My DM Tools for Running a D&D Game

I have been running the same D&D campaign for almost 4 years now, and I wanted to write a post to share the tools I use to create and run my homebrew campaign. At this point I have created about 20 different adventures, which take a few playing sessions to get through. Our game has 5 players, and we usually end up doing about 60% roleplaying during a game, and 40% battles. That feels like a good mix.

Overworld Maps

The most important tools I use by far are maps. Maps are useful because you can visualize a world, and start inventing stories around it together. Each “season” of our campaign has featured an overworld map. I don’t think this is a repeatable process for everyone, but I hand draw my overworld map. What I found by the third season was the more I didn’t know about the world as a DM, the more fun it was to explore. I had some general ideas on different lands, and an overall political plan for the empire, but as the players explored everything, the story grew out of this experience.

There are online generators and many great free maps available online. Since games are non-commercial, you can just take any one that you find, and adapt it to your purposes.

Season 1 - The Civil War at Stone End

Season 2 - Stuck in The Nether

Season 3 - The Tiberius Empire - Back from Hell

Campaign Planning and Writing

For campaign planning, I have bounced between many different systems. Initially I was using markdown files, but found that it was lacking in providing visual references. Visual Studio Code is a great tool for writing markdown for posts on my website, but I didn’t feel like I was getting the same experience on the campaign.

For awhile I landed on Google Docs, but I was always feeling lost and couldn’t find my files. Google Docs suffers from a lack of organizational tools. My campaign has many art assets and map files. Google Docs (and Google Drive) was not a solution that I found easy to use.

I finally settled on Scrivener as my campaign planning software. It’s a little annoying because I really have to be on my laptop to work on it, but the organization tools are what I really appreciate. It’s very easy to organize everything into folders by season -> adventure.

Generative AI Tools

ChatGPT has been a nice addition to the campaign planning process.