Tools/Generators. Inspiration. Advice. Living Forgotten Realms. Specials Special adventures (sometimes referred to as Core Specials) are designed to be challenging, but fair and fun, experiences where the players must work together in order to successfully complete the entire adventure within the time limit. These adventures always premiere at major conventions, so the real-world slot time is usually a significant design consideration (as a rule of thumb, we put in about 120% of the content that a normal LFR adventure of the same length would have; the idea is that a group that is really on their game can make it through, but less-effective groups might not). Special adventures generally give greater rewards (in terms of XP and treasure) than other LFR adventures do, and are generally more difficult than a typical adventure (this might be due to harder combats, more combats, or other elements of the adventure that pose challenges of a different sort than those normally encountered in LFR).
Hamlet, Village, Town. While working on some town and village maps, I decided I really need a good set of guidelines for improvising town and village contents. I don't like the usual village generation systems, with their arbitrary labeling of specific population ranges. Do I even need to know exactly how many people are in a village? Or how many members of each trade there are? I think I just need to know how to describe its size and how likely it is characters can find what they need. The quarter system seems like a good start for larger population centers, but smaller areas are going to be mostly peasants and tradespeople, with zero to three of each of the other two quarters. Hamlet: Has one service the local peasants need: a mill, for example. Larger towns and cities can be extrapolated from the small town. Tools. You must have Java 1.6 or later (also called Java 6) installed on your system to run these tools. Note that the OpenJDK/Java 7 does not currently work.
Some tools require Java 5 or later as indicated on the Launch page. If you are using Mac OS X, your Java implementation is provided by Apple. Use Software Update to ensure you have the most up to date version. Version Information (click to toggle text display) All of the gaming tools by the RPTools Team follow a consistent versioning scheme. Development versions are where all of the glitz and new features are added. My general recommendation (I'm Azhrei over at the forums) is to use a development version that the rest of the community considers solid. My goal with the above is to give you an idea of where you might want to start. Executing the Tools (click to toggle text display) The Launch page has links for starting the tools directly over the web. Dm Essentials | Dungeon Mastering Tools - DM Tools for D&D 4E. The Hypertext d20 SRD (v3.5 d20 System Reference Document)