Hot answers tagged online-resources
14
You're looking for Obsidian Portal.
Obsidian Portal is specifically designed to allow tabletop RPG groups to build their own internal wikis. The privacy options are apparently undergoing an upgrade right now, but if nothing else you can set the whole campaign as private, so that nothing is viewable to anyone except people you invite.
12
Wizards.com itself has a massive collection.
Finding exactly what you need can be tedious, but for sheer volume it's hard to beat the wizards.com galleries and archives.
The Art & Map Gallery and the Map-A-Week Archive are both free, and give access to most of the maps published in D&D 3.5 physical volumes and adventures (though not the content ...
10
Both Medieval Demographics Made Easy and The Domesday Book - Medieval Demographics Made Easy were found using this Google search. Both are from the same author (S. John Ross) but both have sources you could delve into.
The www.medieval-life.net site offers some information as to what life was like which should tell you what people did which will inform ...
8
Ambiance - sound effect mixer, allows you to make a playlist. They have a huge list of sounds you can download and mix as you like. I think you can also upload sounds as well.
The app has versions for IOS, Android, and desktops. My wife uses the IOS app daily so that's the only one I've see work. It seems simple and clear to me.
Here are some other ...
8
Getting players to use it is always a bit tricky. One of my DMs only gives out the XP for the game session if you post a recap on the forums. This is a bit extreme, but it works fairly well about half the time. The best thing you can do though, is impress the value of the resources on your players. Explain how new players are suddenly able to play bards ...
7
Wilderness Survival.net, for basics of survival and techniques.
Surviving in the Wild: 19 Common Edible Plants, good for understanding the right and wrong types of flora
Population density estimates of some species of wild ungulates in Simanjiro plains, northern Tanzania
and
Wildlife Management: Estimating Wildlife Populations
are papers about population ...
7
You could actually use the AutoREALM icons, if you don't mind a bit of fiddly work.
It is quite easy to vectorize simple graphics. Inkscape (free alternative to Adobe Illustrator) has such a function to trace bitmaps by various attributes of the original image (colour, brightness, edges and so on). You can make a map that's just the AutoREALM icons you want ...
7
Cartographer's Guild has a wide selection of maps, some of which are gridded for tabletop gaming.
Paratime Design released 100 Creative Commons licensed, black and white dungeon maps in the style of old D&D.
7
It's not exactly a wiki, but we've used Google Docs to similar effect.
I'm not 100% sure how we pulled it off, but I think we had a wiki earlier and actually migrated its data into Google docs. That particular group was all programmers, so someone could have done something fancy or someone could have had a copy/paste-fest while watching TV.
From our POV ...
6
The 3.5 Elder Evils book got a 4e conversion that should at least give you a solid place to start.
Many aberrant creatures from the Far Realm are inspired, at least indirectly, by the Cthulhu Mythos. Unfortunately there aren't any particularly large collections of these monsters in one place, so outside Elder Evils I think searching the DDI Compendium and ...
6
I would recommend that you also consider taking a look at the dungeonmorphs products. Rather than a map, they are like Legos for building maps in a moment or two. The dungeonmorphs are classic old-schoolish square-grid maps with exits from each tile at the same locations. So you can use the dice, cards, battlemat images, or fonts to create dungeons at high ...
6
These look promising:
Musings of the Chatty DM
Generator at Roleplayingtips
More from Roleplayingtips
One more from 'tips
5
As excellent as S. John Ross Medieval Demographics is the list seemed incomplete. So I traced back to the original source, Paris Tax Roll of 1292. The main issue is that S John Ross worked with a secondary source that didn't use the full list. So I went through the original data and compiled my own version. The full explanation can be read here on the Bat in ...
5
This sounds like a task for the mechanical turk! (and recursive analysis1)
Functionally, if you break a transcript up into paragraphs, then you can offer a mechanical turk job of "summarize this paragraph using a narrative style." The trick is, getting good results can be difficult. You'll probably spend some money figuring out your best process. (Tips and ...
4
If you have an iOS device, DMDJ might be what you are looking for.
It is a tool for selecting and playing ambient sounds as well as music during a RPG session, and has an extensive library covering much of the soundscape of a fantasy game and some modern+sci-fi as well.
