Up until September of 2005, I maintained an up-to-date index of Dungeon Magazine. It was hosted on 3d6.org, which was then my main gaming site (and is now my photo site). When I stopped running the campaign that I used the index for, and after my Dungeon subscription lapsed, I stopped updating the index, too.

In the past few weeks, though, I’ve gotten several emails out of the blue from folks asking where the index went. And the more I think about it, the more it sounds like a pretty good fit for TT. Even though it’s game-specific, it would be useful to a lot of GMs.

Should I bring back the Dungeon index?

I liked the index because it let GMs filter their Dungeon back issues for modules that fit the level range they needed. Instead of paging through the actual issues, you could just sort or search the index.

The original index was an Excel file, which was nice for a couple of reasons. I know Excel pretty well, so fiddling with it was no problem. It’s also searchable and usable offline, unlike an online database — and I don’t know anything about online databases.

It occurs to me that it could easily be done as a wiki, though. And that gets over one of the biggest hurdles I would have in terms of bringing it back: I’m missing the past year of Dungeon issues, and don’t currently have a subscription.

Another option would be to keep it in Excel format, but ask the GMing community to email me the data. That sounds workable, but also pretty clunky.

So what do you think? Is it worth trying as a community project? What format should it be in, if I bring it back?

And the one I’m most leery of, since I strive to keep TT largely system-neutral: Being game-specific, does it really work for TT?

9/6/06 Update: The Dungeon index project has been taken over by Charlie (who commented several times below), and will be hosted on his site, Intwischa.com.

Once I saw how much work he was doing to turn it into a true database, I suggested that Charlie host it himself. Not because I wouldn’t love to see it become a resource here on TT, but because I knew that if I was doing that much work on a project, I’d probably want to put it on my own site!

Thank you to everyone who expressed an interest in the prospect of a TT Dungeon index, and in working on it and helping to populate it with data from back issues — as always, you rock. And keep an eye out for Charlie’s index, which should be coming online sometime down the road.