The popularity of Dungeons & Dragons 5e means that it’s really attractive to produce content and tools for the game. This creates a self-propagating cycle of sorts; it’s the most popular because there’s so much tools and tutorials available, causing more people to get into it etc.
Over the years, I’ve gathered a lot of resources and links, and I figured I’d collect some of them here. If they’re of any use to you, all the better!
Mapping
- Dave’s Mapper
- Azgaar’s Fantasy Map Generator
- Watabou’s Village Generator
- Watabou’s One Page Dungeon Generator
- Dungeondraft is my go-to for all dungeon maps. One-time purchase!
- Wonderdraft is the golden standard of fantasy map making software. One-time purchase!
- Cartography Assets greatly expands on the possibilities of both Dungeondraft and Wonderdraft.
- Dungeon Scrawl provides a really light-weight yet versatile dungeon mapper. I often ‘sketch’ ideas here first, before taking them to Dungeondraft.
- Paratime Designs features endless (ENDLESS) cool old-school inspired maps. I can’t believe it’s free!
- Meta-Studios Dungeon Generator creates unconventional, abstract dungeons that are almost more suited for megadungeon inspiration as opposed to regular dungeons. A great fit with the Alert system!
Organizing Your Campaigns
- As a notepad, I use Microsoft OneNote.
- Notion.so is a really neat, minimalist wiki-like system that can be used for both DM-side organizing and player-side presentation.
- Kanka.io is an amazing campaign wiki/organizing system. There are many others, of course, but I find that Kanka’s way of focusing on the basic features and doing those well suits me way better than some campaign organizers that have more options.
Encounters & Ideas
- Kobold Fight Club’s Encounter Builder is really helpful. If you add all the various sources under Set Sources, it can also lead you to cool new sourcebooks you might not have thought of previously!
- Eigengrau’s Village Generator is a really powerful village generator, which can generate everything up to individual NPC storylines.
- Giffyglyph’s Monster Maker – Forget the DM’s guide rules for creating monsters. This makes the process easy and fun, and the standard traits add so much versatility. Be sure to read the full book as well – it goes into so much depth about how to make a good monster.
- Auto Roll Tables – So many cool tables. The results can be a bit rough (or clearly feel ‘random’), but they’re always good for inspiration.
- DMHeroes – Creates really cool and quirky NPC’s – with portraits!