#dugeons

I’ll begin with maps. Maps are crucial to any campaign, as it lets you get a visualization of where your players are traveling and what kind of terrain they are traversing. Furthermore, it lets you get a feel for how long it would take for them to travel from one area to another.

While I thoroughly enjoy hand-drawing maps, sometimes I need to create a map quicker, with more detail than I am skilled enough in creating, or that I can easily print multiple copies of. For this I use Inkarnate.com. It is a beautifully made website that is very easy to use and download, and creates gorgeous maps.

(The Eight States of Ihelan)

Above is one of the many maps I’ve created for the world, the Eight States of Ihelan. As you can see, it is excellent for creating both a visualization of where cities and countries exist, as well a the different biomes that are in each area. 

Next, I’ll chat about dungeon maps. Maps for traveling the world are all well and good, but sometimes we don’t have endless funds to buy d&d tiles to use for our campaigns. For this, I use pyromancers.com, which has another wonderful map/dungeon-building interface that allows you to create custom dungeons and download them. You can either print them off, or I’m in the process of creating a table that will upload maps onto a screen that we can use.

Above is one of several floors for a rather large dungeon that I made. I usually then take these and edit them on Microsoft Paint, creating a DM’s version that I use to know where everything is located. 

This allows me to quickly remember all of the different aspects of the dungeon I have created, as well as where the monsters are located.

Now I’m going to talk about sound. I use Spotify, mostly, as it has access to an enormous range of music that works incredibly well for a campaign. But when it comes to background sounds that exist beyond music, I use a website called ambient mixer. 

Ambient mixer allows you to create a group of sounds that happen in a loop, making backgrounds to different encounters that you might set, whether it be in a cave, or during a dark ritual, like the one below.

The end result is a background loop that you can use (or download for $, but I don’t have enough just laying around for that). My players have expressed multiple times how much more it adds to an encounter or to an image that I might be describing, and it is very easy to use.

Next, I wish to introduce you to Coggle.it. This program allows you to map out stuff in flowchart form. I use it to plan the story arcs of my campaigns. I would put an example of the story-arc, but I only recently started using it, and therefore the story-arc that I created has not yet finished (and my players are on tumblr). So here is an example image of a different type:

I also use a website called City of Brass, but it is a pay-to-use website on a subscription based payment. It is very useful, allowing you to create a webpage-like format for your world and characters for reference. But it is not especially necessary, and takes a little while to learn how to use. But I thought I would mention it nonetheless.