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.
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.
(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.
(I tried to give credit to the original posters or the actual URL for websites, unless those sites or URLs were no longer active)
the purpose of having a name for the flavor of your product is to tell me what flavor your product is
apparently, nobody ever told you this, and so you think the purpose of naming flavors is to sound like Death Knight talents
I don’t know what Icy Charge tastes like but I’m pretty sure it’s going to move me into melee with my target and slow their movement speed by 75% for 3 seconds
Part of me wants to shift the entirety of Magical Fantasy Adventure Land into the normal world instead of splitting it into a separate realm.
Part of me is still annoyed that this fucker still doesn’t have a proper title. Or at least something that sounds better as a place holder.
it’s called Mafalia. that’s your world’s name. ‘MAH-FAR-lee-uh’.
That actually sounds really good as a world name. I’m curious to know where that came from?
it’s the acronym. “Magical Fantasy Adventure Land”-ia becomes MaFAL-ia: Mafalia.
i always find if you need a placeholder name for something, write it out and make up an acronym, adding and removing letters or vowels if need be.
for example:
“The House Where Clio Fell in Love With Him”
“The HouseWhereClioFellinLoveWithHim”
“THoWeCliFiLWH”
“ThrowecliFiLWH”
“ThrowecliffiLWH”
“ThrowecliffiLWH”
“Throwecliffe”
“Thrawecliffe”
hence ‘the house where Clio fell in love with him’ becomes ‘Thrawecliffe House’. what’s a ‘thraw’? i don’t know. is it on a cliff? maybe; that’s an author’s preogative.
suddenly the name of the house itself throws up new questions which an author in answering goes off down a rabbit hole of worldbuilding.
Holy fuck. That is absolutely amazing advice.
Thank you so much!!!!!
As someone who regularly smashes words together for humorous purposes, I’m appalled I’ve never thought to use it in my writing. Bless you.
good advice
My favourite example of this is Dragon Age. The setting is called Thedas, which comes from calling it “the Dragon Age setting” in development! TheDragon Age Setting The DAS Thedas
I’ve been in a bit of a drawing slump lately but when your gnome artificer is allowed to build their own flying house, I’m going to draw that flying house.
“don’t split the party” is DM propaganda to prevent having to describe three simultaneous scenes and spend ten minutes figuring out the timeline, no this was before your conversation with him, she’s not even in the room yet!
Men like to believe theyd be great in apocalypse scenarios but they dont even know how to sew
Some male friends of mine were once talking about how useful they’d be in an apocalypse, and I pointed out that as a weaver and sewer and maker of stuff, I’d be pretty damn useful and they tried to tell me they could just loot clothes from WalMart and they’d be fine. As if WalMart has endless supplies without weekly deliveries.
So just last night a friend of mine was talking about who he’d round up in the event of a zombie apocalypse and how I’m his go-to farmer on account of I know how to keep an entire homestead up and running and we’re talking about what kind of resources I’d need to keep a colony of about 50-ish people alive and i bring up what all goes into processing wool for clothing and such and he just kind of stops me like ‘wait, wait, we don’t need to do all of that because we can scavenge for clothes we don’t need to be able to make them’ and i’m just like, ‘dude, that works in the short-term maybe but if this community is going to be sustainable you’ve gotta have people whose job it is to make clothes and blankets and shit’
also cloth rots pretty quickly when left exposed to the elements and after the first few years or so anything we manage to scavenge isn’t going to be wearable anymore and anywho we’ve got to teach the kids everything or they’re not gonna know what to do some decades down the line when everything’s too rusted or rotted out to be of any practical use anymore, etc etc, and he’s reckoning that things like woodworking and smithing and ranching are more important than say, cleaning or cooking or dairying and meanwhile i’m just smh may all the gods have mercy on this poor fool
He also balked when i brought up how to run a laundry and what all was needed to make everyday shit like soap and toothpaste – like dude, you think this is going to be all about hunting and scavenging and being neato manly-man drifters like in the walking dead let me teach you a thing about keeping a village alive and healthy for more than a week man most of it is shit you keep thinking is non-essential on account of it being “women’s work” or “simple chores” that’re actually pretty labor-intensive and take time, training, knowledge, and practice to do successfully, let alone well, and are 100% absolutely necessary work in order for you to have any reasonably good quality of life after the world ends
Damn, the aftermath of the apocalypse is going to be just littered with the corpses of people who expect the end of the world to be a video game.
I had a surprisingly coherent dream during that accident-nap, that contained an interesting idea for a campaign.
I say interesting because I’m not sure if it’s a good idea or a bad one, honestly. It would definitely require some careful handling and at least one player who’s 300% on the same page narratively as the DM, but it was definitely interesting.
There was a D&D campaign in this dream where one of the players knew their schedule would make them miss a lot of sessions. So instead of playing one of the main party, they played a recurring villain.
When the
villain
player was free they’d show up to taunt or bother or try to win over the main party. If the session ended with them still involved in the action, the DM just narrated them slipping away at the start of the next one. The DM would talk with the villain player between sessions about what their character was doing, and brief them on things they might know.
This particular villain was the “gain ultimate power and become a god” type. The climax of the campaign involved them seeking out some artifact of ultimate power. When it was clear the party would fail to stop them from acquiring it, the DM and the villain player gave each other a look. Both of them seemed to get really excited.
The DM narrated the villain reaching for the artifact, up to the point where their fingers actually touched it, then went suddenly quiet. The villain player grinned and said, “you sense a great and terrible shift in the structure of the universe. Someone new is in charge. Roll initiative.”
I think the best piece of character design advice I ever received was actually from a band leadership camp I attended in june of 2017.
the speaker there gave lots of advice for leaders—obviously, it was a leadership camp—but his saying about personality flaws struck me as useful for writers too.
he said to us all “your curses are your blessings and your blessings are your curses” and went on to explain how because he was such a great speaker, it made him a terrible listener. he could give speeches for hours on end and inspire thousands of people, but as soon as someone wanted to talk to him one on one or vent to him, he struggled with it.
he had us write down our greatest weakness and relate it to our biggest strength (mine being that I am far too emotional, but I’m gentle with others because I can understand their emotions), and the whole time people are sharing theirs, my mind was running wild with all my characters and their flaws.
previously, I had added flaws as an after thought, as in “this character seems too perfect. how can I make them not-like-that?” but that’s not how people or personalities work. for every human alive, their flaws and their strengths are directly related to each other. you can’t have one without the other.
is your character strong-willed? that can easily turn into stubbornness. is your character compassionate? maybe they give too many chances. are they loyal? then they’ll destroy the world for the people they love.
it works the other way around too: maybe your villain only hates the protagonist’s people because they love their own and just have a twisted sense of how to protect them. maybe your antagonist is arrogant, but they’ll be confident in everything they do.
tl;dr “your curses are your blessings, and your blessings are your curses” there is no such thing as a character flaw, just a strength that has been stretched too far.
This is such a fabulous flip side of what I’ve always known about villians. That their biggest weakness is that they always assume their own motivations are the motives of others.
Verliese Und Drachen 