Today we launch a project we’ve been working on – Questable.app. We hope this will be a new repository of published adventures for all RPG brands and rulesets.
Many years ago now, in 2016, the inimitable Matt Colville proposed an idea – he tapped his following to create Adventure Lookup. If you’re not familiar with this site – it’s a fantastic resource. It is a crowdsourced catalog of 3,337 (at the time of this posting) D&D and D&D-adjacent adventures. All sorts of metadata has been captured about these adventures, including adventures from Dungeon Magazine, independent adventures on DM’s Guild, OSR adventures, there’s even some Pathfinder 2e adventures cataloged. There are filters available and searches. If you need a D&D adventure, this site can help you narrow down choices for an existing adventure with the right fit for your needs. It’s an incredible database.
That said – it has stopped short of a true Holy Grail of the industry – an RPG adventure search engine for everyone. If you don’t play D&D or a D&D-adjacent system, these adventures won’t be great fits for you. There are no Call of Cthulhu adventures here, no Cypher System adventures, no PbtA adventures. Huge swaths of DriveThru RPG and Itch.io are not included. The metadata entered for these D&D adventures on Adventure Lookup would be invaluable for the RPG industry as a whole. We have long felt that this expansion was an obvious next step – an Adventure Lookup for everything.
It’s currently quite difficult to search on DriveThruRPG or Itch.io for adventures with the level of specificity offered by Adventure Lookup. Google won’t drill into those, and most creators aren’t posting metadata listings on the eCommerce sites for search engines to pick up. The problem is not solved. It’s been almost a decade, and no metadata standard has emerged (I had hoped that would happen) and no expansion of Adventure Lookup has gone forward. If you want to find specific Numenera adventures, with specific things in that adventure – too bad. You’re on your own.
They say, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” They say, “Make it exist, and then make it good.” Are they right? We’re about to find out. We do not have the following of a Matt Colville, we largely have no following at all. But we do have some technical skills that are of value to solving this problem. We have built a proof-of-concept, beta offering of a site that can house metadata for adventures from ALL RPG systems. Much like Adventure Lookup, we must rely on crowdsourcing much of the information. Obviously manually entering metadata for hundreds, thousands of adventures is a huge ask, crowdsourced or not. But what if there were an easier way?
Questable.app
Introducing Questable.app – our attempt to expand the scope of the Adventure Lookup model. We do not expect to achieve 3,000 adventures cataloged anytime soon. Hopefully someday! But we believe we have made it much easier for people to enter metadata about published adventures. You can enter the data manually, but if you have a pdf file – you can have the site scan that file and extract the metadata automatically. The fields will be presented to you, pre-filled, for you to make any edits and corrections. Quests can be added in less than a minute this way! We have a list of quests on the front page, and a separate search page available. Feedback on both pages is welcome. Currently we are putting everything behind a login screen to mitigate spam risk. You may log in with an email address and password, or a google account. We do not store any passwords, authentication is handled by Firebase. We do not store any PDFs scanned by the system.
Known Issues
We primarily have experience in back-end development, and as you might expect – the UI is rudimentary at best. We have not (yet) invested in logo creation or website assets – we intend to in the next phase of the project, before we exit beta. Any assistance in front end design is welcome. Consequently, site navigation is sub-par and needs more work. We are trying to understand these practices and techniques better.
Duplicate quest detection is currently experimental. It may work, it may not. We’re learning more on this as we go. We hope to expand its capability to detect multiple quests from a single file, but that work is ongoing.
Hosting costs, so far, have been minimal. However, that may change, and we’ve opened a Ko-Fi account in case anyone wishes to support the project. Currently, it is neither needed nor requested.
Many features are not yet implemented (filtering lists, for instance) but are on the obvious improvement list. But we imagine there are many improvements that are less obvious, and we hope you can help with your suggestions. We hope this page will become a useful tool for anyone in the RPG community.
Thank you for reading, and if you choose to check out Questable.app and send your thoughts, thank you for those too. You can reach us at [email protected] or [email protected].
