I Blow Shit Up With My Mind

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.

Wonderous Item, Uncommon, requires attunement.

This amulet is a gold disk ingraved with the image of a sunglasses wearing humanoid holding up finger guns. While attuned to and wearing this amulet, you may, as an action, ask a creature who understands and can speak at Least one language you know, “does it smell like updog in here?” Or a similar question designed to prompt them into saying “What’s updog?”.

The creature makes an insight check contested by your deception check. On a success, they see through your shit. On a failure, they take 3d10 psychic damage and are stunned until the end of your next turn as you say “Not much dog what about you?”.

The company I paper-push for sells parts for heavy equipment. We’ve had a customer calling in the last couple days screaming at our sales department about a part that he ordered that needed to be brought in from overseas, roughly a 2 week wait time. He was warned of the wait time when he placed the order, but seemed to think we should be getting it for him much faster.

This customer has always had temper issues but it’s never been quite this bad.

Not my problem until yesterday, when he physically came into the office. The main guys were busy so he got shunted back into my office so I could track the part and give him another ETA. When I told him the ETA hadn’t changed and it was still a week out, he started going off on me. Redfaced and screaming that the machine was down and they were losing money on the job. Called me a cunt at one point.

I waited for him to stop screaming, then said, “Okay, give me a second to make a call and I’ll see if I can’t fix this.”

I sent him out to the lobby to wait, picked up the phone and called his boss. When I was in high school, his boss was the scout leader for my little brother’s troop. I was friends with his daughter and went over to their house a couple times a month. So we spend a couple seconds with long-time-no-see pleasantries, and then I say,

“So Boss, I’ve got your guy [name] here in my office very upset about not getting this part that he ordered a week ago. I know you guys need it but he was warned about the wait time, and I really don’t like being called a cunt at work. What can we do to fix this?”

Boss goes ‘He fucking WHAT?!“

Story comes out that the guy was warned about this part needed to be replaced a month ago but waited until it was completely broken to order it, and then lied to the boss that the reason for the delay was that my company had forgotten to order it.

The boss apologizes to me, says he’ll deal with it, and hangs up. Out in the lobby, the guy gets a call on his cell phone and answers it, gets this awful look on his face, then leaves without a word to the rest of us.

Boss called me back this morning to apologize again and say he fired the guy. Thank goodness for small-town connections!