So I was having a lovely conversation with @princeofsparrows about magic and magical items and he sent me several links to very useful lists and tables. Those can be used by any DM to improve the game and set some more fun/challenge into the game without adding enemies or limiting themselves to always better armors and weapons.
My players usually discuss for an hour about the best way to open every door with a single rune on it (even if the rune actually just means “toilets”). So if I give them an omniously glowing fork and they will turn around it for half of the evening…
We decided to share with you some links with awesome ideas for loot (or your NPC merchants). The links below include (but are not limited to):
Belt of Pants: This belt creates illusory pants on the wearer. The wearer can suppress the illusion at will.
Digging Spoon: This tiny spoon can dig through any substance with a forceful push.
Hungry coin: Cursed. Will attempt to eat other coins that it comes into contact with. Eats 100 coins an hour.
Crossbow of Whispers (Weapon, light crossbow): You can use an action to whisper a message and fire a bolt from this weapon at a target within range. If you hit, the target (and only the target) hears the message.
Scroll of Cure Blindness: Cures blindness when read.
101 Silly/Useless Magic Items – You need to read through 7 pages of the thread but there are some very nice ideas!
1001 most useless (dungeons and dragons) magical items – There are actually 21 of them on this list but they are really useless. It could be nice to drop something like that on the players so they can have some fun…
Now I will let @princeofsparrows to continue. He still has some things to add 🙂
The great thing about a lot of these items is that, despite their apparent uselessness, as with most things in D&D, an innovative player can find some use for it… and I feel it throws a bit of a wrench into the mix. Here are some other honorable mentions:
Rebloging for the screenshots.
Awesome
Item: masterpost of items that could each deserve an entry on this blog
The last words you hear as a bolt pierces your chest are “haha. Get bitched. ”
can randomly generate just about ANYTHING. awesome for dms
Tabletop Audio: background music and sound effects for the ambience.
PCGen – a character creation program that handles all the tricky and tedious parts of building characters, including NPCs.
d20pfsrd.com – all the free information you would ever need to play Pathfinder, an alternative to D&D
DiceCloud: Interactive character sheet that can be edit and shared with yourself or others easily. Pulled up anywhere with internet connection on PC, Mac, or mobile device. Use it to also mark down health, death saving throws, spell slots, experience, and more on the fly.
DnDMagic: List all spells currently available from Player’s Handbook and Elemental Evil.
5th Edition Spellbook app: Make spellbooks for all your characters, manage spells, prepare spells. Keep track of Spell Save DC, and Spell Attack bonus on your mobile device.
Squire – Another character creation and management app. Contains most of the basic info and spells already, with options to create spells, items, classes/subclasses, etc. This is the free version, but pro has more options for DMs, including initiative order control.
Are you creating a fictional language? Do you need help coming up with words that sound like they fit with what you’ve come up with so far?
Just put your fictional language in the model text, type some words in the translation text, and click “translate”. It’ll “translate” whatever words you put in using patterns from your sample text.
This can create a random calendar for you or you can input the year, the number of months, the name of the months, the number of moons, the number of days in a week, the names of each day, and more.
You can even save the data for your calendar so that when you go back to the generator, all you have to do to get to your calendar is paste the data.
This is a new resource that’s still in beta, so it’ll probably be updated in the coming months.
This map maker is easy to use and free. You can add different climates, mountains, trees, towns, cities, text, and notes. For an example of these maps, look at the quick map I made for this post’s header.
I decided to make a list of DM stuff that I personally use or think are important to know when it comes to being a DM. So here’s my list:
Medieval Fantasy City Generator: This generator is now my LIFE. It generates incredibly complex cities with good customization. (Thanks to plantkat for sharing this site in their post here)
Naming Your Towns/Cities:Now that you’ve made your city, time to name it and give it some character! This post contains lots of great information.
Index Cards Rule:Fuckyeahdnd shared a SUPER convenient way of keeping track of turns and HP in combat. I use this system now for every single session I run.
Troublesome Players? Speak Up:Dicebound brings up an incredibly great point. If someone is being a jerk, speak up and call them out. This is especially important and relevant now to crush awful behavior before it even has a chance to show it’s ugly face.
(Character stuff, spells, online communities/ways to play, etc..)
A lot of people contributed to this post but thank you Mushroomancy for posting the original list.
Donjon: And finally, this site is a great resource for looking up Spells and Monsters along with tons of other generators. Not every single Spell or Monster is on here, but most are listed.
(I tried to give credit to the original posters or the actual URL for websites, unless those sites or URLs were no longer active)
Lesetoilesfous 