5E SRD Bestriary links in existing books/modules are broken since update

[digimatt]

It looks like the 5E SRD Bestiary was updated with new tokens somewhat recently, but it seems to also have changed the record links. If an NPC was linked in an existing book/refman/etc, it now opens a new empty personality instead of the NPC.

[ddavison]

Do you have an example monster and module?

[digimatt]

I could send you a campaign, but not here as it's a commercial release. Can I dm you on discord?

[Zacchaeus]

THe name of the module should be sufficient if it's one from the store. I'm unable to reproduce this with anything I have. It sounds like the product(s) that you are using directly link to the SRD rather than copying the monster first and using the copy.

[digimatt]

Correct, it's anything that links to the SRD and not copied in. There's going to be hundreds of third-party modules affected as it's normal practice to drag an SRD NPC directly into an encounter (for example) rather than making a copy of it first. Most of the store products aren't using SRD so I doubt there'll be any there.

For simplicity, I've attached a basic module containing one encounter with an NPC added from the (older) SRD Bestiary. Here's how to reproduce the problem:
-start a campaign with nothing activated (not even SRD for now)
-activate the module ("SRD Test")
-open the encounter ("The Unsettled Source")\
-click on the link to open the Wraith's NPC sheet
-notice it says the 5E SRD Bestiary isn't loaded, so we know the NPC was added from it
-activate the 5E SRD Bestiary
-click on the link to open the NPC sheet again and see how it opens a new, empty personality.

[ddavison]

Are these hundreds of third-party modules that are available in our store (or Forge) or are you referring to homebrew modules?

[digimatt]

I would guess mostly on dmsguild, but here's a Forge product: https://forge.fantasygrounds.com/shop/items/1670/view
Open the encounter called "balcony" then open the NPC sheet for the skeleton.

[ddavison]

I would guess mostly on dmsguild, but here's a Forge product: https://forge.fantasygrounds.com/shop/items/1670/view
Open the encounter called "balcony" then open the NPC sheet for the skeleton.

Thanks. Give me some time to review this and get back to you.

[ddavison]

I don't see any encounters named "balcony" in that product or a link to the skeleton.

[digimatt]

Sorry, I linked the wrong product. https://forge.fantasygrounds.com/shop/items/1484/view

[dbachen]

Are these hundreds of third-party modules that are available in our store (or Forge) or are you referring to homebrew modules?

Many of those conversions on DMsGuild are linked that way, at least ones that I have direct knowledge of that Grim Press' converters did. The guidelines that the community had in the past (which may be different than those in the SW store) was that you were able to link to the SRD instead of copying in the NPCs. This was because the SRD was available to everyone and shipped with the default product and didn't require any purchase of official books. They didn't have to be self contained in that sense. i know we trained our converters with that information and I know others that followed it as well.. This went along with the fact about the letter tokens.. Since you weren't allowed to use artwork and tokens from the other sources, when you copied in an NPC, you had to recreate the art or make a letter token. However, because of that previously mentioned allowed linking, it meant that could save time and still get to use the tokens and artwork attached to the SRD versions. This had been clarified and understood to be ok.

I thought maybe the linking changed because of changes to the underlying images (like a move to webp) and the file name changing, but it could also be that base module name changed so that invalidated the link also - or something else which is neither of those cases.

[ddavison]

Thanks for the help identifying this issue. There was indeed an unplanned change to the data path of the monsters. I changed them back to readonly and this moved them back into the referencedata path. Please run an update and retest. Let us know if you have any further issues.

[digimatt]

Confirmed fixed, thanks!