At this “Internet and laptop-at-the-gaming-table” stage of our hobby, most game masters embrace a number of online and software tools to save time and keep things organised. Many of these tools are required for world-builders who choose to use a computer. We’ll present general categories here to get you thinking, along with some of our favourite picks within each section.
Information Management
Information management tools are used to create, edit, organise, and store your world-building documents: written notes, timelines, world maps, your database of world pantheons, etc. These documents might be in any format: plain or rich text, files created in MS Office or Open Office, images, PDFs, or web links. Good information management tools allow you to create an organisational outline to store these files in whatever way you like. When you save your outline, all the documents you’ve added are stored in a single package, which makes the whole thing portable and easy to search.
Though it sounds very business-like and not at all fun, information management is a crucial aspect of world-building. Regardless of the detail you plan to instil, you need to be organised so you can avoid (at the very least) combing your hard drive for “that map of such-and-such” or “those notes I wrote about whatever.” Consistency is key in world-building, and you can’t keep your world’s story straight if you’re not organised. Besides, putting all your campaign documents into a neat, hierarchical package lets you bring them with you to the gaming table (imagine how cool it will be to instantly pull the answer to any off-the-wall question about your setting?).
When reviewing information management tools, look for packages that allow you to import documents in different formats (DOC, PDF, JPG, TXT, RTF, GIF, on and on) and organise them in an outline or hierarchical fashion. Make sure the software includes its own editor. Finally, ensure that the tool supports search—information management depends on it.
- NBOS’ The Keep – campaign management software
Cartography
Fantasy RPGs and maps go hand in hand, and good software for rendering your campaign’s cartography can save you a lot of time. Many mappers use image-editing packages like PhotoShop, Paint Shop Pro, or GIMP to create their maps, often with truly stunning effects. If you’re pressed for time (or artistic ability), you may find that a dedicated cartography package is a better option.
Regardless of what software you use, you want digital maps. For starters, you’ll have images you can add to your information manager. And, while hand-drawn maps are useful, there are three principle areas where they fall short: (1) you need a zoomed-in (or zoomed-out) view of a particular region, (2) you need to change the features of an existing map, or (3) you need to share a map with your players, but without showing them secret GM stuff. Electronic versions of your campaign maps makes it easy to satisfy these needs.
When browsing titles, look for software that lets you create custom map templates, because your maps will span the world, the nearby dungeon, the local inn, and everything in between. The ability to import graphics (like royalty-free PNG files) and your system’s fonts is desirable; if you’re not artistically inclined, you’ll want catalogues of terrain and interior symbols. You must have the ability to export maps to useful image formats (BMP, JPG, or PNG), and if you can find something that offers some visual effects (like blurring, gradients, and transparency) so much the better.
- Arr-Kelaan Hexmapper – free tool for creating old-school hex maps
- Greenfish Relief Map Generator – free tool for random relief maps and settlement locations
- Hexographer – advanced hex mapping tool (free and pro versions)
Random Generators
This category used to be limited to dice rollers, but the toolset has become much more sophisticated in recent years. Random generators let a game master write a table of results, weigh the odds of any given result, then “roll” on the table. While the standard examples of creating random encounters, names, and treasure hoards remain, game masters can also create full-blown character generators, weather forecasters, and even graphical dungeon layouts. Since tables are written by the game master, it’s very easy to customise the output to your individual campaign.
A random generator is indispensable to any world-builder. As you map out continents and create civilisations, you’ll want random names. Random results will help you populate cities, dungeons, and wilderness areas. A random generator can significantly decrease the time spent creating non-player characters. The primary benefit of a random generator is that it saves you the bother of making trivial decisions–do you really want to think of a name for every person or place in your campaign? A secondary benefit is that random results can spawn other ideas that you wouldn’t normally think of. For example, you might randomly roll ability scores for an NPC henchman; when his intelligence comes up higher than his strength, you might decide that he’s more than just hired muscle.
Any random generator you choose should have its own scripting language, which is used not only to build your tables, but also to manipulate and format the results. Most such languages are easy to learn, but they rarely port from one random generator to another, so make sure to evaluate the software before you climb too high along the script’s learning curve. The script language should also support commands that call other tables, which lets you create tables of common results (names, colours, weapons, etc.) and reuse them in your other tables. Finally, the generator should let you use your favourite text editor to manage and update tables, it should support HTML formatting, and it should allow you to organise and group your tables in some hierarchy.
Last Word
When selecting tools, experiment with a variety of packages to find what works best for your style of creativity and organisation, and do it before you get too far along in the world-building process—it’s no fun to spend your valuable world-building time migrating data from one set of tools to another.