RPG Link Collection

Google+ is a bonanza of great links to blogs, house rules, forum threads, etc., for RPG enthusiasts. I quickly found that I couldn't remember all the great stuff that I had seen, or have any hope in hell of finding it quickly. I tend to forget that I have bookmarked things, and often the titles that bookmarks end up with don't tell me what the link really is and, more importantly, why I thought it was worth remembering at some point.

The links below are my attempting at creating a personal 'best of' that is categorized and contextualized enough that I can later remember why I wanted to remember it.

Advice on Building a Megadungeon and running a Campaign Around It: Giant thread written and updated by Benoist Poiré in which he lays out a process for conceptualizing and building a Megadungeon that can be used with a long-term campaign. Benoist actually goes through building a pretty well-defined Megadungeon, and along the way talks a lot about some great design advice, mapping, etc.

S is for Sandbox Recap: Raven Crowking's 'S is for Sandbox' series of posts covers the hows and whys of running a 'sandbox' style campaign with relatively minimal up-front prep and significant player direction. He covers the basics of what a sandbox campaign is and how it works, as well as related discussions like why the rule system for a sandbox game matters, and how much material needs to be prepped in order to provide a base for a campaign without forcing the DM to specify the entire world up front.

In Praise of the Six Mile Hex: Great information for building a hex crawl environment- how to make life easy for yourself as a DM in terms of keeping track of overland movement, lines of sight, and building sub-hex maps that are realistically laid out and scoped.

Zak S's Random Table Collection: An ungoinngly-updated collection of useful and/or amusing random tables.

Mithril & Mages Labyrinth Lord Resource Collection: Settings, modules, generators, and other utilities for Labyrinth Lord.

Untimately OD&D Equipment Generators: Random tables for quickly putting together class appropriate equipment sets for OD&D characters.

Weighing In: So you need to know how much that dead aboleth weighs...

Dungeonographer: Dungeonographer is my preferred dungeon mapping software of the moment. I previously used some of the more 'arty' looking programs, like Dundjinni, to create maps but ultimately found it to be too time consuming and too dependent on someone out there making an object/texture that you could use for a particular need- I'm no artist and have no hope of creating good looking terrain tiles by myself that are anything more complex than stylized line art. It's close to the simplicity of GridMapper but adds the capability to add room labels, mark traps, and add furniture and other room features. Its sister product, Hexographer is also great for making outdoor hex maps if you lack the patience or artistic ability to use a more graphically oriented program like Dundjini or the CAD-like Campaign Cartographer. Both programs hit a great sweet spot of speed, simplicity, features, and quality for what I want to use them for.

Towards a More Simplified Corpse Robbing: Great quick simplified system for quickly generating appropriate stuff to take once you've killed something.

Slacker DM Item Costs: Quick 'n' dirty method for quickly estimating the costs of items in order to reduce the amount of time spent flipping through equipment tables.

Random Carcosa - Random hex generator for the Carcosa setting. With a little squinting and re-jiggering, can easily be turned into a random hex generator for anything else with an Elder Evil feel- WFRP, for instance.