5e Inspiration: a DM app

Over the past year or so, I’ve been working on a phone app. It’s a DM tool: it’s meant to be a sort of Random Dungeon Generator as a Dungeon Map for your entire campaign world. I’m tentatively calling it “5e Inspiration.”

0% preparation, 100% inspiration

5e Inspiration is a tool for populating your game world with people, locations, monsters, and treasure. It can be used to supplement, aid, or even replace your game prep.

image1I’ve been using it to suggest random encounters, random NPCs, and random treasure to fill out my high-level, story-based, plane-hopping D&D campaign.

On the other hand, my buddy Rory has been using Inspiration for the past 6 months to randomly generate entire dungeons and wilderness treks in a procedurally generated West Marches campaign. Rory can both DM and play a PC because he has no foreknowledge about what the party is going to find when they leave town or descend into a dungeon.

5e Inspiration can also be a sort of an “in emergency, break glass” option for when you just don’t know what to do next. Maybe your players just wandered off the edge of the map. Or they just came back to town and are staring at you, waiting for the next adventure hook. Maybe it’s time to reveal the campaign villain and you lost the scrap of paper with his name on it, and the only name you can think of at the moment is “Smerdley.”

5e Inspiration also enables true solo D&D. With the app as DM and you as player and referee, you can play a complete game of D&D on your own. You can spelunk dungeons, wade through swamps in search of lost idols, pick up rumors in town, and race across city rooftops pursued by angry guards. The app provides the dungeons, swamps, rumors, and rooftops.

image25e Inspiration also includes a dice roller and a built-in SRD reference, so you can DM with only your phone.

what this app is not

5e Inspiration is NOT an index of dozens of random generators. As a DM, I don’t want to browse or navigate through menus to find the table I want. You know what’s not fun for players? Watching the DM play with their phone.

In my vision, EVERYTHING YOU NEED IS ON THE SCREEN WHEN YOU LOAD UP THE APP: map, terrain, monsters or NPCs with their own agendas, and treasure, all suitable to your party’s level and location. If you don’t like the suggestions, reroll for new ones.

This app is NOT a D&D Beyond competitor. D&D Beyond is a complete D&D rules reference, aimed at both players and DMs, with an ever-expanding library of official content.

While my app includes a searchable SRD reference, its main function is to suggest D&D scenes that you can drop into your game session. It’s purely a DM tool. And it’ll have an ever-expanding library of unofficial content.

The app is NOT a strict recreation of the 5e random NPC, random encounter, and random treasure rules. That would be a useful app, but it would be a weekend project, not my obsession for a year.

Screen Shot 2019-09-15 at 2.05.05 PMThose 5e tables were a starting place. I’ve expanded and varied each of those, through obsessive brainstorming and editing every day for months, until the original rules are perhaps a tenth of the content in the app. I’ve created something that’s probably too big to be printed as a DND book.

For example:

  • the 18 pages of character name tables in Xanathar’s Guide are nice, but my name list is about 4x longer. Besides NPC names by race and class, you can also use the app’s name generator to come up with villain names, noble names, magic item names, ship names, books of forgotten lore, etc.
  • I’ve taken each Monster Manual SRD monster and added lots of details that can help you run an unplanned encounter: clues that they’re nearby, what they’re doing now, who’s with them, and tables of monster-specific details like alternate vampire weaknesses, bandit gang names, and the like. It’s sort of like having an extra page to each Monster Manual entry: something like the information in this mockup I made for hags. For every monster. 10 signs of nearby hill giants! 15 variant mages! 60 kobold behaviors! 10 fomorian deformities!
  • What’s more, I’ve added more than a hundred new monsters.
  • While I was at it, I wrote lots of new traps and wilderness hazards to complicate your journeys.
  • I’ve taken each of the 350+ SRD magic items in the DMG, and I’ve given each of them variants; I’ve created an average of 6 variants per magic item. Some items, like the generic +1 magic weapon, have more than 50 new variants. Each time your players find a treasure hoard, they’re likely to find something they’ve never seen before.

    image3

  • I have insanely detailed random encounter tables that can produce an astronomically huge number of distinct encounters, because repetitive encounters are boring. A party could probably spend their adventuring career in a single niche terrain, like tundra or desert, and never find an encounter that felt “samey”.

    join me!

    Over the years since I started this blog in 2008, I’ve posted hundreds or thousands of dnd things: new magic items, spells, monsters, house rules, rules analysis. If you like any of that content, this app is the mother lode. There’s probably more in the app than I’ve posted in 10 years on this blog.

    I’m unreasonably excited about this project.

    And it’s going to be free.

    It’s the DM tool I need, and I hope you find it useful too.

    Over the next while, I’ll post samples of the content in the app, along with my design notes.

    If you’re interested, you can sign up for the beta test. Sign up here!

    Here is more to read about the Inspiration app:

  • dungeon exploration in the Inspiration app
  • here are some Inspiration cloud giants
  • how big does a random generator have to be?
  • 22 magic item variants
  • on npc names
  • 12 Responses to “5e Inspiration: a DM app”

    1. Mark Cox-Palmer says:

      Exciting!

    2. Nat says:

      Uh, wow. I could have used this at my game last night. Consider me a beta tester!

    3. Jeff says:

      Will this be open sourced?

    4. Paul says:

      Looks cool – which platforms will this be for?

    5. Paul says:

      @Jeff: The engine won’t be open source, but the new game content, such as the new monsters, will be OGL.

      @Paul: I’ll be doing iOS and Android. I’m interested whether there is interest in a stand-alone computer application as well.

    6. Paul says:

      I tend to still be less mobile-inclined (except when actually AT the game table for the game) and do most of my prep on my computer.

    7. I, for one, would be interested in a stand-alone computer application.

    8. Romex says:

      This sounds really cool! I’m excited to try it out.

    9. I’m all for Android, but would a web app / browser-based version be an option? That could be used by the majority no matter their OS.

      Very excited to tinker with this :)

    10. Tyler Do'Urden says:

      A Windows PC based one would be a miracle for me – especially if we can hack/add our own content!

      That’s the one thing I’ve been missing so far – in all my searches for D&D 5e apps, I have yet to find a proper Windows-based Treasure Generator (with modifiable data files) – only web-based ones. This demands correction!

    11. The Green Man says:

      I’m so glad to read about this…I was just going to start learning to code so I could develop the exact same thing… So glad I read this first. Any news on how is coming along or when it’ll be available?

    12. Adam Gertsacov says:

      Is this app now out and available?

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