BetaRandom

worstdorkevermore:

rpgtoons:

xanth-the-wizard:

I decided to make a list of DM stuff that I personally use or think are important to know when it comes to being a DM. So here’s my list:

Medieval Fantasy City Generator: This generator is now my LIFE. It generates incredibly complex cities with good customization. (Thanks to plantkat for sharing this site in their post here)

Naming Your Towns/Cities: Now that you’ve made your city, time to name it and give it some character! This post contains lots of great information.

Index Cards Rule: Fuckyeahdnd shared a SUPER convenient way of keeping track of turns and HP in combat. I use this system now for every single session I run.

Tricks & Traps: I am AWFUL at coming up with good Dungeon traps and challenges, this PDF includes some incredible ideas. The original poster, Courtney C. Campbell also runs a blog where she shares tons of great stuff. (Thanks to we-are-rogue for sharing the PDF in their post here)

Playing Different Types of Characters: Writeinspiration has a masterpost on how to write/play lots of different types of characters.

Unique NPC Jobs: Lauraharrisbooks wrote a list of different Fantasy Jobs which can help populate your world with some unique characters! Another similar post by Thewritershandbook also covers Common Occupations in the Middle Ages. 

Developing Characters by Threes: Monticusrex’s method of creating characters help you really flesh out who they are. Useful for Players and DM’s.

Troublesome Players? Speak Up: Dicebound brings up an incredibly great point. If someone is being a jerk, speak up and call them out. This is especially important and relevant now to crush awful behavior before it even has a chance to show it’s ugly face.

List of D&D Resources: And finally, pretty much anything you might need for D&D.  (Character stuff, spells, online communities/ways to play, etc..) A lot of people contributed to this post but thank you Mushroomancy for posting the original list.

Donjon: And finally, this site is a great resource for looking up Spells and Monsters along with tons of other generators. Not every single Spell or Monster is on here, but most are listed.

(I tried to give credit to the original posters or the actual URL for websites, unless those sites or URLs were no longer active)

Incredible list!

@tiedinaslipknot

(via we-are-dread-commando)

tondo-ule:

r-n-w:

a-dms-side-quest:

Out of curiosity, how do my fellow DMs prepare their campaigns? 

Do you open up a word doc at type out your story hook and make little bullet points from there? 

Do you wing it completely? 

What’s your notes system like? 

I’m simply looking for new ways to plan for my d&d games! 

The Over-Prepared GM

I can’t help myself. I love all the work that goes into prepping for a campaign, and I keep all of my crazy notes and papers, so today I’m gonna try and share with you my process for the latest DnD session I prepped for/ran! 

Rough Notes

I always start by hand writing a full page or two of just random thoughts/story bits. I’m gonna give examples from the latest session I ran (BACKSTORY - this setting has frequent time travel moments and so every location I make also needs a past version and present version)

Writing Stonevale began with me rambling on about any vague ideas I had for the scene setting. I also find it’s useful to get the secrets and mysteries all clear and laid out straight away, and work backwards from them to slot in clues for players. “Stonevale Past” begins with me deciding that the ancestors of an important NPC live here - maybe the players never get far enough to discover that, but having the secrets and info at the heart of my process helps me keep things focussed, and it’s easy/fun to build walls around the secrets this way :)

I also generally get a feel for any creatures/NPCs that populate the area, and give them vague roles. And I try to note down key details/props/locations/events that will help the players navigate and investigate.

Session Summary

Now’s the time to check what happened last session just to make sure you know how the party characters will likely be feeling/acting at the start of the session, and to remind yourself of any items they picked up, or active statuses going on. Also a good moment to check what the party planned to do next, what their expectations could be and so on.

It’s hard to make myself fill this in at the end of every session, but the session summary page in this kit really helps me note down what’s most important.

