Frequently Asked Questions.

Grimshackle's Battlesmith is a free, browser-based combat companion for tabletop role-playing Game Masters. You type a few creature names and it generates full, playable stat blocks in seconds — then helps you run the fight live, tracking health, conditions, dice, spells, and loot. It supports Dungeons & Dragons 5e, Pathfinder 2e, and Daggerheart, and runs entirely in your browser with no account and nothing to install.

Grimshackle's Battlesmith fully supports three systems: Dungeons & Dragons 5e (SRD 5.1), Pathfinder 2e, and Daggerheart. Each is rendered with its own rules, math, and presentation, using that system's native power metric — Challenge Rating for D&D, creature Level for Pathfinder, and Tier for Daggerheart. You run one system at a time and choose the one you're playing from the top bar.

Grimshackle's Battlesmith is built on the Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition SRD 5.1 — the official System Reference Document released under Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0) and the Open Game License. It uses the open 5e rules, creatures, spells, and magic items from that document rather than content from any single published book.

Yes — Grimshackle's Battlesmith is free to use. There's no account to create, no software to install, and no paywall on its features. It runs as a single web page in any modern browser.

No. Grimshackle's Battlesmith runs entirely in your web browser with no sign-up, no login, and no download. You open the page and start building encounters immediately, on desktop, tablet, or phone.

Everything in Grimshackle's Battlesmith stays on your own device. Your session log and settings are saved locally in your browser rather than on a server, so your game data is private to you. Because nothing is uploaded, there are no accounts or cloud syncing to manage.

Because Grimshackle's Battlesmith stores your session log and settings locally in your browser rather than on a server, clearing your browser data or site storage will erase them. There's nothing to recover from the cloud, since nothing is ever uploaded — the trade-off for keeping your game data completely private to your own device.

Yes. Grimshackle's Battlesmith works in any modern browser on desktop, tablet, or phone, with a layout that adapts to the screen. The same encounter building and live combat tracking are available whether you run your table from a laptop or a phone on the couch.

Yes. Grimshackle's Battlesmith is built to take the bookkeeping off a Game Master's plate, which makes it especially friendly to newer GMs. It generates complete, playable stat blocks for you, keeps every weapon, spell, and item one click from its full description, and tracks health, conditions, and dice during the fight — so you can run a confident encounter without memorizing rules or flipping through books.

Grimshackle's Battlesmith is a Game Master's tool, designed to be run from the GM's screen. It handles the monsters, loot, and combat tracking on your side of the table, and your players experience the results through you. There's no separate player login — everything lives in the single browser page you run the fight from.

In Grimshackle's Battlesmith, pick your system and type the creatures you want — one per line, with optional quantities like 3 goblin or 1 ogre. Click Generate and fully formatted, ready-to-run stat block cards appear instantly. A live counter shows the true number of creatures in the fight, so three skeletons and a bear reads as four bodies, not two lines.

Open Grimshackle's Battlesmith, set your party's size, level, and difficulty, and use the Random Encounter generator. It assembles a balanced encounter using each system's native power rating, and can theme the group to a location — a forest, cave, sewer, desert, swamp, or ruins. The result drops straight onto the table as ready-to-run cards you can then rename, re-stat, or convert.

Yes. Type a quantity in front of a creature's name — for example 4 skeleton or 2x orc — and Grimshackle's Battlesmith generates that many cards at once. A live total-creature counter always shows how many individual bodies are in the encounter, not just the number of groups.

Grimshackle's Battlesmith includes 2,376 ready-to-use creatures: 342 for D&D 5e, 1,987 for Pathfinder 2e, and 47 for Daggerheart. It also carries deep spell and item libraries spanning hundreds to thousands of spells and magic items per system, so you rarely need to leave the app to run a fight.

Open the Bestiary panel to browse the current system's full roster — grouped by type, role, Challenge Rating, Level, or Tier, and searchable by name. Click any creature to drop it straight into your encounter. The Bestiary pulls live from the same database the rest of the app uses, so there are no duplicates or stale entries.

Turn on Vary Stats before you generate, and each creature in a group gets small individual differences — health nudged up or down, to-hit and Armor Class shifted by a point, and gear swapped among the creature's options. One bandit ends up swinging a greatsword while the next carries a mace, so no two copies feel pasted together.

They're two ways Grimshackle's Battlesmith reshapes a creature without changing the underlying database. Roles create lateral variants — a Skeleton becomes an Archer, a Knight, or a Brute, with characteristic gear and tilted stats. Ascendancy raises a creature up a power tier with an evocative name — a Beast becomes Dire, a Dragon becomes Ancient, and a humanoid captain can rise to Champion or Warlord.

Yes. Grimshackle's Battlesmith can give each generated creature a unique, type-appropriate name, so a Goblin becomes Skarrak instead of just "Goblin." Paired with Roles, Ascendancy, and Vary Stats, a random group arrives as a distinct cast of characters rather than a row of identical entries — and your players start talking about them by name.

Yes — this is the one feature that crosses systems. You can convert any D&D 5e creature into a fully formed Daggerheart adversary on the fly, with Challenge Rating mapped to Tier, health scaled, damage thresholds set, and role and features inferred. The original D&D data stays the single source of truth, so the conversion is consistent every time. Your imagination isn't limited by which book a monster happens to live in.