The sound mixing engine allows you to select the intensity of an ambient sound, and ...
4
We've had a forum for our group for years that players could use to post both in and out of character. It's nothing as immersive as a full wiki like Obsidian, but I think a forum setting well represents the base level of getting players involved in online building up of your campaign.
What we've found is that some players take a very active roll in ...
4
Well, a list of spells would be enough, right?
Crystalkeep indexes are good. Well, they were before Spell Compendium was released. They got removed from crystalkeep, IIRC, but I still have them and can upload them to Dropbox or somewhere, if needed. Speaking of Crystalkeep, they used to have magic item index as well, potions included.
WotC index is a list ...
4
Essentially you are looking for players. I suspect most players in an online one shot game won't care if they are doing the DM a service by playtesting something for the DMs regular group.
There are many online games played and organized on Google+ these days.
G+ RPG Hangouts: https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/101466247068767710475 is a good place to ...
4
As BESW rightly points out, aberrant creatures are D&D's take on Mythos. In particular, take a look at illithids (mind flayers), aboleths, tsochar, gibbering mouthers/orbs, various oozes, swordwings. Dark Sun Creature Catalog also had a few good ones. I wouldn't recommend Elder Evils conversions, as they've been released in the very early days of 4e, ...
4
I'm pretty satisfied with the brushes and hex templates on this post, even if I'm not a big fan of hex maps.
Make sure you snap to the grid to make it easier.
You could also try to make your own brushes.
I don't consider myself good with graphics, but I did manage to get some usable maps.
3
The Cartographers' Guild is a site for devotees of map-making in fictional worlds. There is some serious talent there, and they're a very sharing community.
In particular, you'll be interested in the Mapping Elements subforum, especially the sticky posts at the top. There are lists and lists of free symbols, and more are shared and created by Guild members ...
3
As far as I know, the biggest/most currently active PbP (Play-by-Post) forums are
Giant in the Playground
Paizo
each maintains some sort of a community relating to the D&D 3.5 family.
Relevant for you, the GitP recruitment forum maintains a guide for those who are new to PbP gaming, mentioning critical topics such as
Game pacing
Dealing with ...
3
Encouraging players to contribute
I do this mostly by having them enter the information while we actually play. It's hard to get players to do those things afterwards. When we play online, one of the currently less involved players is encouraged by me to enter the information in real time (raw shape is ok) into a wiki of sorts.
Doing this in between ...
3
I can answer about Obsidian Portal from a player perspective. I have talked about it before in this answer regarding rewards for contributions.
The best thing about Obsidian Portal or any wiki, in my opinion, is allowing for collaborative world-building. The GM can world-build - writing up about the geography, history, and culture of the world - and put it ...
3
As a GM or player I find having most of the information accessible from anywhere as highly valuable. If I have an idea at work or on the move, I can pull it up on my smartphone and even make notes. Just being able to organize documents is nice and recording milestones and notes in a permanent place (instead of that scratch paper that gets lost) is vital.
...
3
Theoretically they can continue to offer support for 4E and 4E-related DDI offerings indefinitely. Practically, it costs them every month they do continue. Despite all plans they say they have, I think we will have to assume that they will only be able to support 4E up to the release of 5E. After that point, continuing support for 4E would, while generating ...
3
Genius: The Transgression was developed on RPG.NET; as a result, you'll find the mass of its fan base and development community there. Here's a link to the most current thread on the game; its origins can be found at this link.
3
Doku Wiki
Open source wiki project that has built-in user access control. This option requires that you have server space. All content is stored in text files instead of a database.
https://www.dokuwiki.org/dokuwiki
Page creation is very intuitive, and the resulting layout is very simple/minimal.
3
I don't know about specific rpg story teller willing to write for other DMs, but based on what I found on Internet, a (cheap) ghostwriter is about 0.50$ a word or 4$ a page.
Here's some info : http://www.ghostwriter-needed.com/expensive-cheap-ghostwriters.html
I have a friend more than able to do this, but he'd consider himself rather good at it, so not so ...
2
For ambiant sounds I can recomend gomix.it. It is a collection of sounds that you can play straight or mix and there are plenty of sounds to choose from. You can download and also share.
Here is an example I made of an autumnal camp fire.
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
