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Necrozius

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I would love to share—and discover new—useful gaming aids offered on the web (especially for free!).
To get things started, here are a few of my personal favourites:

Tabletop Audio - Free
Great for DMs who wish to add sound to their game sessions but want to avoid recognisable tunes from movies, tv shows or video games. All tracks are about 10 minutes long, loop perfectly and are named by genre/mood/theme/setting. A huge variety of tracks that you can stream right there or download for later.
Bonus: has a Sound Pad, which is a dashboard to cue up multiple types of sound effects (looping or otherwise).
Highly Recommended.
Link: http://tabletopaudio.com/

Dongon - Free
A massive collection of random generators. Just about everything is covered (monsters, encounters, dice, names etc...) and some of it caters to specific games. Includes map generators too.
Very useful.
Link: http://donjon.bin.sh/

Tiamat the Tile Mapper - Free, but requires Sign In for all features.
Ever need to quickly and easily create a dungeon map? This online tool is a very nice example of such a site. Decent U.I., and nice imagery, but I wouldn't use it to create maps for a published product (well, maybe). Still, useful and effective.
Link: http://www.rpgobjects.com/tiamat/
 
donjon.bin.sh is without a doubt one of the most useful things ever.

If you go to the Virtual Apple II website, you can run both Dungeon Masters Assistant programs through online emulation. Be forewarned: it is not possible to save the files locally...
 
The DMA programs are considered abandonware and are readily available for download after a simple search. They run well in DOSBox and copy/pasting and printing are available using DOSBox SVMs.

On a related note I have been trying to elicit help building a new AD&D 1e toolset based on newer programming languages and easy to run natively in Windows. I thought I had a partner based on a Facebook discussion, but that seems to have evaporated.

If anyone is interested in this, please contact me. I don't have a lot to spend, but payment is not out of the question. I even suspect that given the nature of the OGL and OSR it would be possible to set up a project that relies on donations.
 
I consider Tabletop Audio a must-have in my game, and miss it deeply if, for some reason, I can't use it. For some reason, I can't get the SoundPad to work, but the library is great and grows all the time. Donjon is wonderful for whipping up an instant dungeon when you don't have time.
 
I consider Tabletop Audio a must-have in my game, and miss it deeply if, for some reason, I can't use it. For some reason, I can't get the SoundPad to work, but the library is great and grows all the time. Donjon is wonderful for whipping up an instant dungeon when you don't have time.
Ooh I'm curious. What browser/device do you use where Tabletop Audio doesn't function? (I'm a Web Developer and thrive on these mysteries)
 
Nothing too mysterious. I use a tablet/ Bluetooth speaker combination in my game under ideal circumstances. If I forget to charge my tablet or I can't be bothered to bring down the speaker that night, I might eschew it for an evening. Easy things to circumvent normally. Also, games at cons aren't always worth the hassle of getting Wi-Fi access. Then I use my gaming soundtracks.
 
The Homebrewery - Free
An online interface to create your own content for D&D 5e. It has painstakingly mimicked the layout and branding of the official books. If you want to create stuff for the DM's Guild, you don't even need InDesign or other desktop publishing software.
Very simple to use: no coding knowledge needed.
Link: http://homebrewery.naturalcrit.com/
 
D&D 5e Single-Use Magic Items - Free
A simple page from one of my favourite bloggers (Sly Flourish). Each time you refresh this page you get a list (ordered or not) of one-use magic items with listed costs and page references to the Player's Guide spell section. If you want to have the equivalent of Cyphers in your D&D game.
Very quick to use and handy in a pinch.
Link: http://slyflourish.com/one_use_5e_magic_items.html
 
Scrapbook DMG - Free
This one isn't a tool, per se, but a blog post that compiled a list of resources that are great contributions to a DM's "scrapbook". I've personally been assembling one of these over the past few months. There are a few web-based tools here, as well as some advice, tables and resources for monsters, treasure and idea-generation.
Worth looking over sometime: you might find a few valuable bookmarks for your DM toolkit.
Link: http://iceandruin.blogspot.ca/2015/09/a-scrapbook-dmg.html
 
How to be a Great Game Master - Free
A YouTube channel of GM advice. While some of it is more suited to beginners, I still find a lot of valuable advice in here. He has a series of on how to be a Great Player, which are also great. Notable one: How to be an Evil character, which was particularly fantastic.
Great to watch when you're bored or to share with new players (or problematic ones).
Link: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1F4eMw3W_rHBfxf9_m1hbw
 
Trilemma.com: I'll See It When I Believe It - Free
(in response to Tristram's One Page RPGs thread)
A fantastic blog by Michael Prescott where he posts one page dungeons. They're incredible, system-neutral and very inspiring. If you need more than just a random dungeon map location, this guy delivers a lot. Many have been translated into French and Spanish too. Highly recommended. Had I more disposable income, I'd support his Patreon.
Link: http://blog.trilemma.com/
 
