Morning Princess

What is it?

Morning Princess is a character sheet for D&D 5e that runs within the terminal, controlled entirely with the keyboard. It’s flexible, fast, and entirely offline. I think the best endorsement I can give is that I’ve been using it personally for every D&D game I play ever since it

But why?

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Morning Princess has consumed the last year of my life.

Morning Princess is the single most complex project I’ve ever attempted, despite its apparent simplicity, and the one thing out of everything I’ve created that I’d say I’m most proud of.

This project started life (as most do) with frustration. I play a lot of D&D, and ever since I was introduced to the game have used the automated character sheet PDF by MorePurpleMoreBetter. It’s a fantastic tool, but unfortunately can be extremely slow. Some of my earliest memories of the game are waiting ~40 minutes for my poor Surface Pro to generate the entire cleric spell list using pdf-embedded JavaScript!

In the process of working on the thing I became quite enamored with the idea of text user-interfaces. Something about the hacker aesthetic? I’d had enough of web design, and I’d had enough of Flutter. From that, Wriggle was born (yet another working title that stuck).

How do I use it?

• Morning Princess operates entirely with keyboard controls.
• Press F12 to show contextual control information.
• Arrow keys to move up and down through menus, enter to confirm.
• When you press “Start” on the main menu, you’re shown the character list (which will start empty). Press Ctrl+N to create a new character. You can also change the location characters are saved by pressing Tab to switch to the directory list and Ctrl+N to add a new directory.

Installation Instructions

• Head to the download page linked below (Release section of the Codeberg repository).
• Download the most recent “Morning Princess.exe” file.
• Run that file!

If you’re using an older version of Windows you might like to install Windows Terminal (or set it as your default terminal emulator) because it looks much prettier than the older CMD.