WYRM’S TURN: Site Seeing

These days it seems like everything’s on the Internet. A million resources at your fingertips to bring you any information you desire. For GM’s this means that almost anything you could need for your game is available with the click of the mouse. In today’s article, I’m going to give a shout out to three of my favorite sites for gamers. Whether it’s for homebrewed rules, ebooks, campaign management, or even the latest news from the gaming community, these sites will help you make your gaming life easier.

One of the first sites that I use on a regular basis is ENWorld.org. EN has been around in one form or another since it was “Eric Noah’s Unofficial D&D 3rd Edition News” site back in 1999. The site has changed hands since then, currently being run and owned by Russell Morrissey, and is one of the premier sites for all things D&D and d20. What I use the site for is to catch up on the latest news in the community, fan and professionally created content, and links and news from other great gamer sites. While the majority of material on ENWorld deals with d20 system, and Dungeons and Dragons related forums and news, you can find all sorts of tidbits, discussions, and enthusiasts to a plethora of other RPGs.

EN is actually where I discovered the other two sites I plan on highlighting in this article, ObsidianPortal.com and DriveThruRPG.com. It’s a great site to start of your day with, giving you the scoop on what’s new and hot in the d20 and D&D community, and also to find some great fan created monsters, free downloads, and other content. On EN, you can rarely find snippets of my own posts and comments, under the sobriquet, Wyrmwood.

Next I’d like to highlight a site I’ve used now since late 2007, ObsidianPortal.com. Obsidian Portal is first and foremost a site dedicated to sharing your game with the world at large. With an easy format that allows for posting in text or HTML, creating your own campaign Wiki which can be contributed to and edited by your entire group, and an adventure log to keep track of your games weekly progress. The site supports over 100 game systems, and allows you to make your game appealing even to people not in the game. Want to showcase your fiction writing skills, recapping last night’s session in a dramatic and narrative fashion? Need to reference that obscure NPC that returned to your game months after his initial appearance? Want a way to intrigue your players with tidbits and teasers to get them excited about next week’s game? Well this is the site for you.

I currently have two campaigns up on Obsidian Portal, one is a completed Vampire: the Masquerade game titled, the “Winds of Change”, the other I’ve mentioned in my blog was my Aberrant game, the “Keys to Power”. The site has great walkthroughs and how-to’s for the novice web designer like myself, and allows those with greater skill to really make a slick and professional site to showcase their favorite games. All of these capabilities are for free, allowing you to create two campaigns per GM. You can also become an Ascendant member, supporting the site through an Amazon Marketplace payment system, and gain all sorts of new functionality, from expanded maps to games run by multiple GM’s and other goodies. I’m currently considering singing up for one of these, just so I can start posting on some new campaigns. When I do, expect more from me here on the site.

Lastly, I wanted to talk about one of my favorite resources for legitimate ebooks online, DriveThruStuff.com. Not just a resource for RPG ebooks, you can also get novels, comics, and even printable maps and paper standees, all in Adobe PDF format. I love to use it to find rare or out-of-print games that you can’t find anywhere else with out sacrificing something dear to the dark gods of the publishing industry, as well as Indie products you might not be able to find in your FLGS (Friendly Local Game Store). In the past I used this site to fill in the holes of my collection for old 2nd Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons products, as well as out of print White-Wolf books.

Sadly, last year Wizards of the Coast, in their infinite wisdom, cut off this and other legitimate sources for digital copies of their popular D&D lines. The logic behind this was that the site made it too easy for people to buy and disseminate their books online, but since all of the books were electronically watermarked, it made it easier to track those unscrupulous individuals down. After a large lawsuit, that I believe was settled out of court, here we are. Currently the only option available is piracy and torrents, so their choice left those of us honest buyers without a legitimate source for these materials. There are rumors that they may be setting something up for the iPad, but I’m not holding my breath.

If you’re like me, you have shelves and shelves of RPG books. If you’re not, you’ve probably got at least two or three books for your favorite game that you lug with you every game night. I’m a little OCD about this, running around my house like a rat in a sinking ship, clawing up books, dice and other gaming paraphernalia. I stuff this into one huge backpack, and many times a second bag and drag to my games. With the ebooks I purchased from Drivethrurpg.com, I can just bring my laptop and pull up anything I need. The other things I like about the site is that usually the prices are discounted from the normal cover price and there are professional and customer reviews for the majority of items. They also run great specials and sales, and they have hundreds of free downloads as well.

So if you’re surfing the net, and looking for gaming materials, you could do a lot worse then signing on to any of these professional, expansive, and easy to use sites. If you’ve got a favorite gaming site that you use, please post it in the comments on this article, I’ll be sure to check them out. Also, look for a possible future interview with the guys from Obsidian Portal.com in my next article. Until then, keep those dice rollin’.

 
The Wyrm’s Turn is a weekly column that discusses all aspects of tabletop gaming — and beyond.

About Stygian Jim

Stygian Jim was born in Missouri, but his family later settled in the Florida Keys. It is there that our benighted correspondent spent his formative years, and it is there he lives to this day. A consummate gamer geek he whiles away his life planning dramatic stories and plots for people and places that do not exist, and besting his compatriots at games of strategy.

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