Maps

Making a map is always an exciting prospect for me! I thought this time I wanted to give a more illustrative style of map, as I’ve been super inspired by the very cool maps made by @anywhichwayatlas ! I got onto pinterest and collected some ideas of the type of map style I was going for:

Above are the images I used to inspire me, and below is the finished Stonevale map! It’s come out a bit rough/childlike but was definitely a fun way to explore more ways of making maps!

Later on, I realised I’d got too into making this and forgotten about some sort of depiction of the INSIDE of the manor… Since I didn’t have any time to make more maps by this point, I went to where I always go when I need a DnD map in a pinch - @2minutetabletop ! I picked up Castle Keep, which is free (like so many of his maps are!) and faffed with some colours and levels in photoshop until I was happy. Printed them out on A3 card and they were good to go! I can’t recommend this resource enough, it’s saved my GM butt a lot when I run out of time to make a map of my own!

Adding in Detail

So next I need to flesh out those vague ideas to make sure I’ve covered what’s likely to be important for the party. I love using the town builder here as it gives me a bit of mental breathing room and asks the questions for me. I find having questions ready means the answers come a lot easier than if I was trying to pluck this out of my head, if that makes sense? 

It was at this point I realised I’d likely need a family tree, even just so I could keep track of the time travel/ancestral stuff. I roughed one out, then made a slightly bigger, still very rough, version that I thought might be a handy clue for players. If they make it inside the castle, they’ll notice a framed family tree on the wall, and this will be it!

NPCS

Our story involved one of the players having worked at Stonevale before the adventure, so I made a staff list for that player’s reference. This way they had some basic information on their old co-workers and the residents of the manor. I also filled in an NPC list from the people & society kit to make sure I had enough NPCs to generate about the property.

Then I used the map to mark some likely locations of the important NPCs. I made sure to spread them out so that no matter how the party approached the grounds, they’d likely hit a plot hook somehow.

Quest Hooks

Time to shove as many clues as possible in here! My experience has been that players need a lot more help picking up clues and reaching conclusions than you expect (myself included!) so I make a point of writing a bunch of quest hooks to inspire both the players and myself during play. I use the quest hooks page from the session kit to note down basically little story bites and clues that I can drop in as and when I need to. It’s a useful sheet to glance at real quick during the game!

Loot

Gotta make sure there’s some loot somewhere! There’s always at least one player who ransacks every location they visit :) I hadn’t set up Stonevale to be a particularly loot-filled place but knew the manor in the centre could do with holding some of the resident’s belongings that could be steal-able. Again, I realised this quite late in my planning, and so dashed off to the @rpgtoons Patreon to grab all the free item cards I could find! Then I picked out which ones could be appropriate for certain family members and residents, and stashed ‘em in the pile ready to hand out.

Ambience

This is one of the last things I come to, as it’s fairly easy to set up, but so important if you want your players to be focussed and engaged. Every time I use music or scents its palpable how much more invested in events players are. For ambient backgrounds, youtube is a gold mine. I like to have two playing simultaneously - one for music and one for background noise. For example:

Fantasy Adventure Music + Forest Sounds
Peaceful Travelling Music + Winter Storm
Horror Music + Swamp Sounds

Check out Sword Coast Soundscapes or Guild of Ambience for some very cool RPG ambient soundtracks too!

As for scents, I use these a little more sparingly, but @cantripcandles does some exceptionally convincing aromas that really work for setting the mood, and taking your prep that lil extra step. My favourite is Goldwheat Bakery - the only way to get a more accurate smell would be to visit a bakery!

Finishing Up

At this point I’m almost good to go. I take one last look over everything I’ve prepped to see if there are any gaping plot holes or parts I’ve missed. For this particular session, it occurred to me there could be an opportunity for eavesdropping on an important conversation, so I wrote out a one page script for what the players might overhear should they choose to snoop. 

Play!

I guess you wanna know how the session went down after all this prep? Did the players enjoy it, did they find what I’d laid out for them? 

