#6 - The Best DM Tools
I have been experimenting with ChatGPT for various work-related tasks and I’ve been very impressed. So, I recently decided to see what could it do for my DMing.
Let’s say your players unexpectedly decide to explore the deep dungeon they discovered that lies beneath the castle cellars (where you initially assumed they’d be adventuring in); rather than railroading them to remain in the cellars, you ask for a five minute break and break open ChatGPT.
The results are... game changing.
Here is the process I used (ChatGPT’s responses are italicized):
“You are an expert at the D&D 5e Monster Manual. Do you understand yes or no without elaboration”
….
Yes
….
“Create four difficult encounters using earth elemental creatures that the five, 5th level players will discover in an underground dungeon.”
….
Sure, here are four challenging encounters for five 5th level characters in an underground dungeon:
1. **The Living Walls**:
- 2 Gargoyles (Monster Manual, pg. 140)
- 1 Earth Elemental (Monster Manual, pg. 124)
The party enters a seemingly empty room. As they proceed, the stone walls around them animate into the forms of 2 Gargoyles and an Earth Elemental, presenting an immediate threat from all sides.
2. **The Tremors**:
- 1 Bulette (Monster Manual, pg. 34)
In a large, cavernous chamber, the ground is soft and sandy. Suddenly, a Bulette bursts from the ground, attacking the characters. The sandy ground around them may make it difficult terrain and make it easier for the Bulette to use its burrowing abilities.
3. **The Stone Guardians**:
- 2 Stone Golems (Monster Manual, pg. 170)
In a hallway adorned with statues, two Stone Golems awaken to block the path and attack any intruders. A magic ward on the hall might prevent the characters from simply bypassing the golems.
4. **The Heart of Stone**:
- 1 Earth Elemental Myrmidon (Elemental Evil Player's Companion, pg. 11)
In the final room, the characters face an Earth Elemental Myrmidon, a much more dangerous and skilled foe than a regular Earth Elemental. The Myrmidon might be protecting a magical artifact or treasure of great value, providing the characters with a significant reward if they can overcome this final challenge.
Remember that while these encounters are designed to be challenging, the exact difficulty can depend on many factors, such as the characters' resources, tactics, and the specific features of each encounter location. Always adjust encounters to suit your specific party and campaign.
….
So, that is a pretty good series of impromptu encounters to flush out the unexpected side-trek the players have sprung on you. BUT - let’s say you know the PCs plan on helping out a Myconid leader in an underground raid. In the same chat, simply have ChatGPT weave your encounters into a short story:
“Create a story that could combine all four of these encounters in a short adventure about the players helping the mushroom king reclaim his underground home from evil cultists with appropriate treasure for fifth level player characters:”
….
**Title: The Fungal Crown's Claim**
Long ago, a sentient fungus, known as the Mushroom King, ruled over a vast underground kingdom. Recently, an evil cult worshipping a primordial earth entity took over his realm, driving the Mushroom King and his myconid subjects out and occupying the cavernous home. The Mushroom King, desperate to reclaim his kingdom, sends out a plea for help.
1. **Encounter One: The Living Walls**
As the adventurers enter the Mushroom King's realm through a secret entrance, they find themselves in a seemingly empty chamber. Suddenly, the stone walls around them animate into the forms of 2 Gargoyles and an Earth Elemental. They are the cult's first line of defense, animated by the cult's primal magic to guard the entrance.
If the adventurers can defeat these guardians, they'll find their first treasure: a *Wand of Magic Missiles* (DMG, p. 211) hidden in a niche in the wall, a remnant of a previous adventurer who wasn't lucky enough to make it past these guardians.
2. **Encounter Two: The Tremors**
Venturing deeper into the labyrinth, they enter a sandy, cavernous chamber. A sudden tremor precedes the emergence of a Bulette, a creature corrupted by the cult's magic and made to serve as a second line of defense. The sandy terrain makes it a tough and memorable fight.
