Why this is free

Every spell, every monster, every magic item, every encounter table on doungim.com is free to read, free to query through our REST API, free to call through MCP, and free to embed in your own blog or app. There is no paid tier of the reference library. There is no rate-card for the data. That is a deliberate choice — here is the thinking behind it.

The community is the reason any of this works

D&D is a 50-year-old hobby that survived two TSR bankruptcies, a satanic-panic boycott, the death of brick-and-mortar game shops, and a global pandemic — because the community kept showing up. People wrote homebrew. People ran free games in libraries. People taught their friends. People published wikis with no ads and no logins. That culture of shared work is the only reason a new player today can sit down with a stranger and have a session that feels alive within an hour.

Doungim wants to keep that culture intact. The reference library exists so a new DM can prep a session in their lunch break. A long-time player can settle a rules argument in thirty seconds. A homebrewer can find every monster of a given challenge rating in one page. None of that should require an account, a subscription, or even a Doungim console sitting on the table.

Use it even if you will never buy a Doungim

Doungim is a physical TTRPG gaming console — the kind of thing that sits in the centre of the table with real dice and real miniatures. That is what we sell. The /dnd reference library is not a sales funnel. We do not gate it behind an email capture. We do not require a Doungim account to use it. We will not paywall the spells next year.

If you ran your last D&D session on a coffee table with paper character sheets and a battered set of dice from 1992, that is great. If you run yours on Roll20 or Foundry, that is also great. If you happen to find Doungim's spell pages helpful while doing any of that, we have done our job. The console is for people who want a physical product — not a tax on people who want to look up the rules for Fireball.

What "free" means here

• Free to read. Every page on doungim.com/dnd is server-rendered HTML you can open, read, print, and screenshot.
• Free to query. The REST API is CORS-enabled JSON. No API key. No registration. CDN-cached so it stays cheap for us to serve.
• Free for AI agents. The MCP server lets Claude, ChatGPT desktop, Cursor, and any other MCP-capable client pull reference data directly. Cite the canonical page in your answer and we are happy.
• Free to embed. The embed widget drops spell, monster, magic-item, and NPC cards into your blog with one script tag — see the live demo.
• Free to redistribute. Reference data is released under CC-BY-4.0. Take it, remix it, ship it inside your own product — we ask only that you credit Doungim with a link.

Why we ask for citation

The one thing we do ask, every time, is a credit line back to the canonical Doungim page. That credit is not for ego — it is the mechanism that lets a hobbyist project we have never met find their way back to us, which is how a community grows in the first place. Every link from a homebrew blog, every citation in an AI assistant's answer, every embed on a teaching site is one more thread connecting the community we care about.

The CC-BY-4.0 licence formalises that ask, but in practice the citation rule is closer to the unspoken etiquette around homebrew: someone made this thing, name them when you use it.

What we are working on

The library at /dnd is a living catalogue. We add new content monthly — the spell comparison pages, top-10 lists, printable cheat sheets, and player & DM guides are all relatively new additions on top of the original spell / monster / item core. If you spot an error, email us — the contact page goes straight to the editorial team.

If you are a developer building a project that uses Doungim data, we would love to hear about it. The collaboration page is for creators publishing adventures on the Doungim marketplace, but the same address works for "hey, I used your API to build X." We aggregate community projects on the developer wiki landing page when we can.

Help spread the word

The most useful thing you can do — whether you ever own a Doungim console or not — is share a page that helped you with another DM or player. Every time the library reaches a new table is a small contribution back to the hobby. That is the whole point.