Here are my favourite websites that help me prepare and run TTRPG sessions (I mainly play D&D 5e but many of these will also work for other games). All of these are either completely free or have a free base version.

2-Minute-Tabletop: Lots of free tokens, maps and more! Also contains some content you have to pay for, but the free selection is usually enough for me. Very useful, especially if you're running online games. You can even customise the tokens' colours.

Lost Atlas: A huge selection of free maps, with filters to help you find exactly what you're looking for.

Falindrith's D&D Monster Maker: Create custom D&D monster statblocks. Lots of customisation options, from spellcasting to legendary actions. Very useful if you want to create a unique BBEG, but too complex to use for minions imo.

Fantasy Name Generators: You've probably heard of this one before, but it's incredibly useful. Whether you need to quickly come up with some NPC names, figure out what that town is called, or invent an extra riddle because your players solved the puzzle way too quickly, you'll find what you need here. It's very versatile and even has specific name generators for some RPGs!

Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator: This is my favourite world map tool. You can generate a random map and then customize it until it fits for your campaign. You can let it generate country and town names for you or come up with your own.

Dungeon Scrawl: Create your own digital battle maps. Base version is free, but you can pay for a premium version if you want more features. Not as quick as simply downloading an existing map, but you will be able to create exactly the kind of map you want.

I Loot The Body: Great if you need to quickly generate loot, treasure, or NPCs (I mainly use it for the latter). Compatible with D&D 5e and Pathfinder 2e.

Nuudel: Wonderful tool for planning the date and time of your next session. Easy to use and it works very well. If you make a poll with it, make sure to select "All voters can modify any vote", otherwise it can lead to problems if people want to edit their own answer. The website is German but you can switch to a different language in the drop-down menu in the top right corner.

These are just the ones I know off the top of my head, if I remember or discover more websites/tools I will update this post.

ok so because I am becoming a DM this year in my school TTRPG club, I've been looking for things to hopefully make my life a little easier for keeping track of the campaign and sharing stuff with my players.

that being said, I have found this really cool website:

It lets you create and keep track of campaigns, create characters, add other players/dms to the campaign, link different aspects and such, and a whole lot more!!

It's free to make an account, all you need is a verifiable email! There is an option to support them and get extra perks, but they're not necessary to use the website.

If you play online via discord and want to try using the Avrae bot, but you can't afford to pay for all of the expanded content on D&D Beyond, you can instead use dicecloud! It's compatible with Avrae so you can use discord commands to keep track of your character sheet, and in my experience there hasn't been a single piece of content missing from it, and that's coming from someone who loves to make variant tieflings or firbolgs with homebrew and multiclasses. The UI is not super user friendly but I have very poor computing skills and I managed, so it mustn't be too bad!

If you're a Star Wars fan like me, but don't want to learn a whole new system, I recommend SW5e! It's a totally free (as far as I'm aware) fanmade Star Wars TTRPG using D&D 5th Edition as it's basis. It was my absolute best option when I was looking for Star Wars TTRPGs since I wanted a d20-based game and something that was compatible with both clone wars and old republic eras. They have all their content (like, fully written core rulebooks and expansions, it's amazing) on their website as well as a character builder similar to D&D Beyond that's currently in beta testing (it worked fine for me, just with a few class features needing to be added manually)

Expanding on the above, I recently found a masterlist of some SW5e adventures across different eras and playstyles on GM Binder (SW5e DMs PLEASE hmu I'm so desperate to play a clone medic rn)

SPELL CARDS! Ever played a Cleric and don't want to have to look up every single one of your spells whenever you're preparing them at the start of the day? This website has all D&D spells available as spell cards and you can just pick whichever ones you want to print, filtered by class (they also automatically include subclass spells, so make sure you check which ones are available to you). They're quite small when printed but imo it's a good size, you can put them in plastic card sleeves or laminate them if you want them to be a bit less flimsy. You can also print blank cards for custom spells

