Playing Dungeons & Dragons involves the hard work of deciding on your character, your spell seasoning, and what class to play. But what about actually running a campaign? Whether he’s a dungeon master looking to host his first campaign, or he’s experienced enough but wants to know how to make his job easier, we’ve got you covered.
Thanks to the internet and the popularity of games, it’s easier than ever to track the resources you need to build your campaign. Here are some resources to help you along the way.
It’s a common joke that many Dungeons & Dragons campaigns are just media that the DM likes and decides to participate in. But there is also a saying that there is truth in every joke. Streaming services, YouTube, and fandom have made more media accessible than ever before.
You’ll have no problem using your favorite comics, movies, and books as a source of inspiration, or coming up with ideas for cool NPCs you want to place in your tavern or quests that will captivate your players. Just be careful not to make it too obvious.
9 Kobold Fight Club
There are many encounter builders, but few are as good as Kobold Fight Club. The website has everything you need to tailor the encounter to the player, including options such as party size, level, and indicators of what kind of monsters to throw in depending on the difficulty of the encounter. is included.
Whether you’re fighting a boss or ambushing on the side of the road, you’ll have handy tools to calculate your encounters.
8 campaign module
Media will always be there, but what about media that is a little more familiar? The campaign module can help.
You can learn a lot by studying the campaign module and going through all the little DM notes written there. It might be worth running the campaign module just to see how the caveats apply to the actual game.
7 incarnation
If you’re running a campaign, you’re probably going to be brewing your own beer. There’s nothing more satisfying and frustrating than creating a map of an epic, cool continent, nation, or entire continent that puts a lot of effort into building the world.
But how do you make a map? Well, using Inkarnate. It’s not suitable for small maps like buildings or dungeons, but it’s the type of map you want to use for countries and continents, with easy-to-use software available to anyone with an internet connection.
6 Dungeon master guide
It sounds typical, but yes, the Dungeon Master’s Guide is something you can use as a resource. There’s a reason it’s called the Dungeon Master’s Guide. Not because the font looks cool, but because it has actual information about required items, classes, encounters, etc.
If you’re an experienced Dungeon Master, you can skip this, but if you’ve never created a campaign before, you should choose this.
Five concept
Creating a campaign is a touch. Planning a campaign is a hell of a job. Notion is free software that allows you to create a wiki-like collection of information about almost anything.
From diaries and task lists (quest logs) to item spreadsheets and info pages, Notion provides easy-to-use templates for creating pages that are perfect for organizing plot lines, quests, and lore. .
Four reddit
It sounds a little strange, but Reddit has a thriving Dungeons & Dragons community and you should put it to good use. In some cases, it can be difficult to connect with other people who frequently play games in real life, so online communities can be the next best thing.
You’ll find all sorts of interesting threads about how people flavor spells, how different languages ​​sound, what other Dungeon Masters have experienced in their campaigns, and more.
3 your player
Creating the campaign you want is fun, but you also need to consider the type of people you’ll be playing with. Sometimes you create campaigns and look for players online, but if you’re playing with friends or others, it’s best to know what kind of campaign is expected.
Talk to them and ask them what their adventures envision. Players can’t control everything, but it’s better to know if there’s something they don’t particularly like right now than to find out when the game is running.
2 one-shot
There is no real first draft when it comes to becoming a Dungeon Master. Well, except for one shot. If you’re feeling super nervous about being the DM, try doing something small, one-off, that helps you get used to the DM role. You can also experiment until the game feels more comfortable. You might even be able to set these mini-adventures in your homebrew world to give it even more depth.
If you’re not confident in creating your own one-shot, you can find countless ready-made one-shots online. The D&D community is constantly creating one-shots to share with each other on platforms like the DungeonMastersGuild, which can be sorted and filtered to suit your party’s needs.
1 D&D Beyond
Maybe the most typical answer, but there’s a reason for this. D&D Beyond is great for storing character sheets and having all sorts of resources for researching spells and monsters. In addition to this, there is also a Homebrew section where you can browse spells and items created by the community.
The only problem is that D&D Beyond isn’t very customizable and there is a fee for access to services and source material. But it’s still a good way to keep track of things.