Each system has its own HP tracker built to match its rules. D&D uses a health bar with minus and plus steppers and an editable current/max readout; Pathfinder uses a pip ladder; and Daggerheart uses the authentic Minor / Major / Severe damage-threshold track. You adjust health right on the creature's card as the fight unfolds.

Grimshackle's Battlesmith tracks 24 combat conditions per creature, including blinded, charmed, frightened, grappled, invisible, paralyzed, poisoned, prone, restrained, stunned, and unconscious. Each is a tappable icon on the creature's card that you toggle on or off as the situation changes.

Dice are built into every stat block — attack rolls and damage expressions are live links you click to roll, with an animated result. There's also a standalone Dice Roller panel where you can queue several dice and roll them together, so you never have to leave the card or dig for physical dice.

Click any spell on a creature's card to open a guided cast flow. The app adapts to the spell: attack spells roll to-hit then damage, auto-hit spells like Magic Missile skip the attack roll, save spells roll damage with a save note, and utility spells simply resolve. Spell slots tick down automatically as you cast.

When a creature reaches 0 HP it automatically enters a Dead state, and an Unconscious button can drop one while it still has health. Both dim the card, cross out the name, and badge the header — while keeping the creature's loot reachable, so your players can still search the body.

Grimshackle's Battlesmith can drop random loot on any creature: one weapon always appears, with configurable chances for a second weapon, armor, a shield, and magic items. Because the haul is generated rather than pre-set, it's a surprise to the Game Master too — you don't know what's in the goblin's pockets until someone searches the body.

Yes. Equipment routes into a live loadout, and equipping or unequipping armor or a shield recomputes the creature's defenses in real time. You can have a creature draw a different weapon, raise a shield, or shed its armor during the fight, and its Armor Class and attacks update to match.

You can move items between creatures on their turn. A creature can hand an item to an ally freely, or a player can take gear from a downed enemy with a Steal action, narrated with a bit of flavor. So your party can loot the fallen — or your kobold can give its dagger away, if it's feeling generous.

Yes. Consumables and effects do real work: drinking a healing potion rolls its effect and applies it, a buff changes the relevant numbers, and the item is consumed when used — all reflected live on the card. Stats can also be adjusted on the fly, so you can raise a creature when a fight's gone too easy, or drop its numbers the moment a spell lands on it.

Grimshackle's Battlesmith composes magic properties onto base equipment, so applying a Flame Tongue to a Longsword produces a complete, ready-to-use magic weapon. The magic property and the base item combine into one stat block rather than living as separate notes.

Every weapon, spell, and item is one click from its full description. There's no flipping through a rulebook to remember what something does — the details are right there on the card.

Grimshackle's Battlesmith keeps a running History log — every roll, hit, heal, defeat, restore, condition, and spell cast — and saves it locally in your browser between sessions. When a player asks how much health a monster has left, or how a fight actually went, you've got the record on hand.

There are four sliding side panels, each on a tab along the right edge: a Dice Roller, the Bestiary, the History log, and Settings. They slide in and out as you need them, keeping your tools close at hand without cluttering the table view.

Yes. Grimshackle's Battlesmith follows Daggerheart's own models rather than forcing D&D conventions onto it. Wealth is tracked as handfuls, pouches, and chests, and damage uses the Minor / Major / Severe threshold track exactly as the rules intend.

An initiative tracker for D&D 5e and Pathfinder 2e is planned and coming in a future update. The app already tracks health, conditions, dice, spells, and loot on each creature's card during combat.

A Daggerheart Fear tracker is planned and on the way in a future update. Daggerheart itself is already fully supported, including adversaries, Tiers, and the Minor / Major / Severe damage thresholds.

Support for homebrew creatures is planned for a future update, so you'll be able to bring your own monsters into Grimshackle's Battlesmith alongside the built-in library. Today the app draws from 2,376 ready-to-use creatures across its three systems, and Roles, Ascendancy, and stat tweaks let you reshape any of them into something new.

Saving and reloading full encounters is planned for a future update. For now, Grimshackle's Battlesmith keeps a running History log in your browser between sessions, and you can rebuild an encounter in seconds by typing the same creatures back in.

Exporting and printing stat blocks is on the roadmap for a future update. Until then, every creature's full details — stats, attacks, spells, and loot — stay live on its card in the app, ready to run directly from the screen.

It was built by a Game Master, for Game Masters — out of a love for running games and a frustration with everything that pulls a GM out of the moment. The guiding rule is simple: take away the mundane bookkeeping and leave the creativity, so the Game Master can stay in the story.

Grimshackle's Battlesmith is an independent tool and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Wizards of the Coast, Darrington Press, or Paizo. Its D&D content is used under the OGL and Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0) SRD 5.1, its Daggerheart content under the Darrington Press Community Gaming License, and its Pathfinder 2e content under the Open Game License v1.0a and/or the ORC License. A full licenses & attribution page is included.

Grimshackle's Battlesmith is free to use and self-funded by its creator — no paywall, no account, and no ads. A simple way to support the project and help with its running costs is coming once a few more features are in place, and the core tool is free to use today.

Grimshackle's Battlesmith is a focused combat companion, not a replacement for your maps, character sheets, or rulebooks. It sits alongside whatever you already use to run your game and takes over the part that's most tedious in the moment — generating monsters, rolling their dice, and tracking the fight — then gets out of the way so the rest of your table runs however you like.