You may have seen it before since it's one of the first results when you search for spells, but RPGBOT is really handy for picking spells quickly when you're playing a new class. Sure, it's just someone else's opinion, but for me it's nice to have an explanation of how a spell would actually be relevant and what it's caveats are. They also have guides on each class, such as picking race, subclass and backgrounds, which I use pretty often to see if I like the sound of a class and to get an idea of what it's strengths are, so that I don't make the mistake of trying to play a Spores Druid as a non-melee class again

their bruiser is a mild mannered english librarian (don’t be fooled by his appearance, he was something of a rowdy youth in his day). he was a victorian explorer and inventor who invented a time machine using ancient artifacts, but the blasted thing went and broke on him

their magic user is a chinese line cook at a struggling vegan restaurant. he was a former jin dynasty daoist priest who entered secluded cultivation, lost track of time, got mistaken for a statue, and woke up in the british museum

their tech whiz is a native hawai’ian electrician. she was a 22nd century graduate student on the team that developed the first working time machine, and was using it to study her ancestors whose philosophies and technologies the time machine was based on when some british guy came and stole her machine, and now she has to track him down before he destroys himself and the universe

Xoxo

-Designer

Source

It would have been simple for AO3 to 'lose' a million or so bookmarks to buy some time. They're just bookmarks, who cares? It's not like anyone's paying for this.

First: this particular type of data migration (moving from INT to BIG INT) has happened twice in AO3's past already (for history, and for kudos) and it was the same each time - a large table with hundreds of millions of items being moved is time-consuming and you need to be cautious doing it, and it WILL require a few hours of downtime to be safe. It is not "fixing a bug". It is moving the content of all bookmarks on the site. It will have to happen again for other types of data in the future, because AO3 just keeps growing.

Second: They can't know exactly how long a migration like that will take, so they make their best estimate. They can't test it before-hand on the test archive and have it reproduce exactly what will happen on the live archive, because the live archive has so much more data. Estimating "how long will it take to move 700 million items" is a matter of experience and luck. (Yes, 700 million is more the actual number of bookmarks involved, I know people keep citing the 2 billion number but each bookmark is assigned an ID number, and bookmark numbers iterate by 3. The highest ID number available under the old system was the slightly over 2.1 billion number, so the actual total is about 1/3 that. It's still a lot.)

Third: In general, AO3 tries not to have downtime, and it does very well. My observation is that the process in this case was usually like "Ok, let's start doing this and see how it goes. *waits to see if things start to get painfully slow and a lot of errors start happening* Ok, there are lots of errors happening and the site is getting slow to use, let's block all bot traffic and see if that helps. *that helps for a while and then things start to pile up again* Ok, let's try flipping the site into maintenance mode (i.e. take it down) just for a minute or two and see if that lets it catch up. *that helps for a bit and then things start to get slow and not catch up with just a few minutes of downtime* Ok, we do need to actually take it down and just let the process run until it finishes. " My point is that they first try various options that, if they work, will not require taking the site down all the way, before resorting to downtime. If they left it up, the process would take a lot longer, and people would experience a lot more problems while using the site. Taking it down is safer and more efficient in that kind of case.

Fourth: The same people doing the work need to communicate it to the people who do the tweets/tumblr posts/status updates. So not just doing complicated database stuff, but also telling communications "hey we are about to do X and Y and it will take approximately Z hours". (Fortunately we have mostly moved on from the times when it was literally the SAME people trying to do both things, and have dedicated communications folks to help.) Sometimes when they are trying to do a lot of things at once, the technical volunteers might not communicate as quickly or clearly as would be ideal, or a comms person might not immediately be available to make a post, so a status update is a bit later than we prefer, but we try to always communicate to users before doing something big like taking the site down. In a normal situation with planned downtime, the ideal is to make a post a couple of days before, then an hour before, and then at the time the downtime happens, and then when it's done. Sometimes there isn't time for as much advance warning, when something is either unexpected or doesn't go as planned.

hahaha

This is bat friendly street lighting, which not only looks sick as fuck but allows bats to pass through without disturbance, as they cannot see red.

‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers – That perches in the soul – And sings the tune without the words – And never stops – at all