Resources for DMs and Homebrew 5th Edition D&D
There are some great resources out there for helping DMs online and for making homebrew titles that actually look pretty good. I’m making a short list here, feel free to add to let me know of any good additions.
- Dungeon Master’s Vault – This page is actually got a lot of great tools for D&D. I really appreciate the amount of effort that went into this site. There is a decent character generator that can pretty much handle homebrew character classes and sub-classes, a combat tracker and even a way to save your homebrew classes and races so that you can easily use them again later. Seriously worth checking out.
- Donjon’s 5E Random Generator – This page is a big favorite of mine. It has some great random generators for making worlds, towns, quest ideas, dungeons, Inns, NPC and NPC names… AND, it isn’t just D&D 5E, it also has tools for Science Fiction settings, Pathfinder, AD&D, 4e and Microlite20, a super simple RPG system. Very fun stuff.
- The Homebrewery – This is very nice, purely online layout and design editor for D&D. Definitely, give it a shot if you are going to make your own adventures. It can take a bit of messing about to get how it works, but once you get it, it’s amazing.
- Monster Maker This is a pretty nice statblock creator. Unfortunately, it’s a downloaded app and doesn’t work for Mac. I didn’t use it because I prefer to do a lot of things on my Mac.
- Encounter Level Calculator for 5th Edition – …It’s interesting. Take a look.
- Reddit Unearthed Arcana Community Resources – This has some really good resources for templates and images. Make sure you pay attention to the license information, not all of it is public domain.
I didn’t really use any of those things in making my materials. I built the Alternative Steeds in Excel, which was clunky but worked pretty well, then used Word and Acrobat to make the Paladin Variants and the Paladin Character Sheet, and then… and then I got a little crazy.
Then I wanted to make a collection of Monsters, and I wanted it to be easier to make the monsters and after searching for resources and finding that none of them did what I was thinking, I decided to make my own.
In Filemaker.
Yep. Filemaker. I used a database program that few people have even heard of (it often seems) to design and layout and output my monsters for Creepy, Crawly, and Crazy. It will make making a new collection of monsters a lot easier for me, but it is definitely stretching Filemaker’s capabilities to their absolute limits.
Here are some screen shots of the designer, finished layout and the “cards” option:
Monster Maker Designer page 1
Monster Maker Designer page 2
Monster Maker Designer page 3
Monster Maker Output
Monster Maker – Card Layout
I thought about making this publicly available, but you have to have Filemaker Pro 14 or newer to make it work and even then it takes some fiddling with the layouts to make it work.
However, if anyone is interested and already knows a bit about Filemaker, send me a message. I’m happy enough to share it.