|
Can be a bit hard to find good images for eg elderly female NPCs (attractive young ladies seem strangely common...) but thank goodness for Helen Mirren! :)
I especially like how it sometimes generates the weird & unexpected...
Hmmm....
Sometimes you get attractive young ladies who ARE Helen Mirren. Being very very weird & unexpected.
Sure, 'Helen Mirren in Excalibur' makes a great Evil Sorceress! 'Helen Mirren at the Oscars a few years back' is the mother in law of a female PC in one of my games, I think the PC is more afraid of her than the monsters...
Sure, 'Helen Mirren in Excalibur' makes a great Evil Sorceress! 'Helen Mirren at the Oscars a few years back' is the mother in law of a female PC in one of my games, I think the PC is more afraid of her than the monsters...
Heh. My old Forgotten Realms group would have rather faced down an army of Zhentarim with nothing but cantrips, clubs, a dull butter knife, and a bent spoon than deal with their family problems (which made for some amazing roleplaying sessions).
(For modern day adventures, the best GM tool is the news, especially tabloids, for ideas for adventure seeds.)
The Law & Order approach. :P
It is a pretty effective technique. I recently used a news article about a cavern in China so large it had it's own weather system to good effect.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I use Lego blocks with my players names on them so I can quickly assemble initiative order without writing anything. It also gives my players easy to identify colours.
The clear dice container that comes with Chessex is a great Gelatinous Cube.
Any board game by fantasy flight is instant miniatures for your games, in particular I use the World of Warcraft Board game which comes packed with coloured minis. The cool thing about coloured minis is I can roll green dice for my green monsters, red for red monsters and so on. Always keep an eye out for secondhand board games!
The best dice container I have is a small clear plastic condiments lunchbox, I roll my dice inside the lid and it stops them jumping off the table or getting confused with other player's dice.
A tablet or phone with the "Masterwork Tools" android app is the fastest way to check info.
An egg timer is an excellent prompt for keeping players on their toes and ready to take their turns.
Post it notes are the best way to make modifications to an adventure path without ruining the book. Also great for a low tech way of moving creature stats without flipping back and forth through the book.
I never let an opportunity to deliver a physical letter to the party go to waste. Often for official letters I print them out on textured paper with cursive font and because I have a wax seal collection, I seal some important scrolls with wax seals. Sometimes I'll put letters completely in code or rip them up and have players find them one piece at a time.
Ice cubes on a glass tray makes an epic river fight, as the ice melts the cubes will automatically "float" off in their own haphazard direction. Players spend a move action to paddle their ice cube into position.
I use plastic "counters" to mark positions of spells on the map or swarms when they're sharing space with players.
Something I've started doing during the prep-work phase is using a free Windows app called PDFill Writer to "print" pages from the various Bestiaries to PNG and then copy them to my tablet for use during gameplay. The nice formatting and monster images from the Bestiary are preserved, and I don't need to go swapping between PDFs or lugging books around.
Thus far, I've found printing from Adobe Reader at 600dpi, with no page scaling, and "Print As Image" turn on (from the Advanced print settings) yields the best results.
Link: PDFill Writer