DM Tools

Things I built to run my own games, collected in one place for reference. Take what is useful.

✦

For any table

System-agnostic — useful whatever you are running.

  • The Stele editor with a carved marble epitaph

    Stele

    Handouts

    Turns text into a weathered handout: carved marble and sandstone, bronze plaques, clay tablets, burnt letters, water-stained papyrus.

    Pick the medium, the script — Roman capitals through blackletter, runes, and cuneiform — then age it with chips, cracks, lichen, burns, and fading, or paint the damage on by hand. Export at 300 DPI, transparent for a virtual tabletop, or as a PDF.

    Open
  • The Jabberwock generator with a passage of invented Elvish

    Jabberwock

    Filler text

    Lorem ipsum for the table. Text in real languages and fantasy ones — Elvish out of French, Dwarvish out of Old Norse — where the words are invented but the rhythm, punctuation, and little words are real, so it reads as that language and means nothing.

    Prose, conversation, inscriptions, or names; a respelling under each word for reading aloud; and a button that drops the finished text straight into Stele.

    Open
  • A Sator puzzle card: the answer, the clue laid out in letter tiles, and the hints beneath it

    Sator

    Puzzles

    Named for the Roman word square whose letters rearrange into PATER NOSTER. Scrambles a password, a name, or a clue into letters the players have to work back — easy keeps the words and their first letters, hard runs everything together, moves every letter, and parts any two that used to sit side by side. It finds real-word anagrams too (DORMITORY gives DIRTY ROOM), or helps you write one by hand.

    Any line becomes a puzzle card: how much the clue gives away, what else its letters spell, a riddle, hints that ladder out a letter at a time, then a player link, tiles to print and scatter, or the clue carved into granite in Stele.

    Open
  • The Daedalus menu of puzzle kinds: turning discs, word guess, maze, trapped floor, pedestals

    Daedalus

    Playable puzzles

    Five kinds of puzzle to build and hand over: turning stone discs that spell names where they meet, a word to guess, a maze to escape in the dark, a floor of trapped squares crossed by minesweeper’s rules, and pedestals that each want the right object.

    Make it, copy the player link, and they solve it in their own browser — on a phone at the table or between sessions. The link never holds the answer, and their progress survives a reload.

    Open
  • A shop page of magic items, each with a price and a description

    RPG MegaMart

    Magic items

    A shop your players can browse. Build magic items with their own art, price, and rules text, gather them into a store, and hand the players the link instead of reading a list aloud.

    Open

Four Horsemen

Four Horsemen is my worldbuilding game, in the vein of The Quiet Year: the table writes the history of a world one age at a time.

  • The Age Deck showing a drawn Age of Calamity: Pestilence card beside the history of earlier ages

    Age Deck

    Four Horsemen

    Draws the deck the game runs on. Each card is the next age to befall the world, the calamities shuffle themselves in as you play so nobody knows which turn one arrives on, and every age drawn so far stays listed beside the deck.

    The full deck list is there too, behind a spoiler warning, for whoever is running the table.

    Open

New World

New World is my homebrew game — a colonial-era fantasy setting with its own rules, so these only make sense at that table.

  • The New World dice roller showing a failed Endurance check

    Dice Roller

    New World

    Rolls a New World check: choose the stat, set the value, dial advantage or disadvantage up and down, and the dice tumble out with the result and every die that went into it.

    Open