Favorite Writing/GMing Tools

I'm not as imaginative a writer as I'd like to be, so I lean on a lot of different online tools to help me write both player and GM posts. I thought others might also find them useful, and I'd love to see what other people use that we'd all find interesting or useful.

Word Hippo: I've always found difficulty in remembering the word I'm looking for. This is the best thesaurus I've found so far, and has a fair amount of phrases or fairly uncommon words to represent what I'm thinking. I do wish it had even more obscure terms, or words that fell out of fashion decades/years ago.

Fantasy Name Generator: If you need a character name, town name, street name, cities, religions, gods, angels, devils, rivers, superheroes, fungi, helicopters, pirate crews, honorifics...honestly, the variety of types of names this thing can cook up is astounding. They've also gotten into descriptions and other types of generators, some of which are randomized, others you just use to design something. Enjoy getting lost in this rabbit hole.

Who the F*** is My Character?: DnD 5e character creator (backstories). We dug into this one on Discord today, but I've used it before. If you just can't decide or if your imagination needs a seed of inspiration, this can get you started. It's also a bit rude, so if you're not a fan of crude language, best skip to the next one. Just now, it gave me this character: "Helpful Mountain Dwarf Rogue from a secret cult who believes they had contact from a Celestial but it was just food poisoning." Avoid if you don't like giant, caps-locked fonts.

What the F*** is my Quest?: I lied, this one is also pretty crude. This is the last one like that, though, I promise. It'll give you a brief randomized synopsis of what could be broadly called a (fantasy) quest. Just now, it spit out "Ride a giant bird through the river of demonic influence. Kiss the delightful wizard, then take the cursed dagger that's only visible in complete darkness. Only then will your family allow you to return home." It's not exactly Pulitzer-winning, but it'll give your imagination a kick in the butt. Unless you want to ride a bird through the river of demonic influence and kiss a wizard, in which case, feel free to steal that one.

DnD Speak: A ton of d100 lists for inspiration-fodder, not all of which is DnD-themed, such as "100 Villainous Character Traits"



That's all I've got for now, but I've stumbled on a ton of other stuff that I've never gotten around to bookmarking. Share some of your favorite stuff, let's drown in possibility!

I like the site https://mythcreants.com for story writing tips, & funny comics. They have some D&D specific articles too.

@crazybirdman, that site is a goldmine of good stuff. Thanks for sharing. Some great resources there @skeptical_stun.

I have used this city generator. It can come in handy. https://watabou.itch.io/medieval-fantasy-city-generator and this one ffor wilderness travel https://www.kassoon.com/dnd/wilderness-travel/

The somewhat disorganized and ever-growing list I keep over at GM Mentoring Project and removing those already mentioned on this thread:

There's already an exceptional amount of material here, and I'm not sure how much value I can add to it. However, a library is an absolute treasure trove of material. I use and abuse my library card. Public domain resources are absolutely fantastic.

For example, try this collection of old maps from the New York Public Library.

Or, alternatively, old books. Here's something from King James VI (published 1597) called Demonology. For me, all these old resources like these are just waiting to be turned into gameable material.

Lemme chime in with a pair of the most handy tools I've found: the world building tools found within Stars Without Number and Worlds Without Number. Both of which are found on the free versions of their PDFs on DriveThruRPG. They're system agnostic, too - the former is great for scifi, and the later great for fantasy.

For the lazier GMs, SWN has a fan-made generator, Sectors Without Number, which does all the work for you, and gives you a bit of a visual output for it all too. Saved me a lot of work for my Lancer campaign.

my two cents, I used a couple of good resources for mapping, easily hiding / revealing sections of an existing map, etc.

https://www.owlbear.rodeo/

https://hextml.playest.net/

Over on the GM Mentoring Project, XOSkel10 brought up The Monsters Know What They’re Doing, a blog and now a book by Keith Amman. Run monsters like creatures and not just stat blocks. Awesome, awesome resource!

Don't forget to use Gamers Plane's Amazon referral link if you're purchasing the book.

there's an audiobook version too! :D

I like the Zoho Annotator free extension for chrome and mozilla browsers. It lets you take a screenshot of something, say a map, and add annotations, arrows, etc. A quick, simple tool for quick, simple jobs.

a buddy just sent me this: https://rtalsoriangames.com/2020/05/29/bringing-back-the-beat/

"Scripting the Game was one of the most useful tools R. Talsorian has ever developed for helping Gamemasters plot out an adventure but, unfortunately, had been lost to time because we no longer have the Dream Park license.

Or, rather, Scripting the Game had been lost until now!"

I make good use of the following resources:

Wonderdraft: Simply one of the best map-making programs available. A lower learning curve than Campaign Cartographer (and cheaper, too) and it makes some absolutely beautiful maps.

Dungeondraft: From the makers of Wonderdraft, this map-making tool does for the small scale what Wonderdraft does for the global scale!

Supernatural Collective Nouns: I don't recall where I found this, but I was kicking around the Internet one day and came across it. I've found it to be very useful.

Foundry VTT: A virtual table-tops go, Foundry is one of the best that I've found. It's a $50 one-time fee and there are hundreds of support modules for it. Anything that you can do with Roll20 can be done with Foundry and far, far more. Don't believe me? Just watch the demo videos.

The Elephant in the Room - Feat Taxes in Pathfinder: If you play Pathfinder, you could do worse than to have a look at these rules that reduce the "feat bloat". It makes some feats obsolete by adding them into the combat options and reduces the need for so many prerequisites on others.

Traveller Map: If you play Traveller in the established universe of the Third Imperium, this is an absolutely invaluable resource!

Donjon: Any GM worthy of the title already knows about this resource, but just in case...

I would highly recommend both of these programs as well. I have literally 0 visual artistic talent but I think my results with these programs aren't half bad. The sky would be the limit for anyone who actually knows what they are doing and downloads extras assets. The sub-reddits for these programs are a goldmine for maps posted by other people, if you don't want to make them yourself or are looking for inspiration.

Back in the day I used FlowScape a few times for scenery.



I'm kinda curious about Townscaper.

I loved that book! I read through it at least two or three times. It does such a great job at putting fiction and stats together.

I loved it so much, that I hacked D&D Beyond with it... About a year ago I was interested in applying to a job opening as a developer at D&D Beyond. So, as part of my application, I spent a weekend hacking the source of their encounter builder to add a feature. Each monster included tips for each monster. The tips were all those from TMKWTAD. I never even heard a single word back from them, but I was really proud of my work. Totally off topic here, but I feel like sharing :)






Source
Running it is pretty complicated tho. I had to download all the source code from their site (which included source maps so I could read it all and actually make the hack), then run a proxy that ran the site locally but forwarded to the real dndbeyond.com any requests for site assets that I didn't run locally.

It bugs me that you never heard back. If you're going through the effort of applying to a job, they should be good enough to say "Thanks but no thanks."

I don't really use DnDB much but I would've liked to see that, @Constablebrew!

I've used World Anvil in the past. It can be a little overwhelming, but if you don't worry about using all the options it's a great way to organize all your world building notes. Guy Sclanders who has the How to be a great gm channel on YouTube has a whole series on how to use it.

Also a big fan of Dungeon Fog for mapping