Ive Been Really On A Roll Lately. Helps That I Have My Actual Computer Again. Havent Felt Great The Past

I’ve been really on a roll lately. Helps that I have my actual computer again. Haven’t felt great the past few days otherwise this would have been even faster. I have one more in the chamber that I want to work on with my buddy from the undead post.

Ko-if.com/the5eclassist

A massive tower of rotting, squirming bodies, this horrid clump of undead has no actual combat capabilities but attracts weak undead and strengthens them. Powerful sentient undead (CR 15 or higher) create these through a sacrifice of 100 humanoids that were slain violently and died in anger, within 1 week of the start of a 24 hour long ritual that taxes the undead greatly, causing them 3 levels of exhaustion despite their regular immunity. The creator can communicate telepathically with the tower, who shares memory and senses with its master.

School of Planar Magic by FrostBladestorm on reddit

A city where necromancy is legal and actually a part of every day society. So long as you follow a specific set of laws to make it seem a bit more ethical, you’re allowed to use it to do anything from helping you in a fight, to helping you run your business. In fact, there are entire shops or restaurants where the staff are undead. Laws to handle the undead could be things like:

• The corpses used cannot have flesh on them for sanitary reasons, especially in the case of businesses. Those who raise undead who are more than just bone will face a fine dependent on their situation.

• Similar to how people can donate their bodies to science, or donate their organs to those in need, people can choose to donate their bodies to necromancers before their death.

• If it is unknown if a person wished for their body to be donated after death, and they have been dead for 150+ years, you’re allowed to raise them. If next of kin is still alive, you must get permission from them first.

• You must take care of the undead in your charge. Keep them clean and unbroken. If one of them starts to get too much wear and tear, you are required by law to respectfully lay them back down to rest. Failure to do this will get you a hefty fine.

Monster: Ruin Worm by DeckofJokersGames on reddit

DM Tip: Getting Organized

Hey you, yes YOU, the person who has a sideblog where they reblog all their d&d content to use as a later reference. 

Why the HELL aren’t you tagging your shit? Why are you just tossing my stuff (and I presume other people’s) into a great big pile and expecting you’re going to be able to so find it weeks or months or gods help you, years later? I go hunting in the tags of my own work for validation all the time, so don’t pretend I can’t see you reblogging 3-10 of my posts in a row without a way of sorting them. 

Take it from someone who’s had to hack their way through innumerable backlogs of their own making looking for one particular image/idea: you need a system, something that will let you access the content you want with the smallest amount of brain/time investment possible. This advice doesn’t only apply to tumblr, It applies to being a dungeonmaster as well, as any good idea you don’t write down is as good as lost. 

So, as a public service I’m going to go through a few different methods I’ve found helpful in keeping my ideas organized, and how you can use them to improve as a storyteller.

First step Journals

See all these? These represent the last 10 or so years of bad ideas, stray thoughts, and anxious scribblings I’ve had while trying to be a better dungeonmaster. The seeds of my best campaigns and my very worst mistakes are in there, as are the fundamentals of my current novel and a hundred other projects ranging somewhere between pre-production and the cutting room floor.  If I didn’t have these notebooks on hand, all those ideas would have just slipped into the aether, rather than having a way for me to reference them later. Every time I’m 50-100% through a journal, I go through it and type everything into a google doc, sorting it into dnd/non-dnd related stuff, and then further subdividing it into plot ideas, random concepts, future projects, or mechanical improvements.  Every journal gets its own google doc, and from there I suddenly have a decade of ideas at my fingertips, ready to recall. 

Next up, DM Binder: 

This right here? This is your tome of wonders, your tome of wily wizard tricks, that ubiquitous book that DMs are always pictured with whenever they get fantasy fanart of themselves. Every beginner dungeonmater knows how handy it is to have the DMG or other rulebook on hand so you can quickly page through and address a specific ruling or look something up, but eventually you get enough of a sense of how things should work that you don’t necessarily need to do that all the time. 

The instinct to have a book close at hand is a good one, you just need to upgrade the book in line with your skills. That’s where the DM binder comes in, a collection of everything you think you’d need to look up without being weighed down by all the stuff you already have on lock. Fill it with all the cool 3rd party systems you stumble across online, printouts of your own homebrew rules, and resources that help you cover for weaknesses in your natural talents. 

For instance, here’s what’s in my DM binder right now: 

Bulk grid paper if I need to draw something to explain it to the players

Writeups on the 3rd party XP and Talent point systems I use for levelup

Simplified encounter building rules if I need to create an encounter on the fly. Stand in monster stats. 

A one page d1000 list of character traits if I need to create an NPC on the fly. along with nearly 10,000 names. 

My simplified loot generation rules, along with a printout of various items that I can use to fill out a horde/magic item shop without having to go into my treasury docs (which is where I keep the good shit) 

A writer’s reference guide to different terrain types and the terminology used to refer to different parts of them. 

Random town/location/dungeon/quest/villain motivation lists. 

Collection of homebrew/3rd systems, separated by combat/downtime/etc

Generic dungeon layouts for different terrain types in case my party stumbles into something I didn’t plan, or if I get very, very lazy. 

Under the cut I’m going to go into a few more means to get organized, including a tried and true method of organizing your d&d sideblog that’ll turn your cluttered pile of notes into a solid archive. 

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