Your own books in the Grimoire

1. Open the Grimoire and go to the shelf.
2. Drag the file onto it. Several at once is fine.
3. Or press the Add a Keeper tile and pick the files from your computer.
4. A PDF can go through that same door, or through Add a Tome on the PDF shelf.
5. Read the line it gives you back. It names every file it took and every file it skipped, and why.

What it takes: .pdf and .epub books, .docx and .xlsx from Word, Google Docs or Excel, .csv and .tsv tables, .txt and .md notes, .json homebrew in the 5eTools shape, and .html, which covers an Adventure Keeper and any web page you saved to your computer.

A folder of Markdown notes has its own door: Import from Obsidian. Pick the folder and every note becomes a page and a card you can summon, with stat blocks arriving as monsters, encounters as encounter cards, pipe tables rollable, and your [[links]] still linking. It asks for permission to read, and only to read.

1. The file is copied into this browser's own storage, on this machine.
2. Nothing is uploaded. There is no account and no server to upload it to.
3. Drop the same file again later and the book updates in place. You do not end up with two.
4. Taking one out again depends on what it is. A Keeper: press the ✕ in the corner of its cover, then Take out, then Are you sure? Three presses, on purpose.
5. A PDF: open it and press Remove in its own bar at the top, then press again. Two presses, and the PDF file on your computer is untouched.

1. Press Space.
2. Type any phrase you remember.
3. Hits come back from titles and from the words inside your books, each with a piece of the sentence around it so you can tell which hit is yours.
4. Press Enter. A PDF opens at that page. A chapter, a note or a table opens as a card over the scene you are running.

A PDF's words are read once, when it comes in, and kept page by page, so a phrase from page 200 finds page 200. An EPUB comes in chapter by chapter, so you can summon a single chapter instead of hunting through a whole book.

1. Open a Tome. It opens inside the app, in your browser's own PDF viewer.
2. Turn to a page worth keeping.
3. Set a page mark and give it a name you will recognise mid-session.
4. Jump back to it later from the book's own bar, or by summoning the mark by name.

1. Press Space.
2. Type book: and a piece of the title, like book:salt.
3. Pin it down further with kind:monster, cr:2, level:3, school:evocation or tag:undead.
4. Or open the book itself and use the filter box at the top of its Contents, which only ever searches that one book.

• An Adventure Keeper carries its own cover art, and the shelf shows it.
• A book you write yourself in the Forge takes whatever cover you give it when you build it.
• A PDF you shelve wears a plain plaque with its title on it until you give it one.
• Any PDF you have shelved can wear a cover of your own: press Add a cover on its tile and pick a picture, or drop the picture straight onto the tile.
• The Grimoire shrinks it to fit the tile and keeps it small, in this browser beside the PDF, so it costs you almost nothing and it never leaves your computer.
• Changed your mind? The same spot on the tile says Remove cover, and your PDF and its page marks are untouched.

1. Open the binder bar and press Export .keeper. That is your whole binder in one file.
2. Copy it across however you like: a stick, a drive, a cable.
3. On the other computer, open the Grimoire and press Import .keeper.
4. Copy your PDF files over separately, drop them into your Grimoire there, and add their covers again.

There is a second way that skips the copying entirely. Press Binder on a drive and pick a folder, and your books, notes and saves live in that folder from then on. Point it at a USB stick, run the Grimoire from the stick, and your books, notes, saves and tables travel with it. Your PDFs and their covers do not: they stay in the browser on the machine you shelved them on.

• A book locked with DRM. An EPUB with a publisher's lock on it says so plainly and stops there. It is not damaged and neither are you.
• A scan. Pictures of words hold no words. Marks and the viewer still work.
• .doc and .xls. The old binary formats are not read. Save as .docx or .xlsx.
• Files from other table apps. Module files exported by other virtual tabletops are not read today.
• Tables inside PDFs. A wrong table looks exactly like a right one, so the app will not guess. Retype it into a .csv, a spreadsheet or a Markdown pipe table and it arrives rollable, with the die read off your own roll column.
• Very large PDFs. Over 50 MB it warns you and shelves the book anyway. Past 32 MB it stops reading the words out and says so, so a huge book is still a book with marks and a viewer.

One thing that surprises people, and it is the question I get most: the Grimoire is not tied to one game. It is a container, so any system's books, notes and tables are welcome in it. What is 5e specific is what it ships with, the free SRD 5.2.1 reference, and the War Table, which builds encounters and runs initiative off 5e style stat blocks.

1. Go to the free packs on the Grimoire page.
2. Download one. It is a single file, like every other Keeper.
3. Drop it on your shelf.
4. Every monster, spell and item in it is in your Summon from the next keypress.

The SRD 5.2.1 is already in the box: the monsters, the spells, the items and the rules, free under CC-BY-4.0. The packs sit beside it, so your own homebrew, a free pack and a book you bought all answer to the same Space bar.