Greetings from the edge,
Overworked and undercaffeinated, a DM’s lot is mostly spent trying to stop a group of their friends from spectacularly destroying themselves by proxy on a weekly basis.
Despite what our players might think, we don’t spend our spare time lurking in deserted castles, cackling maniacally and waxing our goatees while plotting their downfall. Most of us are just desperately trying to keep track of the plot, maps at three different scales, half a dozen NPC voices, and the fact that somebody adopted the goblin we expected them to kill three months ago.
Back in the bad old days, the only way to organise all of this was by hand. Maps were drawn in pencil, encounter tables lived in dog-eared notebooks, and important campaign notes were scribbled on whatever scrap of paper happened to be within reach. My very first dungeon was sketched on the back of a sheet of duotone cartridge paper.
Thankfully, we futuristic spacemen of the twenty-first century have access to tools that would have caused fifteen-year-old me to detonate like a small and badly dressed atomic bomb.
So, in the spirit of a peek behind the curtain, here’s the collection of DM tools I use every week.
Inkarnate
If you’re anything like me, you have my condolences. However, if you’re nothing like me, but also have a lot of maps to keep track of, then Inkarnate is probably a good starter.
A subscription to Inkarnate costs $7.99 per month and $63.99 per year, and that has gone up this year; however, for that you get 30,000+ HD assets, 8K exports, 100 map slots, personal use, and cloning allowed. While you can get by with the free option, it is very, very limited. With just 1,000 or so art assets, 3 map slots. Although a higher cost tier is available.
It’s relatively user-friendly, and I use it for world, region and town maps. There is a healthy Reddit community, and, like with almost any artistic program, you get out what you are prepared to put in. Although you need a certain amount of flair and forethought. You can just throw elements at the page and see what happens (that’s how I started) or take a good deal of time to produce a masterpiece.
Dungeon Scrawl
The nice thing about Dungeon Scrawl is that you can literally sit down an hour before the session starts and have a professional-looking map after 15 minutes, giving you 45 minutes to populate it with monsters and traps. It will help you immensely with the former and not at all with the latter.
Cost-wise, you can use it for free, but you are really not getting the full benefit, and for $5/month (or a discounted annual plan). It adds unlimited cloud storage, autosave, commercial use rights, PDF/high-res export, custom textures, and lighting effects. The free option is pretty good, but the quality of life improvements you get for 5 bucks a month are more than worth it.
This is one program that I have high hopes will just keep getting better as new updates come out, but even if they don’t, if your party are dungeon divers or you just need to map out a few cursed temples, this is one subscription you’re going to want to keep.
Very, very user-friendly, it is a program that I keep returning to, and my players love the handouts.
Fantasy Name Generators
https://www.fantasynamegenerators.com
With over 1,400 generators, which in DM terms might as well be approximately a billion names across every conceivable category, fantasy name generators are one of the most useful sites that I have found for dungeon masters.
It’s completely free and growing all the time, no matter what you are running, from historically accurate Arthurian-inspired adventures to space cowboys out in the ’verse; if you are in a tight spot and need a name real quick (and don’t want to call them ‘Dave’ for the hundredth time), then just log on and make a few notes prior to your session and you will be golden.
Places, NPCs, even big stuff like nations and kingdoms can be found hiding for you on the site, ready to be released with just a few keystrokes.
None of these tools will run the game for you, and thank Gygax for that. The point is not to automate the soul out of your campaign. The point is to clear away enough admin fog that you can focus on the good stuff: strange choices, memorable places, terrible accents, and that one NPC your players were never supposed to care about but absolutely do.
These are the tools I reach for every week. Not because they make me a better DM on their own, but because they give me more room to actually be one.
See you in the margins,
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