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.
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.
(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(I tried to give credit to the original posters or the actual URL for websites, unless those sites or URLs were no longer active)
I’ve discussed in the past how one of the functions of tabletop RPGs is to generate creative prompts, and how that’s a big part of the reason why games with character classes and spell lists and such tend to be so popular: build-anything systems are well and good in theory, but in practice a lot of gamers don’t want to build anything – they want a jumping-off point, and that hook can be game-mechanical just as easily as it can be narrative.
The reason I bring this up is because I’ve been reviewing my copy of Blades in the Dark, a game about playing as a criminal gang in a city where the sun never rises, and I’ve been reminded of one of my favourite class abilities in any game I’ve run so far. In BitD, in addition to the individual character playbooks, there are also playbooks for the entire crew – a sort of party-level “character class”. One of these playbooks is “Hawkers”, a gang of contraband-runners and vice-purveyors, who have the option of taking the following crew trait:
Ghost Market: Through arcane ritual or hard-won experience, you have discovered how to prepare your product for sale to ghosts. They do not pay in coin. What do they pay with?
That’s an entire campaign premise right there: you’re a gang that sells drugs to ghosts.
“There’s blood in you ghosts. You should do cocaine about it!”
I need to take a moment to rave about my absolute favourite tool for writing right now! WorldAnvil.com! Its a brand new project that is already amazing. and free to use. You can make maps and drop location pins. Create timelines. Write articles using helpful templates. Engage with a really cool worldbuilding community on their discord server. Follow other worlds. And much more … . It’s being made by a two person team and already its extraordinary.
If you write, RPG or just like to worldbuild, please give WorldAnvil.com a try!
i’m sick of doom-and-gloom, 2edgy4u urban fantasies with angsty Chosen Ones™ and constant hard darkness and entirely too many werewolves. so here’s a list of kinder urban fantasy things:
• pharmacies run by faeries who can tell what you need with a single touch and who are tipped with dollar coins and drawstring pouches of sugar (don’t worry, they have human employees to handle the iron supplements)
• dryads who tend to the parks and sidewalk trees and have the ability to purify little patches of air for asthmatics who have difficulty breathing in the polluted city air
• tiny water sprites living in public fountains who use the coins people make wishes with to buy thimblefuls of coffee– once they’ve granted the wish to the best of their ability, of course
• sphinxes who guard libraries and only ask riddles at the level each passing person is capable of answering
• and werewolves too, I suppose, but they don’t sit around angsting all day about being monsters because there’s a monthly bus service that takes them to special parks just outside the city where they can spend the night running around and roughhousing without hurting anyone. they also get the next two days following the full moon off from work since wolfing is very tiring.
because while cities can be hard, dark, unfriendly places, they’re also vibrant and bright and full of all kinds of wonderful people
SlythKris (tumblr backup babey) 