If they defeat the Bulette, they'll discover a hidden chest buried beneath the sand, containing a *Cloak of Protection* (DMG, p. 159), along with 500 gold pieces in assorted precious stones, a fortune swallowed by the Bulette over time.
3. **Encounter Three: The Stone Guardians**
As they proceed, the adventurers come to a hallway adorned with statues. As they tread, two Stone Golems awaken, blocking their path. A magical ward prevents teleportation or any easy bypassing of the stone guardians.
Upon defeating the Golems, the adventurers discover that one of the statues holds an ancient *+2 Warhammer*, a relic of the dwarves who originally carved these tunnels, and a *Potion of Superior Healing* (DMG, p. 187) hidden in a recess in the wall.
4. **Encounter Four: The Heart of Stone**
The final room holds the earth cult's leader, an Earth Elemental Myrmidon. The Myrmidon is busy performing a ritual to fully convert the realm into an elemental dominion, threatening not just the Mushroom King's domain, but the entire region above.
Defeating the Myrmidon not only disrupts the ritual but also rewards the adventurers with the cult leader's *Ring of the Ram* (DMG, p. 193), and a spell scroll of *Stone Shape*, an emblem of their dominion over earth.
Once the Myrmidon falls, the Mushroom King's forces can retake their cavernous home, and the grateful monarch rewards the adventurers with his own gift: a *Gem of Brightness* (DMG, p. 171), a radiant jewel cultivated by the fungal king himself. The Mushroom King thanks them and offers his alliance, leading to potential future adventures
In addition, each adventurer receives enough experience for aiding in this endeavor to reach their next level of experience. Through this, the adventurers not only gain valuable treasure and allies but also help restore balance in the vast underground ecosystem.
….
Now, by itself, this is not a complete adventure; but it does do a tremendous amount of the work for you and allows you to springboard off this material for your own campaign. And when combined with a random map generator, you have a night or two of playing with almost no prep required. Right HERE is a Sample Map generated for the above adventure.
So, in 15 minutes and with three commands, you have created a customized, detailed adventure - complete with a map, encounters, a simple plot and appropriate treasure.
Encouraged, I then asked ChatGPT:
“What are the best commands to use with ChatGPT to enhance your dungeons and dragons game?”
And it responded with a whole range of possibilities and examples:
“ChatGPT can be a valuable tool to enhance your Dungeons & Dragons game. Here are some ways you can use ChatGPT, along with example commands:
1. **Creating NPCs**:
- "Generate a detailed tavern keeper NPC."
- "Create a backstory for a gnome wizard."
2. **Building Encounters**:
- "Design a challenging encounter for five level 10 characters."
- "Create a random encounter table for a haunted forest."
3. **Generating Story Ideas**:
- "Give me a plot hook for a group of adventurers in a coastal town."
- "What is an interesting twist for a classic 'rescue the princess' quest?"
4. **Worldbuilding**:
- "Describe a bustling city in a desert."
- "Create a unique religious order in my fantasy setting."
5. **Rules Clarification**:
- "Explain how grappling works in D&D 5E."
- "What spells can a level 5 druid cast?"
6. **Item Generation**:
- "Create a legendary magical sword."
- "Describe a mysterious potion and its effects."
7. **Adventure Design**:
- "Outline a short dungeon crawl adventure for a party of level 3 characters."
- "Give me a description of the final boss in a lich's tower."
8. **Role-playing Scenes**:
- "How would a stoic dwarf warrior react to petty insults?"
- "Describe a conversation between a shy elf bard and an outgoing halfling rogue."
Remember, as an AI, I can generate content on the fly and can be a valuable tool in many aspects of your game. Use these commands as inspiration to meet your specific needs.”
Never be caught off guard by random player whims again!
#5 - City Creation Mastery!
The act of creating a city for your D&D campaign is often seen as a chore. It feels like a huge hassle to have to come up with all of the places, interactions and townspeople that the characters are likely to run into - especially when you consider that the characters will never go where you expect them to go and they'll never do what you expect them to do.
