Ludonarrative Dissidents

Tales from the Shelf is two gamers, one American who started with D&D, and an English person...who did not. We take on the campaigns we run, the systems we use, the things we learn. With deep dives in on specific books, gaming advice and RPG history. Links podcastaddict.com - Podcast feed

RoboDad1 is a YouTube channel dedicated to helping Dungeon Masters run better, more exciting Dungeons & Dragons games. The channel focuses on breaking down published adventures and transforming them into easier-to-run, more cinematic experiences at the table. Through detailed DM guides, encounter ideas, and practical storytelling advice, RoboDad1 explores popular adventures and settings, offering Dungeon Masters tools to improve pacing, build tension, and bring memorable moments to their players. The channel also covers topics such as common DM mistakes, campaign preparation, adventure design, and creative ways to enhance published modules without increasing prep time. RoboDad1’s guides aim to make running D&D more accessible for new Dungeon Masters while still providing inspiration and clever ideas for experienced Game Masters. Whether you’re preparing your first campaign or looking to improve an existing one, RoboDad1 focuses on one simple goal: helping DMs run unforgettable adventures. Links youtube.com - Youtube channel

Geek Native is an independent news site and community for tabletop roleplaying games, board games, anime, and geek culture. It covers tabletop mechanics, industry news, and reviews with a critical but welcoming tone. Whether you’re a player, a Game Master, or somewhere in between, it’s a solid place to find content that actually holds up. It also publishes practical tools for session prep and world-building -  things like spaceship name generators and lists of oddly unsettling phrases to throw at your players. Alongside those, there are columns on the psychology of gameplay and table dynamics. It’s been around long enough to build a genuine community, and it shows. Links geeknative.com - Website

Saga20 is the campaign tool that keeps up with your table. It is a full world builder, a campaign wiki, a session summarizer, a character sheet system and a shared player portal, and all of it runs off one action: hit record. Play the session, upload the audio, and Saga20 works out who spoke, writes the recap, and pushes what happened into every world page it touched. Characters, locations, factions and items each keep their own page, their own timeline, and a link back to the session where it happened. Most world builders need you to update them. This one updates itself. It works for every TTRPG system, from D&D across all editions to Pathfinder 1e and 2e, Call of Cthulhu, Cyberpunk RED and Vampire: The Masquerade, with character sheets built into the app. The app is quickly growing in popularity and is already being used and trusted by thousands of GMs. Description Every campaign wiki dies the same death. Immaculate for four sessions, then the group plays a long night, nobody writes it up, and a month later the wiki describes a campaign that no longer exists. Saga20 fixes that at the source. The session is the input, and the world updates because you played, not because you did homework afterwards. Underneath the automation is a proper world builder. Characters, NPCs, locations, factions, items, deities, starships, corporations, clues, house rules: anything in the campaign gets a real page, with rich text, images, custom icons and cover art, organized into folders and templates and custom entity types for whatever the world needs. Search reaches every page instantly. A campaign graph draws who knows whom. Interactive maps carry routes, regions, pins and the party's current position. Build it all by hand if that is the fun part, or you can import an existing world across from Obsidian, Notion, Google Docs or World Anvil and carry on from there. You can then upload session recordings to automatically update your world wiki. Anyone at the table can record, on a phone, a dedicated mic, Discord or Zoom, and nobody else has to install anything. Saga20 generates the Session Notes including choices, clues, quests and consequences that happened during the session then automatically updates the world pages so you'll always have an up to date wiki without having to spend hours after every session.  It is not only the GM's tool but a tool for the entire table. Players can read the campaign and session notes without an account, or choose to claim their own characters, keep their character sheets on the same page as the story, and arrive at the next session actually remembering the last one. The wiki can be themed to match the setting and published on its own link. Prep, play, notes and the whole table, in one place.

StarCar is a permanently free linear star systems cartography tool. It enables GMs running sci-fi campaigns to visualize and share star maps with their players easily. It allows a lot of different customizations for orbital bodies, like planets, secondary stars, Ringworlds, Dyson Spheres, and more. GMs can add notes to individual orbital bodies, stars, and moons. The notes can be totally customizable, or use either Traveller or Stars Without Number rules. If they want, the GM can even export a stylized PDF report that details all the notes in an easy-to-follow format. And if the GM just needs something right away? StarCar will roll the dice and generate a totally randomized system: random stars, planets, and even randomized plot hooks. Once the GM is finished, they can export it in a number of different formats: PNG, WebP, or JPG, or with settings like Printer Friendly or Transparent Background. Anything exported is licensed under Creative Commons 4.0, which means the person who makes it owns it. They can even use it in any products they sell, with attribution.

Obsidian is a free, locally-stored Markdown note-taking application that the TTRPG community has widely adopted as a campaign wiki, session planner, and lore database. Originally designed as a personal knowledge management tool, it stores everything as plain text files on your own machine with no subscription required. Description Unlike purpose-built platforms such as World Anvil, Obsidian was not designed with TTRPGs in mind, which means it arrives without templates, stat block support, or any TTRPG-specific structure out of the box. GMs who want those features need to install and configure community plugins themselves, which carries a steeper setup cost than dedicated alternatives. For those comfortable with that process, however, the result is a highly customizable system with no ongoing fees and no vendor lock-in. A thriving plugin ecosystem has filled most of the gaps, and the tool has become a genuine alternative to subscription-based worldbuilding platforms for technically comfortable Game Masters. The plugin ecosystem extends well beyond what is listed here, with community tools covering everything from database-style note querying and cross-device sync to interactive maps and combat automation. A full directory is available at community plugins.