RPG Stuff

Category: Tools

  • World Building Tools

    World Building Tools

    Made with Hex Kit.

    I enjoy world building and writing campaigns that I expect will never see the light of day. I haven’t run or played in any RPGs in a few years, but I still like to goof around dreaming up spells, items, and maps.

    I’ve previously written about the tools I used to use, but since I’m not running games anymore, some of them are no longer relevant to me so I have cancelled subscriptions to any of the sites I had to pay for, but I’m always on the lookout for tools I can use to generate ideas. (Although I’m still paying for my son’s subscription to D&D Beyond, which he does routinely use)

    Mapping is the main thing for me at the moment so let’s take a look at my current favourite mapping tools, from macro to micro:

    • World maps
    • Region maps
    • City/town maps
    • Dungeon maps
    • Battle maps

    World maps: I just discovered Azgaar Fantasy Map Generator. Gods this is good. It looks like it’s been around for a few years, but is still under active development, which is great. What is also great is that it’s free. At first, I thought it was just another random map generator that made particularly good looking maps, but it’s an amazingly comprehensive web based app that runs in the browser. Almost every aspect of the maps is customisable, down to naming conventions for regions and towns. I’m looking forward to spending more time with this app.

    Azgaar map

    Region maps: I’m not sure about region maps. I’ve been drawing them by hand, but I wonder if Azgaar might be able to handle this as well. I’ll post something about it once I figure it out.

    I should also mention Hexkit. It’s not free, but it’s not expensive at $15USD as a one off price (no subscription). It has a particular aesthetic, with bold hex lines and simple graphics, but it’s a lot of fun to play with. If you are happy with the aesthetic then it’s worth checking out.

    Hex Kit map

    City/town maps: I still love Watabou’s Medieval Fantasy City Generator. It’s very customisable and generates great looking maps. There’s a bunch of other cool stuff by this developer as well. Completely unrelated to map making, Watabou also has a great little game called Patient Rogue, which I love playing.

    Watabou City Generator map

    Dungeon maps: I enjoy drawing these by hand. I’m sure there is smart software for this, but I haven’t found one I’m happy with yet. I’m happy for suggestions.

    Battle maps: I’ll stick to hand drawing these for now.

    I tried using Inkarnate, but the learning curve was steep and I don’t think I ever got the most out of it. It’s meant to be a very capable mapping app, doing everything from the world scale maps down to battle maps, and to be fair, people do great things with Inkarnate, but it’s not for me.

    While writing this post, I logged in and found all my maps had been downgraded to the free plan and all my map assets were gone and the maps now look shite. The funny thing is that I see some tile icons I made myself in this map which are also missing from the current Inkarnate view. How is it that my own content is “premium” and I don’t have access anymore? If I pay the $25USD a year subscription, I’ll get my maps back, but I think I’ll walk away.

    I found a map I made in Inkarnate that I had uploaded to Owlbear Rodeo (before my Inkarnate plan was downgraded). I’m happy with this map, but it would only be worth the subscription fee if I used it regularly.

    Oh well. Like I said; I’ll stick to hand drawn battle maps.

    Map made in Inkarnate (with all assets)
    The same Inkarnate map on the free plan 🙁

  • Beyond

    Beyond

    Following on from my last post, I’ve been running D&D games for my son and his friends online every week during lockdown for the pandemic and I’m really getting into it.

    My current setup is to use Discord for voice chat combined with the Avrae bot to manage combat. The Critter DB site is great for building and storing monsters and NPC. I still use Roll20 as a virtual tabletop, but I ignore almost all it’s features except for the maps. I’m also using D&D Beyond more and more.

    At first, I chaffed at the idea of buying digital copies of books I already owned print copies of. I’m not a huge fan of digital copies of any kind, but that’s a whole other rant. Having used D&D Beyond for a while now, I have to admit they have one slick product.

    The integration with the Avrae bot means that character sheets can be pulled into Discord directly from D&D Beyond. All their gear and spells and stuff is all there and it’s mostley tracked. Creating characters in D&D Beyond is easy. They’ve clearly put a lot of work into the character sheets.

    The catch is that you can’t use anything unless you’ve paid for that content. SRD stuff is available free, but to get any of the interesting races or classes, you need to buy them. Fortunately, they have options for buying only the content you want. For example, the Sword Coast Adventurers Guide is listed at $29.99, but considering it’s mostly fluff, I chose to just buy the spells from that book and only spent about $4.

    I bought the entire Players Handbook, because it’s hard to DM without a lot of the contents of that book. But for books like the DMG, I only had to buy the magic items.

    The other nice thing is that as the DM, I can start a campaign and share any content I’ve purchased with the players. This is a huge plus for me. The players, who in this case are all kids, can just sign up for a free account, and then access any of the content I’ve purchased without having to pay for it again.

