As I’ve been running tabletop RPGs online over the last year, there are some resources that I’ve been introduced to that I simply wished I’d known about sooner. These are them. Two are Discord-specific, the rest are system and platform agnostic.
Maps and Mapping
There are so many sites and places to get tokens and map-making tools. The one I keep coming back to, time and time again, is 2 Minute Tabletop. Not only are there are good selection of free and pay-what-you-want assets and finished maps, but a whole mess of tokens which you can customize to your heart’s content. Their weekly promotional email is actually useful, introducing quickly what the new stuff is, why it’s cool, and often including freebies as well.
I’ve only recently discovered InnScribe Maps, but if there’s a thing that immediately caught my attention it’s the standalone rooms and buildings. Whether used within dungeon building software, as just graphics, or print cut-outs, simply having stand-alone buildings alone makes it easy to just drop them into whatever setting you need and worth supporting.
Calendars
Fantasy Calendar is what you need. The degree of customization is staggering … but it’s also still simple to use. Want to have a calendar that has five months of 20 days, three moons with different cycles, two seasons, and holidays dictated by the interplay of the moons and seasons? It can handle that. Want a 12-month calendar that is just the same as ours now with slightly different names? Done in a click.
The free tier is enough if you just want to keep track of things yourself; the paid tier allows Discord integration and also to let your players add their own events on the same calendar.
Discord Music And Soundboard
You want Kenku. I’ve tried several other solutions, but if you want actual control over what is playing, from your library, plus a soundboard, this is it.
Downsides: It’s an electron app, and I’d like the interface to be a bit more compact.
Upsides: It works, and easily. It joins your voice channel as a separate user, so everyone on the call can adjust its volume to their own preferences. It can handle tracklists of background music (just drag and drop) while also handling sound effects separately. Pay what you can, but I strongly urge you to take that seriously and give them some cash; this thing is worth it.
Discord Recording
I’ve never really tried to record Discord calls before, and thankfully I was introduced to Craig before I did. Craig also joins your voice channel and will record multi-channel audio, one channel per speaker, and allow you to download it for up to 7 days in a variety of formats for free. One of those formats is a ready-to-go Audacity project. Need it retained longer? Need a specialized format? Normalization to be done on their server? That’s what the paid patreon levels are for.
None of these tools or resources are absolutely essential to running a tabletop RPG online. But they definitely make the experience a lot easier and more fun for everyone.
Featured Image by Ana Carolina Franco from Pixabay