There are, however, many tools and resources available to assist you in the creation of the towns, villages and grand capital cities that your players may be traveling to.
The first and most obvious of these is the pre-published cities and towns that come as stand-alone supplements, or as part of a larger adventure. Plus, these can often be reused from previous adventures, even if they need to be reskinned (especially if there was hardly any time spent there in the past). Good examples of this would be something like Phandalin from Lost Mine of Phandelver or Iskandar from MT Black.
However, even published comprehensive material can't encompass the full range of places, activities and people that the characters are likely to interact with. All of them will likely need to be fleshed out, expanded or revisited. To that end, here are a series of books and websites that I have found useful in the creation and/or expansion of my D&D worlds when I am using a packaged adventure in a published campaign or when I’m homebrewing everything from scratch.
This is the book we introduced in our latest Table Talk episode and I have quite enjoyed working with it. It has a lot of random generators for a new or existing town or city. These generators are great for creating all sorts of interesting ideas or odd combinations - they really make something unique. It also has a lot of good explanations about how a particular feature or choice would possibly affect your world and this allows you to more easily add history and depth (and therefore, realism) into the world itself.
This is a very similar book published by Nord Games. It has more tables and less explanations, but it also includes a large sampling of pre-generated cities towns and villages.
One of the advantages of both of these books is (as I show in the podcast) an excellent way for you to engage your players in your world. Having them roll all of the random tables and then discussing how those results could fit into this new city or town you are building increases their vested interest. Also, from a purely thematic point of view, it would sort of reflect what their individual characters might know about a city (even if you don't keep all of the random roll results in your final creation). Those changes can be explained because what they rolled simply reflected what the character believed to be the case, not necessarily what is the case.
Beyond books, there are some amazing websites you can use to flesh out some of the details of your city:
This one is amazingly detailed. It creates a name, race and occupation for every single person in your town village or city up to 25,000! You can choose various settlement sizes, the inhabitants and incorporate some geographical situations.
I lump these two together because they are both amazingly flexible and have many useful tools for the creation of treasure, NPCS, towns and villages. I use and support Kassoon, but the things created in Donjon are equally as interesting. Both include a medieval demographics generator so that you can see what sort of people would be in the town or city; for example, a medium sized town may have one cobbler, four cobblers or no cobblers – which of course doesn't matter until it does.
Donjon also creates a listing of other adventurers currently in town. This can be very useful for long term urban campaigns.
This one has several tools to help with your urban design. First up, we have the city & town generator itself with a bunch of different options; it will auto create neighborhoods, roads, etc. Secondly, you can generate detailed street maps of specific areas in the city. Third, they also offer a great little region generator if you are completely homebrewing your own space to provide extra detail in the local area.
This one is a bit more about ideas and concepts of things that are important to the culture of a city.
There are literally dozens of published cities, other online generators and resources that can be used to make sure your city-building is more about creativity, and not about any sort of drudgery. For those of you who have been building cities for years (or maybe have just gotten excited about using some of the tools above), please feel free to head to our Discord and post examples here!
#4 - DAC’s Critical Hits and Fails
(DISCLAIMER - These are unofficial House Rules for our table.)
I believe there is lots of drama available in any well-run D&D battle. But to simulate that classic movie moment when everything goes just right (or perfectly wrong), I have set up a couple of House Rules around rolling Natural 1s or Natural 20s on your attack rolls.
Critical Hits:
The damage on a critical hit is rolling your regular damage dice, and then adding the maximum of what you could roll with that dice/die. So, if you are using a longsword one-handed, a Critical Hit would do a 1d8 + 8 + STR. This is just an increase in intensity from the rules as written, which would simply be rolling 2d8 - and nothing squelches the excitement of a critical hit like rolling double dice and getting a 1 and a 2. Of course, this applies to NPCs as well.
