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.

I’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.

5e 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.

Those 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: