Recent open source work on drpg

4 Jul 2026

I'm a big fan of what gets called either a Tabletop or pen-and-paper RPG, despite most of my playtime these days neither involving an actual table, pens or paper, being more of a Zoom/Discord gamer now. I don't get to play quite as much as I'd like these days, but I do still end up accumulating a whole lot of books and rules for games, either from Kickstarters or something just getting my fancy. I've heard the argument that collecting RPG books and actually playing games with them are two separate hobbies, and well, it's not entirely wrong.

Given the centralisation of such matters, I have a DriveThruRPG account with a lot of stuff in it. Downloading all of those, and making sure I've actually got it all organised is tricky, and they do have an official app for it, but it's missing Linux support and the sort of automation I'd actually like out of such a matter, so I'd been meaning to find an app to fix this. Enter drpg, a command line tool that does this. It was pretty good, but it hit the sort of problems I was describing in "You should be contributing to open source. Yes, all of you!" and so I made a few improvements along the way, and there's just been a new release put out with some of those in.

Here's what I've done:

• First some housekeeping. Fixed a tiny issue in the README and corrected something the build system was complaining about, mostly to stop both of those bugging me.
• I then added a config file system, both because it was on the list of requests, and because it made repeatedly running the tool easier.
• I started running the tool in earnest, and hit the issue that a bunch of my files had weird names because publishers vary wildly on their naming conventions. To fix that, I built on the config file system to add a "rewrite things" feature so I didn't have to keep moving stuff around by hand.
• I then spotted an item on the TODO list that got my fancy: making a Flatpak which is something I hadn't done before. This was interesting, even if I did hit an upstream issue but both that and my eventual PR got merged, even if it turns out that Flathub doesn't like CLI apps.
• I also made some testing and non-JSON failure case improvements.

This absolutely failed the xkcd time saved test, but I'd argue in the case of personal projects that I'd get bored several times over trying to do it manually, and that I'd never be quite sure I'd got it all v.s. automating it and being sure. Plus I learnt Flatpak creation, which I'm sure will end up being useful at some other point, and generally just enjoyed myself, which is the most important part.

Previously: Fuseki - playing Go on a Remarkable

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