In addition, the Critical Hitter also rolls a d8 for the following effects:
1. You may roll one additional damage die.
2. You may take an additional Action this round.
3. Your opponent is jarred - they are at a -2 to hit for 1d4 rounds.
4. Your opponent is knocked prone.
5. Your opponent is stunned until end of next turn.
6. Your opponent’s armor comes loose. Their AC is at a -2 for 10 rounds whilst they adjust.
7. Your opponent panics and turns to flee until the end of next round. This does not trigger opportunity attacks.
8. Your opponent’s weapon cracks. They are at a –5 to hit.
Critical Fails:
When somebody (be it player or NPC) rolls a Natural 1 on an attack roll, I secretly roll a d10. If I roll a 1 on that d10, that character’s weapon cracks and they are at a –5 to hit. If left unrepaired, the weapon breaks the next time this happens.
The player (or NPC) also rolls a d8 for one of the following effects:
1. Roll a d20 - if the character rolls a 1, the ‘cracked weapon’ effect mentioned above takes place.
2. The character hits themselves.
3. The character critically hits themselves.
4. The character hits one of their friends (or hit themselves if no friends are in range).
5. The character critically hits one of their friends (or hit themselves if no friends are in range).
6. The character drops their weapon and can perform no more attacks this round.
7. The character’s opponent gets a free attack.
8. The character falls prone until the end of their turn.
I created the breaking weapons to reflect the rough-and-tumble nature of the Wasteland the players are adventuring in. It also assumes the players will be using non-standard weapons, as the Wastelands routinely cause weapons to rust and wear out.
As an aside, I LOVE the idea of weapons (and magic items) being made from scavenged or harvested monsters parts. To that end, I make extensive use of three excellent books:
1. Creature Components - Tome of Beasts
2. Hamund’s Harvesting Handbook
3. Monster Loot
I highly recommend any of these books if you want to get away from the standard blacksmith or general store selection of weapons and ideas. It’s also extra work for the adventurers if their hand made club should break! The Components book increases the potency of certain spells if it’s components are harvested from a creature and used in that way. They can also be harvested and sold, or they can be bought pre-harvested.
#3 - Campaign Creation (Part 1)
I've received a few questions from listeners about how and where the world for the Die As Cast’s first season came from. I thought it might be useful for people to hear about my experience in terms of creating (technically adapting or enhancing) our setting.
When I first set out to create a campaign setting, I was drawn to the idea of a quasi-post-apocalyptic world where there would be a bit more struggle with regards to finding basic things to survive and grow. Not that I wanted the players to have to roleplay every single day, struggling to get food and water. Simply that some of the D&D conventions they were used to would be a little more challenging. I also wanted to step out of the conventional generic European fantasy mediaeval setting.
For the podcast, I decided to find an existing published world that I could customize, enhance, detail and twist to make my own. Now, I fully understand and embrace the appeal (and the raw creative satisfaction) around creating a Homebrew World completely from scratch. However, I knew in practical terms I would not be able to create, design and more or less fully flesh out a world in the (pre-production) time I had available. Certainly not one that would provide as rich a background and history as one of the existing published worlds.
Related, since I intentionally run games with the minimum amount of outlines to facilitate a lot of improvised creations and additions, I was going to (I quickly learned) have my hands full in terms of continuity, like having to remember what God of War I had created last week on the spur of the moment when the players asked for more details. I mean, I struggled enough with remembering the voice, name and attitude of the vampire bartender when the players decided three sessions later to go back for another blood cocktail.
However, it was a bit of a trilemma because I also wanted to find a world where there had been lots of development, but that wasn't SO well-known that if I placed my campaign there I would have had to spend several months catching up on what had gone on, been developed, revised, updated, etc. Thus, I was specifically not interested in the Forgotten Realms though, from my past experience playing 1st & 2nd edition, reading all the great old novels etc, it was the continent that I knew the best.
