Bit of a weird ep this time. Daniel had less than a week’s notice to run a game for some youngsters, half of whom hadn’t really played an RPG before.
Daniel decided to make this a challenge run: create a new campaign and new vanilla D&D 5e setting from scratch in just a few nights. The materials and tools he used to do that are all down in the Links section.
However, since we were recording offsite, we ran into some technical difficulties, resulting in only the first bit of the session’s being recorded (and its sounding like we’re in a cave). Daniel supplies the rest of the ep in commentary.
Daniel will likely run this campaign again, and, to that end, will revise the materials you’ll find linked below, replacing randomly generated results with bespoke items, replacing random internet images with hand drawn ones, etc.
Patrons will get this revised material; but, with a little thought, you can probably run a game tonight by printing out the alpha material and hanging loose.
Links
- The booklets and maps I used (expect roughness, inconsistency): LINK
- Handout of loot goals and bonds for players: LINK
- 5e Monster Cards (I printed 4 to a sheet and quartered each page): LINK (aff)
- Music generator used to create the campaign theme: https://www.aiva.ai/
- Chartopia Collection of my selected random tables: LINK
- Chartopia Collection I made of the Moldvay Basic treasure types; I preferred to use this when manually rolling up treasure for lairs: LINK
- Pastebin of raw GM notes, from which all the documents were created: LINK
- Web app to create world map: https://azgaar.github.io/Fantasy-Map-Generator/
- If you set units to 1.8 miles and set the grid settings to the smallest possible setting, you’ll get six mile hexes. I did this for printing off maps, but it KILLS performance and took more time than it was worth. I recommend adding in the six mile hex overlay in another tool, or just sticking to a ruler
- It’s integrated with this city generator: http://fantasycities.watabou.ru
- Main dungeon generator: http://www.dizzydragon.net/adventuregenerator/gen
- Web app to generate lairs: http://meta-studios.com/dg/dungen.html
- Web app to generate hirelings: http://meta-studios.com/dg/hire.html
- Dyson’s free to use maps: https://dysonlogos.blog/maps/commercial-maps/
- DnDBeyond for rules reference: https://www.dndbeyond.com/
How to Print the Booklets
You’re likely going to have to fiddle a lot. You definitely, under page setup, want to select “booklet print” so that it knows how to arrange the pages. Beyond that, and you’re best off googling your particular issue.
How to Run the Game from This Stuff
If you download everything in the Google Drive folder, you should be good to go if you:
- Print all the maps
- Print the booklets appropriately (see above)
- Pull up my Chartopia Collection for the campaign on your phone
- Check the links section above just in case
You’ll have to improvise some things, but it’s certainly enough for Daniel to get several sessions out of, even without cleanup and revision.
How Daniel Made the Booklets
Once you get a hang of it, it’s not difficult to paste your notes into booklet form.
- Used Word
- SHIFT + CTRL + 8(*) to turn on formatting visbility (e.g., page breaks)
- CTRL + ENTER to force a page break
- Pages in multiples of 4
- Reserve page 1 & 2 for cover and inside front cover, next-to-last & last for inside back cover and back cover.
Daniel tried doing it in Google Docs for max portability, but it seems to lack some of the essential ease of use features that Word has.
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