TTRPG.events

What is TTRPG.events?

TTRPG.events is an online platform I built to help event organizers in the tabletop roleplaying games industry to manage the scheduling, ticket sales and registrations of conventions, meetups and other TTRPG focused events, using a single tool designed specifically for this type of event.

There are several tools to organize and manage events, from sites like Meetup and Eventbrite, to social media tools and dedicated online platforms, but these solutions are not designed to support the needs of tabletop gaming events, and more specifically TTRPGs.

You might be asking yourself: what are those needs, exactly? Glad you asked!

Tabletop gaming events are built around, well, tables or areas where games occur. Game sessions have a specific duration, minimum and maximum number of participants, type of game, etc. They also - in the case of RPGs - require someone to “host” the session — the Game Master. The Game Master usually will want to connect with players before the session, exchange information, and so on.

A small scale convention, such as BIRCON, of which I’m one of the organizers, has somewhere around dozens to a few hundred sessions happening across different tables, rooms, time slots, etc. Organizing all that, keeping a correct schedule, avoiding conflicts, usually takes a lot of work that generic event tools don’t support.

How do organizers usually deal with all that? Excel. Or Google Sheets for the more adventurous ones. This leaves them having to deal with several tools, transfer information between systems, or create their own custom solutions, if they have the means.

Built for the real world

That last option, building a custom solution, is actually the origin story of TTRPG.events.

When we decided to organize the second edition of BIRCON in 2025, we knew we needed a more structured system to help schedule all the sessions, issue tickets, publish the agenda, and so on. Being the product developer that I am, I offered to build the tool and the team got on board from the beginning. BIRCON 2025 was the first real-world use-case of the platform, and it allowed me to build features grounded in real needs, as we encountered them firsthand.

In early 2026 I converted the platform to a multi-tenancy architecture and started offering it to other groups and organizations, with the goal of growing its audience and making it easier for people to organize and find TTRPG events.

Tech Choices

I chose to build this platform using one of the oldest and most tried and true tech paradigms in web development: HTML, CSS, a tiny bit of JavaScript on the client side, and mostly static or server-side rendered pages with dynamic content. I did not use a frontend library like React, to keep the project structure and code as simple as possible.

My web dev framework of choice, Astro, was perfect for the job. Its latest versions, 5 and 6, offer so much functionality. Together with modern HTML standards, you don’t really need much more to create a site like this. For styling, I surrendered to Tailwind, even though I’m always a bit annoyed with it (too many classes everywhere!). However, I needed to create a simple and reliable design system, and I needed something that would be second nature for LLMs. Tailwind offers that.

The secret-sauce is not in the technology. It’s in my intimate understanding of the day-to-day wants and needs of event organizers and event-goers, and translating that into features on the platform.

My development workflow is heavily driven by AI coding agents. That allows me to move fast, even with the very limited time I have available for this project. It has been super fun to streamline and improve my workflow with these tools, and doing it for this project allows me to offer the same gains to my clients.

In the end…

In the end, this is really a passion-project turned real life product, which I hope will allow many people to enjoy and discover this great hobby that I love and care for so much.