Importing adventures — the PDF Shredder

The PDF Shredder is the family's import tool. What it does is distinct per site depending on what you're doing — but in every case it populates your DNDCards instance with any standard content and NPCs it finds. Monsters, NPCs, and items become cards, so imported material is reusable across the whole family.

PDF import

Point the Shredder at an adventure PDF and it pulls out the parts it can read:

• Page-range control — limit the import to the pages you care about (skip the cover, ads, and appendices).
• The flat-scan / OCR reality — many published PDFs are flat scans, so text is recovered by OCR. Clean, text-based PDFs import most accurately; scanned pages may need a cleanup pass.
• What's extracted — scenes and read-aloud text are pulled into your adventure.
• What's not — maps are not auto-placed; attach them manually to the right scene after import.

Whatever standard content the Shredder recognizes (monsters / NPCs / items) is minted as cards in your DNDCards instance during the import.

Structured Markdown / JSON format

For the cleanest results — or to author an adventure from scratch — use the structured format. It's the canonical authoring spec the in-app importer and marketing pages link to.

Markdown conventions

• # / ## headings → a scene
• a leading > blockquote → read-aloud (boxed text)
• ![](url) image → the scene map

# The Sunken Crypt

> The stair ends at a flooded antechamber. Black water laps at your boots,
> and somewhere ahead, something stirs.

![](https://example.com/maps/crypt-antechamber.png)

A bloated **guardian** drifts in the dark water, waiting for the living.

## The Inner Vault

> A vault door of tarnished bronze seals the passage, ringed with faded sigils.

In that example, each heading starts a new scene, the > block becomes the read-aloud text the DM reads to players, and the image is attached to the scene as its map.

JSON shape

The same adventure as structured JSON — useful for programmatic imports:

{
  "title": "The Sunken Crypt",
  "scenes": [
    {
      "title": "The Sunken Crypt",
      "readAloud": "The stair ends at a flooded antechamber. Black water laps at your boots, and somewhere ahead, something stirs.",
      "map": "https://example.com/maps/crypt-antechamber.png",
      "body": "A bloated guardian drifts in the dark water, waiting for the living."
    },
    {
      "title": "The Inner Vault",
      "readAloud": "A vault door of tarnished bronze seals the passage, ringed with faded sigils.",
      "map": null,
      "body": ""
    }
  ]
}

Any monsters, NPCs, and items referenced in the import are minted as cards in your DNDCards instance (see Cards: the shared base), so the whole family can use them.