I had a basic awareness of Midgard from Kobold Press and the name Wolfgang Baur. Then what prompted me to explore that more deeply was the blog on their website talking about the Wasted West when it popped up during my Googling ‘5e Waste land’ etc. Moreover, even though the wars had been over officially for 300 years the ongoing presence of the unique Ancient Ones was GREAT! This was a land that had somewhat recovered and settled from the mage wars BUT had this ever-present threat looming consistently over all recovery and resettlement attempts. This still destructive force felt to me to be a very rich background in which to develop alternative cultures that would spring up, adapt to the new reality and be functional but unknown to most of the outside civilized world. What twisted but more or less functional economies and cultures and societies would grow and adapt around the danger of the Ancient Ones?
Also of course because of my past playing of Dungeons and Dragons, I had a huge treasure trove of old campaign notes, antique adventures ‘modules’ and a near complete collection of both Dragon and Dungeon magazine from the pre-digital age. Being able to incorporate some of my personal material in combination with the collection of all the random material on the Kobold Press Blog -which I still highly recommend to anyone looking for some unusual ideas- felt like the perfect solution. A way for me to personalize, expand and enhance the established campaign world meshing it with my own concepts and warping it lightly with cherry-picked ancient TSR hardcopy.
Separately, I had also stumbled over and fallen in love with the concepts of harvesting monster parts when I found the Monster Loot series and the Hamund series on DMsGuild. This to me seemed the perfect addition to the Wasted West setting because it showed how people were adapting to this harsh world AND giving people a reason to explore the Waste. Both series are also effectively collections of brand new magic items which could be fun, gross and unique for the player performers to find, prep and use.
So, armed with a distinctive setting and having an unusual quality to the economics and therefore the culture of the adventure lands, I was ready to settle on a starting place and trigger event.
#2 - Making the Most of Fantasy Grounds
Fantasy Grounds is amazing software and I mention I use it to organize and run even the podcast and other in-person games. But like any software, there are tricks and practices that can allow you to squeeze more use out of it. Here is a question I received recently:
"I've just written some encounters of my own. Previously was using modules that I would import into FG. Can you recommend a quick start guide to adding your own content into FG?"
The beauty of Fantasy Grounds is two-fold.
During Gameplay: This is the one everyone knows about and raves about. FG automates so many of the dice rolls, modifiers, bonuses and penalties, constantly checks for Concentration, automatically adds Bless spell modifiers, or poisoned penalties not to mention automatically applying any Resistances or Immunities many opponents have.
Prepping for/Creating the Game: This is just a powerful tool for Dungeon Masters. This works, very broadly in three ways:
Copying NPCs and very quickly customizing them. This allows you to use existing creatures, copy them and then edit them or save them. They then can be duplicated, exported, copied and modified further.
Copying existing unused adventure segments. If you have a very long adventure like the Scarlet Citadel for example, there are going to be segments that are rushed past or ignored. By creating copies of those you can rename them, edit them, tweak them and repackage them in some future adventure.
Grabbing any map from any of your existing assets. You simply need to open it up, strip the name off the ‘new map’ created and you are ready to go, especially if its already been formatted with a grid and Line of Sight.
Process
So, how do I use these techniques when creating a new adventure? (Essentially cobbling a new adventure out of existing assets that have been re-purposed.)
First I create a brand new Campaign I called Create. I do all my prep in this Campaign. Then I export all that material as a module (using /export) to use in my game campaign. Here is the kind of module I create:
NPCs
Most adventures come up with some unique NPCs that can be copied from an owned adventure and used over and over again in one of your future games. For example, in Shadows of the Dusk Queen, the players likely end up fighting the Dusk Queen herself. Assuming you own the FG version of the adventure you can drag and copy the Dusk Queen NPC and rename her something and now you have a relatively powerful fey spellcaster than can be easily repurposed as a generic evil opponent.
Then, I personally will rename the copy something like ‘Dusk Queen Wiz 7 Cl 7.’ I do this to make it easy to find her later. I can search for ‘Wiz’ or ‘Wiz 7’ which is far faster than sorting the NPCs of all the adventures into Humanoid CR7 and then scrolling through all the character names looking for a Wiz.
