Where it all comes from

Everything Olam shows you comes from somewhere you can check, and every piece of it sits on a shelf with a badge, so you always know how far to trust it. This page lists the shelves, every source, and the license each one is shared under. The Credits & licenses page in the app, at the bottom of the rail, has the same list, in the words each license asks for.

Nothing in Olam's code is rules text. olam fetch downloads each source from wherever it's published, and olam ingest builds the library from what it downloaded.

The shelves

Badge	What it is	Where it comes from
Rule	Official rules	SRD 5.2.1 (the 2024 rules) and SRD 5.1 (2014), through the PDF and Open5e's data
3rd-party	Published, but not official	Open5e: Kobold Press, EN Publishing (A5e), Black Flag and others
Expert	Experienced players answering	RPG Stack Exchange and Mythology Q&A
Craft	How to build a world	Worldbuilding Q&A
Idea	Inspiration, not rules	D&D Wiki homebrew, and the books in your library
Yours	Your own notes	your Obsidian vault

There are two more badges you'll see now and then. Summary marks a summary Claude wrote from the sources on the page, and Private marks a passage from your own books, which only you can see.

The rules

• SRD 5.2.1 by Wizards of the Coast LLC, from dndbeyond.com/srd, licensed CC BY 4.0. These are the 2024 rules, and they're what Olam teaches. The Rules Glossary (where 2024 keeps most of its terms, like Advantage, Prone, Grappled and the actions) is read straight from the PDF, and the rest comes through Open5e's data.
• SRD 5.1, the 2014 rules, under CC BY 4.0 and the Open Game License, through Open5e's data. They show up as the 2014 version of an entry, and in the Codex when you choose 2014 or Every edition.

Third-party books

Open5e's data also has books from other publishers, under the Open Game License or Creative Commons: Kobold Press (the Tome of Beasts books, Creature Codex, Deep Magic and the Black Flag SRD), EN Publishing (Level Up, or A5e), Green Ronin (the Tal'dorei Campaign Setting), and a few more. The demo only has the Creative Commons ones. Olam brings in only their monsters, spells and magic items, and puts them on the 3rd-party shelf. They show up as other versions of an entry, and in the Codex when you turn on 3rd-party books. They're never mixed in with the rules, because they're not the rules.

The archives

These are offline copies of whole websites, from Kiwix. Olam searches them in place and shows the best pages on each wiki page.

• RPG Stack Exchange (CC BY-SA). Years of questions and answers about running and playing tabletop games, voted on by people who know the rules well. This is the Expert shelf, and it's where the edge cases get answered.
• Mythology Q&A (CC BY-SA). Questions about myths and legends, which is where the "Myth roots" on a monster's page come from.
• Worldbuilding Q&A (CC BY-SA). Questions about building believable worlds, on the Craft shelf.
• D&D Wiki (GFDL). Fan-made homebrew. It's on the Idea shelf and marked not official everywhere it shows, because anyone can write on it and none of it has been playtested.

Every archive page in Olam names its authors and links back to the original.

Your own books

If you have a Calibre library, Olam can search your books too. Point OLAM_CALIBRE at the folder with Calibre's metadata.db and run olam ingest calibre. Olam reads the library without ever changing it, splits each EPUB into sections about a page long, and indexes them, so your books show up in the Codex under Your library and in the In your books section of a wiki page.

Your books NEVER leave your server. Their passages are marked Private, they're not in the demo, they're not on the Credits page, and Olam only shows a short passage with a link to the book.

Every book starts on the Idea shelf, since most of a library is fiction, myth and history. If a book should be somewhere else, like a rulebook you own, or one whose title or author Calibre has wrong, put it in books.json in the data folder, by its Calibre book ID:

{
  "123": {"shelf": "rule", "edition": "2024", "note": "my own copy"},
  "456": {"title": "The right title", "author": "The right author"}
}

Every key is optional. Books on the Rule shelf are also the ones Ask uses as "your rulebooks". Run olam ingest calibre again after you change it.

Your notes

The Yours shelf is your vault. When a monster, a place or a rule comes up in your notes, it shows in the In your world section of its wiki page. See Your vault.

Pictures and icons

• Pictures from Wikimedia Commons, found through Wikipedia: paintings, engravings and museum photos, mostly in the public domain and the rest under Creative Commons and other free licenses. olam fetch pictures downloads them. Wherever one shows, it names its author and license and links to its page on Commons, and Credits & licenses has a page listing every one of them.
• Icons from game-icons.net, by Lorc, Delapouite and others, under CC BY 3.0. They're in web/icons.svg, with each icon's artist in web/icons.json.

The fonts

The type is IM FELL English by Igino Marini and Alegreya Sans by Juan Pablo del Peral (Huerta Tipográfica), both under the SIL Open Font License. It's in web/fonts/OFL.txt.

Next step

Now that you know where things come from, the next part is building your own world: Your vault.