I gave up prepping “main quest” stuff when my players wanted to find out more about some curse affecting them, and decided the most logical thing to do is kidnap the head of their religion (who one of the players directly reports to), interrogate him, and hold him hostage. Instead of, you know, asking 😅

They eventually backed off of that plan due to concerns of some other PCs, but it was pretty close

I used worldographer for my world map for my current campaign.

I’ve used inkarnate in the past for battle maps, but I was not happy with performance when you have a lot of assets.

I recently got Canvas of Kings which seems awesome and perfect for what I want but I have been pretty busy and haven’t had a chance to make any completed maps in it yet.

I love the Genesys system because it’s designed specifically to homebrew any genre of setting you want (including custom magic systems), along with multiple official settings.

It is so easy to take NPCs, items, etc, from fantasy to sci-fi to current day, to post apocalyptic, etc. Since the rules and stats are intentionally setting agnostic.

And I absolutely love the narrative dice system.

If OP likes plating a variety of settings it’s worth checking out. Or one of the billion other games out there

I do, I try to do as much creation as I can to exercise those skills, but having some prepared adventures to steal things from makes it a lot easier. Like going to the gym with a professionally made program before learning to write your own programming. And I don’t want stuff so pre-prepared that I don’t ever learn to make my own stuff - I’m not so much just running the pre-made stuff as I am dissecting it, trying to understand it, and taking what I like to plug into my game.

When I have prompt or encounter ideas I write them down in a notebook and flesh them out later, but a lot of the time when I sit down to prep it’s hard to think of things out of thin air. I’m getting a lot better at creating new things and integrating things the more we play.

So yeah, any resources on how to better design stuff is very welcome too. I have watched a lot of the Matthew Colville running the game videos that have helped a lot (especially the “Prep Can Be Literally Easy and Actually Fun” video)

Something like Storycaster looks interesting. I have heard of some other story prompt / plot cards (Fabula and Narata) and I might look into those too… That kind of thing is exactly what I’m looking for. Something that can help me generate ideas to flesh out into encounters or side quests that I can keep in my GM notes and stick in different locations so when the players decide to go into the mountains instead of the forests I have a general idea of what might be there…

That is fantastic. That don’t prep plots makes a lot of sense and is very helpful. I will bookmark these.

Thank you!

This is awesome and I will definitely save this for reference as there are a few 2d6 systems I want to try out, but Hero Kids is even more basic than a 2d6 system, at least as far as I understand them.

Your stat pools are basically just the number of d6 you get to roll, and you just take the higher number. Every successful hit deals 1 damage (health pools are between 1-4, 1 being like a weak minion or a spider egg or something, 4 being a leveled up hero or a boss). So higher stat just means you are basically rolling with more advantage, more chances to get a higher number, but you always only use the highest dice.

So a hero with 3 melee attack would roll 3 d6 and take the highest number, and that is their attack roll. If they are attacking a creature with 1 defense, the GM would roll 1 d6 - if the attackers highest dice is equal to or higher than the defenders dice, the attack hits and the target takes 1 damage. Otherwise nothing happens.

I think the best way to convert something like 5e stat blocks into this would be to just say - is this monster supposed to be easy, medium, or hard - and then just copy a stat block from a hero kids monster that is similar to what you want. There is a pretty good monster compendium for hero kids so for a lot of creatures I can just use those directly.

I’m less concerned about copying stat blocks directly than I am about just having good narrative / story content, like NPCs and locations. Having never read any other RPG content besides Hero Kids (and perusing a D&D Players handbook a bit) I don’t know how much of the adventures are story content that works everywhere vs just “This place has monsters with these stat blocks” that is D&D specific or requires conversion.

I didn’t realize that DnD Beyond had free adventures, so I will definitely check that out, and that will probably give me the information I need on whether or not I’d like to spend money on other 5e adventures.

The Dungeon Alphabet seems great! I will add that to my list to check out.

Fire on the velvet horizon also looks interesting, but maybe a little intense for my current game. Kind of giving me some SCP vibes. Would be fun to run a Fringe-like campaign in a dark fantasy setting with these kinds of creatures. Reminds me of The Tales of Durand series, too, where when certain things happen, the world kind of starts to unravel and unbinds a lot of dark creatures and things.

This looks really great. I have a friend who sketches in a similar style and I always like getting to see what he has sketched since we last hung out.