This is a question for TTRPG GMs. What RPG books, supplements, or accessories do you find yourself using year after year? Which RPG products provide the biggest regular impact at your table?

  • eerongal ( eerongal@ttrpg.network ) 
    4·
    2 years ago

    Monster tokens are probably one of my “unsung heroes” of gaming when it comes to travel; I know people (myself included) probably always go to with minis, but if i’m going to a convention, traveling for the holidays, etc. tossing a whole pile of tokens into a bag make for great addition. No particular brand, just whatever i’ve picked up over the years.

  • smeg ( smeg@feddit.uk ) English
    4·
    2 years ago

    For d&d? 5e.tools’s DM screen on a laptop is excellent, it has an encounter tracker, calendar, dice roller, and I can pin whatever rules and statblocks I need this week.

    Also a giant battle mat is really useful.

  • Kichae ( Kichae@lemmy.ca ) English
    3·
    2 years ago

    I’m primarily playing Pathfinder 2 these days, so I make a lot of use out of digital resources like Pathbuilder and pf2easy.com. I also lean pretty heavily on Trilium for session prep and notes, but I’m a chronic over-preparer and struggle with improvising the world on the spot.

    I use a lot of roll tables during prep. I have several of the Gamemaster’s Guide to ____ books on my shelf that I pull out whenever I’m wireframing a dungeon, and I have a lot of the Raging Swan pre-built settlements that I leaf through and drop into my world when the players need a town to come across.

    I also find myself turning to GM advice books every few months, just to skim over things. Right now, So You Want to be a Game Master, Robin’s Laws of Good Game Mastering, and Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master (Eh? Ehhhhh?) seem to be the ones that end up on my desk. I can safely assure you, one of the advice sinks in, but I usually have my best streaks of sessions after reviewing things like these.

    I also find myself returning to modules from 3.x. They were the ones I first played, and they’re (mostly) pretty easy to convert to PF2. We’re currently just wrapping up Forge of Fury – or we will, once I finish converting the Allip.

  • tissek ( tissek@ttrpg.network ) 
    3·
    2 years ago

    Shawn Tomkin’s Ironsworn series. Delve I regularly use for setting up point crawls. Ironsworn/Starforged/Sundered Isles have great collections of random tables, I use the book thematically most fitting for the situation at hand. The core tables of Action, Theme, Descriptor and Focus all get heavy use.

    Kevin Crawford’s [SOMETHING] Without Number series have awesome tables as well. These however get more use when I need more detail. Prep stuff. Again most thematic book is picked first but I do have used Cites (cyberpunk) for fantasy cities.

    When I want to create background for “medieval fantasy” characters I pick up Burning Wheel and burn something up. Through that I get a good selection of relevant skills to sue (for flavor)

    Anything related to cosmos and mythology I say HELLO! to my growing collection of Glorantha material. From cult books to magic tomes and Atlases.

  • Trumble ( Trumble@sopuli.xyz ) 
    1·
    2 years ago

    I only things I have used multiple years are mainly for DnD 5e 2014:

    • Monstrous Races - a supplement that turns everything from official Monster Manuals into playable races with a lovely commentary about how these were balanced.
    • Conflux Creatures - just better creatures, this is the first thing I do is to replace monsters of premade adventures with the Conflux ones. They are just much better experience compared to sacks of HP that most 5e monsters are. There is no need to read “Monsters know what they are doing” when the stat block pretty much does it for you.
    • Creature Loot by Medieval Melodies: https://medievalmelodies.blogspot.com/2017/06/creature-loot-intro.html - lootsies + crafting for all of the creatures.
    • The Alexandrian: thealexandrian.net for reviews, advice and remixes of official campaigns
    • Official WotC products besides the campaigns: Fizban’s Treasury of Dragons for all of the Dragon Lore