What I need to run a game is some notes on paper and dice. But when I can, I prefer some more tools to help me out. They ease the task of immersion and give me peace of mind.

Notes

13th Age adventure prep, stats for a monster. Notice the tabs for Characters, Logbook, Events (selected). Also the pages to the right with different indentationlevels.

I use OneNote from Microsoft for all my notetaking during prep. OneNote is gratis/free as in free beer and runs on Windows, OSX and in a webbrowser. In OneNote I can arrange notes into tabs & pages, link between pages and apply basic styles to my notes.

OneNote stores the notes on OneDrive, Microsoft’s cloud storage. This means my notes are always with me, I can pull them up on my phone, my laptop or any other place that has an internetconnection.

When I run a game I have OneNote open to see my notes and I keep a regular notepad, notebook or paper for notetaking during the session. Except during some games where keeping a logbook is important, then I write in OneNote during the session so that the logbook is accurate.

Music

For my music needs I use VLC and Foobar2000. VLC has a great feature that allows you to view a playlist as a filetree. That means that I can drag all my folders with music into VLC and it organises by folder. Foobar2000 on the other hand has great playlisttools and is easy to work with.

VLC with folders added to the playlist. The button to the left of search (Sök) changes the playlistlayout. This is Detailed List.

Foobar2000 here with ColumnsUI mod and some customising. Notice the number of playlist in the left pane. One set of playlists for each of my main games, Trudvang, Mutant and 13th Age.

Soundeffects

Recently I have started using soundeffects during games to lift the mood and immersion. This has been used to great effect, and have led to the players fear for their characters’ life. Just imagine hearing some background music, blowing wind, rain clatter on the tent and then… wolves howling.

Softrope is a deprecated piece of gratis/free as in free beer software but it works great. It allows you to build up scenes like Rain, At the docks and Caverns. The interface is easy to use but their is not documentation, you'll have to learn it by trial and error.

Softrope with four scenes playing. You play a scene by clicking it and it highlights in yellow.

Tabletop Audio might be an alternative, it’s easy to use and is gratis/free as in free beer to use. They both have premade mixes from different genres and themes like fantasyforest, spaceship and zombies. They also have a relatively new service called SoundPad. SoundPad allows you like Softrope play soundeffects with a click of a button. You can loop them and set the volume of each effect individually.

Tabletop Audio’s SoundPad The Dungeon with some soundeffects playing, seen as blue outlines.

Softrope is more advanced and allows more freedom since you can add your own sounds. A great place to find soundeffects is Freesound.org. There you can find gratis/free as in free beer soundeffects to use in your games. Remember to check out the individual license on each song, it shouldn’t be a problem if just use it in a private game.

Freesound with the searchresults for fire. With additional tags and filters to the right.

Inspirational images

I use Pinterest to organise my inspirational images. With the browserplugin it allows you to easily pin an image you find on the internet to one of your pinboards. You can add multiple people to any board so that the whole group can pin cool images to your game’s board. It’s also gratis/free as in free beer to use. I have at least one board for every gameworld.