Referee Binder Essentials

A terrible storm has hit, localized entirely in your referee binder. The storm has rendered it completely ruined. What do you reach for to replace/rebuild what was in it?

More broadly, what do you like to see out of resources for your prep? Do you draw a hard line between tools you use to prep vs. tools you use to play at the table? How do you organize your materials?

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For me there are 4 essential elements to my GM Binder:
Campaign Calendar & Notes
Equipment List & Loot Tables
Random Encounter Tables
NPC Generators

Campaign Calendar & Campaign Notes:
The bread and butter to allow the world to develop and have the players actually impact the world

Equipment List & Loot Tables:
While at this point both my Equipment List and & Loot Tables are holy original and i keep tweeking them in case they went missing i would just start again with preexisting ones and not much would be lost. For me the main purpose is to allow for a smoother running game and not have to come up with weights and prices whenever a player asks for a specific thing

Random Encounter Tables:
Similiar to the previous one I would probably start off again with a preexisting table but here i think it would realy hurt my game, in my opinion having random encounters tailored to ones game or campaign does a lot of heavy lifting and i would try to create tables of my own asap

NPC Generators:
Probably not crucial in more dungeon crawly campaigns and might also be considered a form of a random encounter table, but because this might be the section in my GM Binder i use most i feel it needs to be mentioned seperatly. I am already using a preexisting one that is generic and than create NPCs that fit the specific situation on the spot so nothing lost if i was to loose my binder.

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I tend to run stuff out of a shitty notebook, which tends to contain maps, a calendar/ā€˜this is what happens over the xourse of X days if you do not intervene’ type thingies, and bespoke NPCs.

As I am trying to run a mega dungeon soon, I should probably try to collect some random tables to mitigate some of the prep, but that hasn’t been necessary in my games before.

So I guess I’d just remake everything from scratch… Not really efficient now that I think about it.

This has come up a few times as a topic on discord too, but I have never quite figured out how people can simply ā€œhave a binderā€ with generic tools and use that for gaming.

Every single campaign I’ve run so far has required different enough things that I basically build a GM binder for it starting from scratch. I know people like to use various tables (ktrey ones or other offerings), have stuff like hex generating procedures and so on, but I have never had the desire or interest in playing in someone’s game when it’s clear they don’t even know what the game is going to be.

As such I do not have ā€œa binderā€, but broad categories of things I do have would be:

  • Printed versions of any modules I may be using at a given session, with notes written on them if necessary (I always modify them to fit my campaign setting)
  • A list of names to use for NPCs.
  • Extra character sheets
  • Player-facing reference sheets (I usually have those in player booklets that I make, but sometimes I need things in separate sheets)
  • Extra pieces of blank paper.

I also carry a notebook that I use to track session information like players attending, turns elapsed, xp gained etc, and then whatever rulebook I am actually using, along with the player handbook booklets with house rules information.

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I have a few of my Tables that seem to migrate from Binder to Binder for most games (Random Impedimenta is probably the oldest veteran for this) obviously a lot of it does consist of these single page Random Tables (that I share on my blog for other Referees who might find them useful) but each is usually curated to a particular Campaign or group of Players I’m running for.

As mentioned, a good long list of Names is something I always like to have handy. The Ready Ref Sheets moves between Binders a lot. The binder is mostly used for Tools that I need during Play. Prep draws from a lot of other tables that might be unwieldy in a single binder…but if I come across one that might be useful in Play for a particular Session…into the Binder it goes!

In terms of organization, I usually insert the tables themselves in those plastic sleeves so that I can move them around easily. They’re usually grouped together vaguely based on need and separated by dividers (ā€œCharacter Generationā€ ā€œEncountersā€ ā€œVignettesā€ etc.)

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