And once you have made that first copy, you can copy the NPC again and again, add HP, or spells, delete special abilities or add more. You can even get fancy and switch up the token and voila the Dusk Queen is now Esmy the Enchantress for your latest homebrew!
Encounters/Story
Next to NPCs, the most useful duplication comes from copying then editing Encounters or whole Story pages with Encounters and NPCs on them. You would do this when you have large portions of an adventure that has not been discovered but has been completed. When I copy these I also rename them for clarity:
For unused encounters and story pages I simply add four **** to the front of the title and that pops it up to the top of the list for quick scanning and future use. So something called ‘01.01 Tavern Brawl’ would be renamed ‘‘****01.01 Tavern Brawl’ to show me that I haven’t used it and liked it. All copied pages and stories can be unlocked and edited of course.
Then when I am ready to use that item, I rename it ‘(Year/Month) Tavern Brawl’ or ‘2202 Tavern Brawl’ which takes it off the top of the list but makes it very easy to find again by searching for 2202. I use 2202 for all the repurposed material I used that month.
This same idea can be used around magic Items, Parcels, Quests, Tables. They all allow you to quickly and easily create your own material.
Making your Own Module
At the end of each creation/copy/edit session, type /export into the Chat and quickly post all your copied, edited and tweaked items into your own personal module that can be later opened in other campaigns. Just make sure to include All to capture all the new material you have created.
And most importantly, make sure to always export from the same Campaign -mine is called ‘Create’- so that all new items, added or edited items are all exported.
This is just scratching the surface on the first, simplest type of Fantasy Grounds creation, repurposing existing material for more future use.
#1 - DM As Cast
Welcome to 'DM as Cast' where I am going to answer some random questions I have gotten and offer up some notes and behind the scene thoughts. I am open to questions and ideas of course but initial plan is to talk first about some of the tools I use when running 'Die as Cast' game sessions. This will be a random collection of long, short or multi-part insights, experiences, new ideas, purchases, new resources, old resources and generators as I experience them.
For 'The Die as Cast' I lean heavily on these tools because I end up improvising quite a bit but also have had to discipline myself to take serious notes since the things I improvise become 'canon' and it seems listeners are quick to point out that I called that particular elvish gladiator or this chubby bat familiar 2-3 variations of the same name.
Part One-During Game Tools
In addition to DAC (which records once a month, several sessions at a time) I run two FG games a week and I -now that I have climbed the FG learning curve- have become totally spoiled. "Spoiled" in the sense that I do not have to remember things like Concentration for spellcasters, resistances, Guidance or Bless effects etc. Even though we are playing 'manually', I will often take a minute and recreate the battles in FG based on the fact that it tracks all of those things and means I can focus on the gameplay itself, even if I may have to spend some times adjusting things manually.
As much as I enjoy the published modules they seldom cover all the wild ideas players come up with. I use these two websites/generators interchangeably because they are perfect for creating things on the fly, usually things like NPC traits, names, appearances as well as taverns, shops, etc. I have also gotten into the habit of immediately saving things generated in a screen shot or into OneNote to aid me in note keeping after the fact.
Note: One of my private games is what I call 'RandomBrew' where the adventures, the treasure, the world itself and even the PCs stats, race and class were generated randomly, (I'll elaborate in a future post) so I lean heavily on these two to generate much of the raw fodder and building blocks for the depths in the various game worlds.
I also use these two websites relatively equally, depending on the moment, my whim. Both of them allow a wide range of captured information, ideas and plans which can then be searched and sorted and linked to. Both require some set up and planning and constant tweaking and there is some structural customization of the information in Notion that is much more accessible than One Note though One Note has a distinct advantage in that you add hand drawn things very easily, you can 'print' webpages very easily and I prefer the layout simplicity since each OneNote is its own 'book.'
Kobold Press has created tons of great alternative adventures, monsters, magic and campaign material. During the game I will keep the map open on a tab and search into the website extensively as needed to reference things to make sure we stay 'on track.'
That will get us started so stay tuned for additional sporadic entries and feel free to comment or send in questions via email or on our Discord chat.