More Audio Resources

Ambient Mixer - free - a great resource for appropriate background sounds.
Syrinscape - free to try, some packages cost a bit - you can combine different sounds, ambient and specific, with different levels
Softrope - similar to Syrinscape
 
There are couple of tools at tools.notesfrompavis.com

Creating Mythras Encounter Generator JSON for Roll20
and
Creating Glorantha and Mythras color - session and adventure planning generators.
and a new one
Mythras Character Skill Designer Makes Exploring Character Options and Creating Characters Easier



There is a new tool in early beta at http://tools.notesfrompavis.com/



If you want to design characters relatively quickly Character Skill Designer is there for you to help with the skills part. It (currently) helps to create cultures and careers from the Mythras Core.
It gives the player quick way to design the skill set. In Mythras RAW there is a set of standard and professional skills available per culture and career. Each culture also has different careers available.

So enter the characteristics (Str, Siz, Con etc…) in the tool

So for example if your player has dreamed of being a Nomad Diabolist from Northern Wastes CSD lets him pick Nomad as the culture, Diabolist as a profession. After this tool let’s you select the right amount of professional cultural and career skills (which is max 3).

Next it let’s you see all the skills (including the standard skills that were not available with the culture/profession). The CSD calculates the base percentages for the skills and let’s you sort them by skill% to see how the skills fit players view and where to add cultural or career points.

The skill template has a note for each skill about whether you can use cultural or career points or whether it is just standard. When you are satisfied with the skill combination you can download that as a CSV file.


This will be developed further. There might be some bugs in the combinations, feedback welcome




 
Token Stamp 2
An online tool that allows you to rapidly create tokens for virtual gaming tables. A variety of shapes, effects and outputs decent-quality transparent PNGs. I’ve been using this plenty with Roll20 and it works like a charm. So quick to use that I have it open in a separate tab during a game.
 
Dongon - Free
A massive collection of random generators. Just about everything is covered (monsters, encounters, dice, names etc...) and some of it caters to specific games. Includes map generators too.
Very useful.
Link: http://donjon.bin.sh/
Thanks for the links, I cannot believe I missed this thread until now. I really like donjon and find it highly useful.
 
Dungeon Mastery - generous Free plan, plus paid
Cross-linked notes like Roam Research from a Game Master point of view. Full disclosure, I built this. But I also use it for all my campaign notes, and I think it's very useful.
Link: https//dungeonmastery.app
 
Similar, but maybe not as nice-looking, and no free version. But good to know!

Giving honest feedback here, your Free tier isn't really generous enough to use seriously. The purpose of something like Roam is to store little bits of information, rather than monolithic bits. From doing Zettelkasten myself, and using Campaign Logger for a while, I know that 150 bits of information will be gone like that if you're seriously using it for a campagin. It was what made me not seriously consider it, especially as I get Campaign Logger for free as long as I support Johnn Four on Patreon for $2 a month and get all of his other items, as opposed to your $6 a month for just that functionality.
 
This would be nice if one could just buy a license for a flat price.

Yeah, he used to have it that way, but as with a lot of things, it's reverted to SAAS. Getting in on the ground floor really helped me out.
 
Yeah, he used to have it that way, but as with a lot of things, it's reverted to SAAS. Getting in on the ground floor really helped me out.
Must be nice! Do you have a lifetime account or something? You're not getting charged by month, I assume?
 
Must be nice! Do you have a lifetime account or something? You're not getting charged by month, I assume?

No, not getting charged by the month. He used to have offline apps for mobile also, but those fell by the wayside- implementing the sync and keeping the platforms in sync was taking away from adding features.
 
Don't know if this passed here, but I found this:


An online real human face generator for non-existent human beings. Can be useful for NPCs.
 
Don't know if this passed here, but I found this:


An online real human face generator for non-existent human beings. Can be useful for NPCs.
I’ll have to admit, part of me thinks that clicking that is a portal to the Twilight Zone. I’ll end up seeing myself, after which I won’t exist (no one knows me or remembers me, no records, etc) or else I’ll see something horrific out of a Lovecraftian nightmare sculpted by Clive Barker.
 
The first one I got had a neck that was just a little too long.
 
Nothing too mysterious. I use a tablet/ Bluetooth speaker combination in my game under ideal circumstances. If I forget to charge my tablet or I can't be bothered to bring down the speaker that night, I might eschew it for an evening. Easy things to circumvent normally. Also, games at cons aren't always worth the hassle of getting Wi-Fi access. Then I use my gaming soundtracks.
 
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Perilous Shores

Somebody about mentioned Watabou's Medieval Fantasy City Generator. My favorite tool of his is Perilous Shores. It is a random map generator that you can set some of the parameters for, change how the terrain is displayed, the color of the map, fonts, etc. or use the presets. You have the option to have a hex grid or not and whether to have it numbered or not. It's just a really cool tool to fool around with.

Perilous Shores


Here's the same map in two different styles.

scheck_island smaller.pngscheck_island (1) smaller.png
 
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