OF COURSE NOT! They made their very best effort to skirt the entire property, clinging to the edges of the map and hiding any time an NPC interaction looked likely. Predictably, I didn’t anticipate that they would attempt to avoid everything, but the Quest Hooks page kept things flexible. That, and the fact that one player’s rat companion decided to jump down a hole and became “irretrievable until further notice”…. ahem.

Hope you find this useful, I’ve tried to link to as many resources as possible because there are just so many good ones out there right now! Thanks to all DnD creators! I think it’s really cool everyone’s helping each others’ games become even more fun to play! :)

Beautiful world maps by @anywhichwayatlas​ 

Location maps by @2minutetabletop​

Item cards from @rpgtoons​ Patreon

Background Music - Sword Coast Soundscapes

Background Music - Guild of Ambience

Ambient scented candles by @cantripcandles​

Session Kit (includes session summary page, campaign brief, encounter manager, quest hooks, world overview page)

World Building Packs (npc makers/lists, land builders, society/org creators, history packs, etc)

Game Master Kits (fillable rolling tables, cheat sheets, loot makers, paper minis, etc)

Okay, this is way beyond what I’ve ever done, even at my most prepared.  Kudos!

(via carldangerous)

biglawbear:

medinaquirin:

riskpig:

kaleymonster:

durnesque-esque:

ceiphiedknight:

riskpig:

allisquish:

almostvivian:

andrejpejicjimmyvegafanfic:

trouncing:

REMEMBER SKIP-IT FROM THE 90’S

my weapon of choice during school yard fights 

DnD campaign but the only weapons are 90′s toys @riskpig

Distance weapon: those sky dancer propeller toys.

Originally posted by whysoright-blog

I’ll allow it.

I have but two words:

Originally posted by peteneems

Are those a weapon or piece of armor?

Party walks into the inn to rest and the pub looks like

Perfection.

@anotherspecter

I ride into battle on one of these

(Source: msnbcpundit, via carldangerous)

probablybadrpgideas:

matthewonart:

Non-Boring Environments that need Fantasy Representation

Tropical Rainforests

Scrubland/Dry Forests. For extra effect make them the sort that burn very often; some native plants never germinate until after a fire, and some animals not only rely on fire to smoke out prey, but may even start them themselves.

Savannas/Tropical Grasslands

Temperate Rainforests. I almost didn’t include this bc New Zealand is covered in them, and that’s where they filmed Lord of the Rings. But tbh, no one really knows about them, so it belongs here

Taiga Forests

Barren Tundra, perfect for some extreme seasonal dichotomy

Polar Ice Sheets

Desert-Grasslands (arguably the same as Scrubland but Australia’s good at adding its own twists)

Barren Desert

If you like Cacti, look at American Deserts like the Sonoran

Salt Flats

Soda Lakes and Alkaline Lakes

Madagascar’s Karst Limestone Formations

Madagascar’s Spiny Forests

Madagascar’s Baobab Forests

Madagascar’s Subhumid Forests (Madagascar is cool as hell ok)

Danxia Landforms

Badlands/Mountainous Deserts

Steppes and Highland Prairies

Flood Basalts

Newly-Formed Islands, still rife with Volcanic activity

Now for Underwater Environments, sure Coral Reefs are cool.

But there are SO MANY other kinds of environments for aquatic settings, it’s unbelievable:

Seaside Cliffs

Archipelagos. Not just Tropical Island chains like Polynesia (Moana anyone?) but also Coldwater Archipelagos like the Aleutians.

Tidal Flats

Bayous/Cypress Swamps

Tropical River Basins, AKA Seasonally Flooded Rainforests

Mangrove Swamps/Deltas/Beaches

Kelp Forests

The Open Ocean

Coastal Seabeds

Rocky Beaches with Tidepools

And there are a LOT more I could name but this post is already obscenely long as is, if you’d like to toss in your own go right ahead, but my point is if you limit yourself to European Deciduous Forests you’re a wimp.

Tell the players the dungeon is in one of those places but when they get there it’s a European Deciduous Forest with a huge sheet of wallpaper draped over it. 

(via dungeondumpster)