RPGaDay2024 Day 29 - Awesome App

 

For TTRPGs, there seem to be three general types of applications available: Those that do some of the work for you, so that you don't have to, those that help you develop creations for your game, and those that help you keep track of everything you know about your game. 

Help Handle the Work

My must-have website when I'm running a game is Fantasy Name Generators. NPC names are a bane of every GM, since any person the party encounters may need one. Names generated by the GM on the fly can have similar-sounding names, not be appropriate to the area, or frankly just be lame. This website has collections of real names or generated themed names organized by type. The area we're playing in now uses Moroccan names, and using this site gives the whole campaign a consistent feel. As a bonus, it also helped name a geographically significant lake that I left unnamed for over 20 years.

Another bane of gamemastering that never had a good solution was "initiative tracking". Setup can take too long; it's easy to mess up the order or skip people, especially when they have the D&D 3e "hold action" concept where characters can permanently change their order. I've used index cards, excel tools, a purchased product with magnets and dry-erase markers, and several other suggestions. I finally found something really useful in the current Roll20 solution. While it's not perfect, it puts people in the right order, lets you change their number (if they hold their action) and moves from one person to the next, while automatically tracking what round you're on.

Generators are a boon, in general. I've spoken this month about a few types of card-based generators. There are online generators for almost anything you can think of. Whole systems to help you describe the weather, the conditions, what a town looks like, and random people who might be in that town. GM creativity is a skill that can't be over-valued, but the ability to pull up 5 possible NPC descriptions with some attached appearance, quicks, skills and goals can be a great help to a GM who has too many things to consider in realtime or before the game starts in 45 minutes.

Develop Creations

Probably the most useful creation tool that has evolved over the last 20 years is map creators. I have personally owned every version of Profantasy's Campaign Cartographer, from the DOS version onward. I've always appreciated the maps that it helped me to create, and will forever give them my business for the quality of what they put out. It's CAD software, so you don't get the beautiful maps that you get with some of the newer systems, but you get very precise maps that scale well and give an accurate picture of what you're trying to represent.

New "battle map" tools, such as Megasploot's Wonderdraft and Dungeondraft,  Inkarnate, Dungeon Alchemist, and the free-to-use Dungeon Scrawl are all tools to help you create maps that either look amazing, help you quickly create the "look" you are after, quickly throw a dungeon together, or all of the above.

I also love VulgerLang for helping me create languages. It was created by people who know a lot more about linguistics than I do, but after a small learning curve, I was able to create a new vocabulary that fit a specific sound that I was after in just a few minutes. And I can store that and use it later to build up bigger languages in the future.

Another great tool to help with creation is any of the numerous storyboard tools, that help you lay out a path (or set of paths) for a given adventure. Scrivener is a solid choice because you can deal with it as story cards, written scenes, or a combination of the two. I have it, and have really liked it, but it has a definite learning curve. It's worth spending the 2 hours or so going through the tutorial, and maybe even doing it again later, to remember all the things you didn't understand the first time.

Keep Track

One of the most popular new applications I've seen over the last several years has been tools to help you organize your campaign content. At their most basic, these tools exist to help you collect the world building and campaign writeups, notes, cards with random doodles and the thoughts you never wrote down into one place. From there, they try to present it usefully, and also be a launching pad for more creativity and productivity.  For example, they often do things like let you build up scenes, adventure notes, or new content with simplified access to the existing content.

My first foray into these tools was Realm Works, by Lone Wolf Development. Developed around 2013, it was an interface that helped abstract one-to-many database relationships. It excelled at establishing roles and creating relationships. Setup correctly, you could click on a city and the tool would show you the organizations, NPC's, events and so on that were connected to that city. I copied many of my notes into the tool, and while it wasn't a quick endeavor, I made some amazing progress in finding and filling in gaps. The downside of it was that it really felt more like a database-setup tool than a narrative tool, and while it had some cool player-driven features, it wasn't really player-friendly. Still, I have my local copy of my files, and am using them to build out my encyclopedia.

Which brings me to World Anvil.

World Anvil is my current tool for creating an encyclopedia of my 3.x D&D world. Unlike Realm works, it really is narrative-driven, even though it's also good at creating relationships. You create content by creating articles, and each article has a type; the type defines the available fields. So a "technology" article is going to have different text fields than a "historic event" article. One will have room to put the creator, the tech level, the description, and the role in the campaign. The historic event will have the dates, participants, effects on the world, causes, etc.

What I love about World Anvil (WA), is that it's very easy to link existing articles within an article you are writing, or even to create new article stubs. Typing something like "The technology was invented by @creator" will link to the creator of the technology, who either already has an article, or will create a stub article when you click the link.

Ultimately, you are writing the text of your articles, and no tool is going to help speed that up, but when you've put in the effort, you can have a really robust campaign encyclopedia. I've used it to create a "new player" guide that anyone going to the homepage can see at the top of the page. From there, new players will see about 6 articles that explain the expectations and assumptions around the campaign, the "perks" you get for choosing different backgrounds, how character relationships work, and so on.

Another aspect I like is the ability to create campaign notes. I tend to write full summaries of what happened and link it to NPC profiles, location and faction articles, and timelines. This shows up as a "book" of sort, with about 20-30 session summaries, formatted with a CSS-driven consistency.

Like all tools with complex capabilities, there's a learning curve both to get started and when you try to utilize new arears of the system that you hadn't gotten around to, though the "getting started" and "how to use this feature" articles really help with that. And while it's a few years old, the tool is always getting both better and more useful, between a constant flow of new or improved content from its very few developers, a strong Discord community, an excellent YouTube channel, and weekly Twitch streams. And while it's not perfect, I find it meets the needs of what I'm trying to do as easily and reliably as I could want.