to-WebP rendering is CPU-bound. Our infrastructure chews through hundreds of rulebooks while your home laptop would be heating up the room.
• Backups by default. Your config volume (search index, thumbnails, user accounts, campaign notes) is backed up automatically. Restore on a bad day, no scripts required.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I get unlimited library size?
Your Grimoire library lives on your ElfHosted storage. Add storage as your collection grows, the app scans it on rescan.

How long does the first scan take?
Plan for a few minutes per hundred PDFs on the first run, since every page is rendered to WebP and indexed for search. Subsequent rescans only touch new or changed files and finish in seconds.

Can my whole gaming group use it?
Yes. Create accounts for your GMs and players in Settings → Users, or pre-seed them with a users.json file. Each user gets their own bookmarks, favourites, and OPDS feed.

Will Grimoire modify my PDFs?
Never. Grimoire reads from your library folder, it never writes. You can point it at a read-only mount or sync from another source without worrying about the files.

Does it work on mobile?
Yes. Pages are pre-rendered server-side, so the reader loads as fast as a single image even on a phone. Pinch-zoom and swipe navigation work the way you'd expect.

Can I read books on my Kobo or Kindle?
Grimoire ships with an OPDS 1.2 catalog. Generate a personal feed URL in Settings → Account and paste it into Panels, Chunky, KOReader, Kybook, or any OPDS-compatible reader.

Grimoire turns a pile of PDFs into a searchable library, a tagged map and token gallery, and a campaign tracker, all from one tab.

Get a 7-day trial of ElfHosted Grimoire and run your next session from the cloud. The dragons won't wait.