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When my group started playing D&D via Fantasy Grounds, several of my players were keen to resume the old campaign rather than starting a new one. That campaign had featured several long-term storylines, and the party had gotten fairly involved in one of them. This had apparently left quite an impression on the players, and they were eager to see that story to its conclusion. I was more than happy to acquiesce to their desire, since I had always been curious about how the storyline ...

In my last post I talked a bit about how I use a database of NPC’s in my campaign. Today we’ll delve into the details. We’ll talk a little about the platform and the software, then we’ll get into what information needs to be included. We’ll finish up by talking a little more about other ways to use it.

Throughout this discussion I will refer to our collection of NPC data as a “database”, even though we may or may not really be using relational database software to store the information. ...

How I Got to Where I Needed a Crafting System in My Campaign:
Ah the good ole Dungeon Master's Guide. My favorite book in the entirety of the D&D Collection. I flip through it constantly, devouring information, plotting ways to challenge the PCs in my campaign, planning out vast worlds with diverse storylines and so much more.

One day during our D&D session, Ielenia, my group's Elven Druid said to me after we were wrapping up the session: "Hey Rem, can I just craft ...

Very early on in my DM days (1980) I realized that I was terrible at making up fantasy names on the spot. It often happened that a PC would unexpectedly strike up a conversation with some blacksmith’s apprentice or farmer’s wife, and all of a sudden I would need a name for an NPC for whom I had no details whatsoever. Every time, my mind would freeze up and all I could come up with were painfully normal names.

Me: “Uh, the apprentice’s name is, uh, um, Fred”
Player: “Fred?

...

As I mentioned in one of my early posts I got Fantasy Grounds in order to restart my old AD&D campaign from 1990. Happily, I was able to recruit enough previous players and old friends to get started. We did a bit of testing, got VOIP chat working, and I got some tokens and maps made up. The characters were converted to D&D 3.5, and enough NPC’s were converted to get us started. I had written up some handouts about the campaign setting, and the basics of combat in 3.5, ...