Free SRD Search: One Search Box for Nine Tabletop RPG Rulebooks

Every tabletop RPG ships with its own pile of PDFs, web tools, and bookmarks. We built one search box for the open content of nine of them. No account required.

The problem: "wait, what does Bless do again?"

A player at our last session cast Bless on the party fighter. Nobody at the table could remember whether it stacked with the bardic inspiration die already in play. The DM started clicking through a PDF reader, one player Googled and got a 2017 forum thread, and the rogue spent the lookup time asking if they could shove a goblin off a cliff and sneak attack it on the way down. By the time you've found the answer, the moment is gone.

GMs have been arguing about how to handle this on forums for twenty years. The standard fixes are to fudge a ruling now and check between sessions, or to halt play and read. Both are worse than a faster lookup.

It isn't only a D&D problem either. Archives of Nethys handles Pathfinder 2e well but you still click around before you land on any specific rule. Cairn and Mausritter have rules short enough to memorize and bestiaries you haven't. The Blades in the Dark and Fate Core books are beautifully laid out and still slow to flip through when all you need is one sentence about resistance rolls.

The fix: one search box, nine open systems

Today we launched Free SRD Search. It runs across the System Reference Documents of nine tabletop RPGs:

• D&D 5e (SRD 5.1 and the new 5.2)
• Pathfinder 2e
• Cairn
• Mausritter
• Blades in the Dark
• Fate Core
• Liminal Horror
• Worlds Without Number
• Cepheus Engine

All of them are released under open licenses (CC-BY, CC-BY-SA, ORC, OGL, or CC0), and every result page links back to the original publisher with attribution.

You don't need to log in or download anything to use it. The whole product is a single search box.

Two modes: keyword search and Ask AI

The tool has two tabs.

Keyword search does what it sounds like. Type "counterspell" or "grappling rules" and the relevant SRD passages come back with the matching terms highlighted. It's the same search engine we use in the paid product, pointed at open content.

Ask AI lets you type a question in plain English (something like "how does cover work in Pathfinder 2e?") and a model answers from the SRD only, with citations to the rule it's quoting. It's the right tab when you don't know the right keyword, or when the answer is split across two sections of the rulebook.

Ask AI works without an account, drawing from a small shared daily budget. A free LorePanic account gives you 100 AI credits a month of your own.

A few examples

Two real questions went up on r/DMAcademy yesterday.

"Is AID a healing spell?" A Disciple of Life cleric gets bonus healing whenever they cast "a spell of 1st level or higher that restores hit points." Aid raises the target's HP maximum and current HP by 5. The question is whether that counts. Searching "aid" brings up the spell text in two seconds, and a second search on Disciple of Life puts both side by side so you can rule on it without leaving the table.

"Slow vs haste" A player Hasted last round just got hit with Slow. The two spell descriptions run six paragraphs between them and the rules don't include an explicit interaction clause. Two keyword searches put both spells side by side. Ask AI does the comparison for you with citations. Either way the answer takes under a minute at the table.

A few more from other systems:

• Pathfinder 2e: "How does cover work, and what does Take Cover give you?" The answer covers three cover levels, a basic action that bumps you up a tier, and the stealth interaction, in one search.
• Cairn: "What does a failed save do?" Cairn's whole resolution loop runs on saves. The SRD answer is one short paragraph and the search returns it verbatim.
• Blades in the Dark: "How do I run a Score for a crew of Hawkers?" The Score procedure, the Hawkers playbook, and the relevant claims/turf section come from three different parts of the rulebook. Ask AI stitches them into one answer with citations.
• Mausritter: "How do wilderness encounters work?" The Watch system, the d6 encounter roll, and the omen rule all surface in one search.

Why we're giving it away

The publishers who release SRDs under open licenses are doing the hobby a favor, and that content deserves tools that work mid-session. What you actually find on Google is SEO spam, fan wikis frozen since 2014, and AI summaries that quietly get the rules wrong. A search engine that quotes the SRD verbatim and links back to the publisher seemed more useful than any of that. So we built one.

There's a self-interested side too. If you like searching open content, you'll probably also like searching your own adventure PDFs, NPC notes, and homebrew documents, which is the paid product. Free SRD Search is the easiest way to try the search experience without signing up.

How to use it

1. Go to lorepanic.com/srd-search.
2. Pick a system from the dropdown, or leave it on "all" to search everything.
3. Search keywords, or switch to the Ask AI tab and ask a question in plain English.

What's next

Shadowdark, Dragonbane, and Mörk Borg are candidates for the next batch of SRDs we add, and we take requests. If there's an open SRD you want in, tell us on Discord.

Searching your own books, including campaign PDFs, homebrew lore docs, and the messy notes file from session three, is what the rest of LorePanic does. Signing up is free, and uploading your first PDF takes about thirty seconds.