#rpg tools

BREAK!! represents an opportunity to introduce some new people to rpgs or playing rpgs online, though, and I can see some vets’ experience actually hindering them from visualizing the abstractions BREAK!! foes with its battlefields.

This is a Google Slides file I shared with the BREAK!! Discord after another user on there gave me the idea. All the copy/paste assets are on slide 9, blank is on slide 10. The other slides so far are common, easy to customize battlefield setups. I love the old art of Grey’s that I used for the background.

Please remember before using this to Make A Copy first, so the original is ready and clean for the next person.

[”Quick #dnd #creator #dmtip! If you got MS Excel access & want to draw out some dungeons, just set your Column Width to 2.14 & your Row Height to 14.5 and boom, you got yourself some graph paper! Just use the fill command from there to color in the squares! Like so!”]

I printed out a bunch of pieces of things and put them in a binder so I don't have to look at screens. World building stuff, mostly, but some NPC generators and miscellaneous other things. The bulk of my world generation tables come from the game F.O.R.G.E. which is free and an excellent solo resource. I also use the one-page fantasy biome event/NPC generators from Chaos Gen on DrivethruRPG, which cost $1 each. They're rules agnostic, which makes them great for to plug into a bunch of different game types or just for journaling.

I mix and match because I've found no one game has exactly what I want. Those two sources make up about 75% of my game set-up. Then I apply a game with a genre, theme, or game mechanics I like for specific types of stories I want to play. There are some really simple one page games that are rules lite, or something crunchier like D&D. Crunchier games make characters with lots of mechanics-based abilities, which is good if you like structured creation. Rules lite games allow more flexibility, but can be a little too abstract for some people's tastes.

My binder is separated into several different sections:

General rules for gameplay that are very generic. One Page Solo Engine, The Two Roll Major Arcana (for rolling for tarot cards instead of pulling them out of a deck, which some games do), and the Verb/Noun and Quest Generator Tables from F.O.R.G.E.

World building stuff. Chaos Gen and F.O.R.G.E. tables for biomes, wilderness, and settlement generation. Also character name generators for various fictional races collected from here, there, and everywhere. (Dolmenwood has some wonderful character creation tables for names, appearance, and even jobs and ambitions.)

Character/Game specific. Character sheets, important game mechanics, genre specific oracle tables, and any relevant maps.

Create a spell book for an NPC, a corpse, a library, a haul. Decide how powerful the book is by the caster level and intelligence score, plus fudge dice to make it interesting.

A maxed out book:

🧙‍♂️ So I found this tool that lets you make your own Deltarune-style prophecy panel and I may have gone too far…

“The one who microwaves tuna at 3am shall bring the end of the world.”

➡️ https://www.deltaruneprophecypanelgenerator.art

A new edition of D&D is coming out this year. That’s cool, and I’m excited. I’ve spent a fair amount of time (maybe too much time) watching videos of people commenting on the new edition, and industry news. It is fun to think about the big picture, after all I have spent most of my life involved with this hobby. A couple of these industry pundits have been putting out videos singing the death…