Posts Tagged ‘Advice/Tools’

50 Barbarian Hooks

This entry is part 1 of 5 in the series Character Hooks

I received an advance copy of the Player’s Handbook 2 and checked out the shiny new barbarian class. Yowsa. Dungeon masters watch out, this guy is mean. As a skirmisher, he’s all about movement and doing massive damage periodically during combat. “Class Traits: Striker. You use powerful two-handed weapons to deal serious damage to your […]

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Ultimate Toolbox of Ideas

When Toolbox for d20 by AEG came out I scooped it up right away and have found it very useful over the years. Now, in 2009, its big daddy has arrived on the Prime Material Plane and it’s awesome. While some might scoff at a book of tables, I see the Ultimate Toolbox, like its […]

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Distilled Cultural Essence – Part 4 of 4: Expressing a different society, Section 3

This entry is part 4 of 4 in the series Distilled Cultural Essence

This is the final part of a four-part article. The first part gave a relatively straightforward technique for creating a unique society; the second and third parts identified four ways of communicating the uniqueness of the result to the players, selling them on its credibility, and exploiting it for scenarios and subplots, and examined these […]

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7 Gamefull Uses for Campaign Coins

I received a box of Campaign Coins for review and they are fun, high quality game props. They must be great because the box packaging has no less than six exclamation marks in the text. :) Each box contains 121 detailed coins depicting four metal types in 1, 10, 100, and 1000 denominations and 1 […]

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FreeMind Tips for Game Masters

I never understood mindmapping until I read one of Tony Buzan’s books, saw numerous examples, and clued-in. For game planning and tracking, mindmapping is now one of my essential tools. My mindmapping tool of choice is FreeMind, a free application you can download for Windows, Mac, and Unix. It’s a natural fit for documenting relationships. […]

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My Campaign Planning Cycle

Ryder asks in my previous post about level of readiness in your campaign planning how I find time to work on my campaign between game sessions. My current recipe is very successful, based on years of trial and error and from facing a ton of time theft from other parts of my life. Bi-Weekly Game […]

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DM Tool: Scrabble Tiles for your Minis & Battlemats

Of all the board games I could raid for props and DM tools, Scrabble tops my list, especially for D&D 4E. Enhance battlemats, track minis, and make combat easier with those crazy, square lettered tiles. Use Scrabble Tiles for the Monsters Wizards of the Coast uses letter identification in its modules for monsters. For example, […]

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