The Dragon's Toolbox

(*all of information in this blog post is subject to changes and may have been altered by their respective owners once this blog has been posted) When my friend and co-host, Jaime Pierson of the RPG Brewery, asked me to run a story ark for our podcast's Actual Plays (Realms of Terrinoth in this case), I also wanted to look into and try out a few RPG campaign organizer sites. One that I was fairly familiar with was Obsidian Portal, which I had used for a face-to-face game I ran about 4 or 5 years ago ( wow, time flies ). I liked it as it was easy to use and had many categories to keep things well organized, and it was the first one I ever heard about. Obsidian Portal Campaign Manager You can use it as a free service with still quite a few features available to you. But if you subscribe to the monthly ( aka Upgrade to Ascendant membership ) package then you all the bells and whistles. You can event just get the Adventurer package which is the middle ground between f...

 Are you creating your own home brew setting or Game World? It doesn't matter whether you're also creating a your own RPG mechanics or using a multi-genre adaptable rule systems, such as GURPS, Savage Worlds, Genesys, etc. You might need a way to keep track of all your ideas, add to them, save some images and organize all that mess into something a bit more coherent. I've stumbled on a few web-based World Building tool kits to help you as an author, artist or RPG creator. Please note that some of these tools are not meant to manage an ongoing campaign per se, just the information that you are gathering for the game world itself. For a campaign manager, look more towards Obsidian Portal or Realm Works .  * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * The first one is called Milanote .  Link: Milanote Milanote is a tool for planning creative projects and is not geared specifically towards role-playing games. Any creative endeavor can benefit from this tool, whe...

Wow, another blog from the Dragonspawn! So soon after the last one. Will wonders never cease? This time I heralding two products from ''The Thousand Trails'' line, published by True Mask Games. You can find them or follow them: @TrueMaskGames on Twitter or on their Discord server True Mask Games on Discord  The author, Alekandar ''Earin_Shaad'' Petrovic brings us two nifty game aids. Both are aimed at the medieval styled fantasy settings. The first one is for the urban landscape of course. With a name like ''Dark Cities'', what else would you expect? And the second one, entitled ''Edge of the Wilds'' takes us out of the cities and into the untamed wilderness. What I feel sets these random adventure generators apart from many others is the fact that  Alekandar has taken the time to explain how to use the adventures, what experience level the heroes should be, how long it might take to run it ...

Time to wake up finally. Sorry folks, I haven't been active at at all these last few months. Real Life stuff getting in the way, but I have poked my head out from my lair and looked around. illustration found online (artist unknown) I have discovered this really amazing PDF book to help out that overworked, underappreciated and harried Game Master (or Dungeon Master if you prefer). The Book of Random Tables Written by Matt Davis from Dicegeeks.  Dicegeeks.com And as you can see from the screenshot I took from the book's Table of contents, it has quite a variety of tables available in one book. So this can cut down on the need to consult multiple PDFs or books/printouts of random tables. From names of men and women, items found in a Cottage, Tomb or on a dead goblin to potion ingredients.  Matt even includes some tables for random encounters in different environments (forests, mountains, swamps, etc.). The encounters are not fully fleshed out, but can...

I realized that I failed to mention my few videos that I have recorded and posted on YouTube, that still go with the Dragon's Toolbox blog. Some things are better described visually and in the spoken word. Stephen Dragonspawn's Videos My first video describes a cool easy to use tool to help you generate the basis of a story, the Amazing Story Generator. Then I go over my favorite dice bag, the All Rolled Up dice bag. In the third video, I talk about difefrent D100 List of things when you need to know what is going on in the game. 004 is a talk about my visit to Columbus Ohio and the Origins Gaming convention and a new Savage Worlds magazine. My fifth video is a 2017 year in review. Please go ahead and visit it and share if you like them, and don't forget to subscribe. * * * * * * * * *  You can always reach me for ideas, suggestions or comments at bignastydragon@gmail.com * * * * * * * * *  This blog is proud to be associated with the Nerds-International Ga...

Hello fellow Savages and loyal Wild Die podcast listeners. Guess what? Our community project is finally completed and ready to be released and shared with you all. This all started on episode 8 of the Wild Die, when Jaime Pierson, Blaine Wagner and Eric Lamoureux were discussing how easy it would be to create a home brew setting with the Savage Worlds rule set, all the way back on July 17th 2016. That's almost 18 months ago, when Jaime was still the host and Eric had just begun co-hosting. And Blaine was back from Alasksa for only a short while before returning to the great white North. It took a while because life has a tendency to get in the way, plus the fact that many of us are in different time zones and have different other projects going on at the same time. Scheduling the various tasks and getting them together was a little more arduous. But we managed to finish it and the final product looks really good, if I do say so myself. ''Bullets over Frisco Bay'...