    I know I’ve been suckered in and spent more money on stuff than I’ve intended to, but that’s their business model. I’m aware it’s a kind of sunk cost fallacy, but I’m ok with it because it currently makes for easier game play.

  • D&D in a Virtual Environment

    D&D in a Virtual Environment

    I took a little break from gaming after last Christmas, but then life happened and here I am, 3 months later, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, no longer able to play face-to-face even if I wanted to.

    My son, who I was running the game for, is chomping at the bit for some game time with his friends and I’ve been investigating how to do this.

    In my last post, I talked about some of the tools I used to help run games, and many of them were already online tools, but I still need to bridge the gap a little to allow for a fully online game. I’ve seen numerous articles online about this, but at the moment I’m thinking of a combination of Roll20, which I’ve mentioned before, and Discord.

    I know I’m slow on the uptake where Discord is concerned. I only recently created an account as a result of World Anvil and GM Binder having channels, and to be honest, I thought it was just another chat program and I kinda dismissed it. But then I saw an article online somewhere pointing out how cool Discord bots were and that there was a D&D bot called Avrae that does all sorts of cool stuff.

    I haven’t got my head around all of it yet, but you can create character sheets in Google Docs (amongst other things), and import them into Discord. Avrae can keep track of combat initiative and track dice rolls. It knows the stats of all the monsters in the rule books (I think it gets this data from Beyond D&D), plus you can create and import critters from CritterDB and use them in fights.

    I’ve still got a ways to be comfortable using all this, but I’m hoping to run a game or two over the Easter break with my son and his friend.

  • Gaming Workflow & Tools

    Gaming Workflow & Tools

    It’s been about six months since I got back into D&D, running games for my son. I have learned a lot in that time, including how to be a better DM, but that’s a story for another post. I thought I’d take a moment to go back and reflect on an earlier post I made on a different blog that I use for tabletop gaming (I hadn’t started this blog at the time).

    I continue to be more and more impressed with the selection and maturity of the tools available online for gaming. There’s some really great stuff out there. So here’s my updated rundown of the tools I’ve been using and how I use them:

    • Typora. Writing is first and foremost the main activity I do when planning D&D sessions or designing new content. I’m a huge fan of basic text editing tools like the Atom editor (Atom is no longer being maintained. Visual Studio Code is the new kid on the block), but Typora takes it one step further by using Markdown formatting. It’s not a full-blown word processor like MS Word, but I don’t want that either. Typora sits nicely in the middle ground where I want it. I end up with many small documents on various aspects of the game. Best of all, Typora is free (Actually it’s not free anymore but it’s not expensive so I was happy to pay for it.).
    • GM Binder for keeping notes. As stated above, I love Markdown as a simple formatting language and GM Binder uses Markdown as its native format and adds some serious styling to make all your pages look like good old fashion printed D&D rule books. I don’t keep ongoing game notes here, but if I come up with a new spell, monster, magic item, etc, I publish it on GM Binder. I’m liking this tool so much that I help fund their recent Kickstarter campaign.
    • WorldAnvil. I only just discovered this site and fell in love with it straight away. This is where I plan to keep all my ongoing running notes for the game. The tool lets me build out all the elements of the world, including places, people, histories, etc. There’s also a virtual DM screen section which I haven’t quite got my head around yet but looks very promising to help me run games.
    • Encounter Calculator. This might be a bit specific for D&D5e, but I find judging encounter difficulty to be hard for me. I seem to always either under or overestimate how hard a fight is going to be, but I’ve found this tool really helps me get better at it.
    • D&D Beyond. This site has great resources for looking things up. I can find a spell reference quicker here than by flipping through my books. The only thing I don’t like about this site is that some of the detailed content is locked until you buy the digital version of the book through this site. I already have the hardcover physical versions so I have no intention of plonking down another $40 just to get access to content I already own, but I don’t expect their business model will change, and even without this, I find the site super helpful.
    • Roll20. I’ve gone off this site a bit. I do love the ability to upload (or draw) maps in the online tool, apply a Fog of War, and log the players into a second computer for the player map. But without at least two proper computers, this just isn’t working for me. I can run the virtual table from my laptop just fine, but the app version of the site is limited. I want this tool to work, but I just don’t know if it will do it for me.
    • Mapgen4: I used this to generate the campaign’s world map. I love the style in which it renders the maps, and even though I’ve now got the map I want to use, I could happily sit for ages randomly generating new maps just to look at them.
    • Fantasy City Generator. Maybe I’m lazy here, but this tool is great for banging out quick and usable town or city maps. Once again, I could play with this for ages just having fun with all the settings, and seeing what it comes up with. I have found that I’ve gone back and hand-drawn some of these maps for a different look, but I still use this site to get an initial layout of the towns.