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?
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.
I tend to run stuff out of a shitty notebook, which tends to contain maps, a calendar/āthis is what happens over the xourse of X days if you do not interveneā 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 hasnāt been necessary in my games before.
So I guess Iād just remake everything from scratchā¦ 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 āhave a binderā with generic tools and use that for gaming.
Every single campaign Iāve 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 someoneās game when itās clear they donāt even know what the game is going to be.
As such I do not have āa binderā, but broad categories of things I do have would be:
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.
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 Iām 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 binderā¦but if I come across one that might be useful in Play for a particular Sessionā¦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. Theyāre usually grouped together vaguely based on need and separated by dividers (āCharacter Generationā āEncountersā āVignettesā etc.)
Interestingly, I build a new referee binder for each campaign.
I am very much a āswapperā in the tools I use. I donāt tend to consistently draw from the same sources all the time. There is something to be said for using a consistent set and getting really good at it, but for me I find I get bored with how things work in one source or another, or the class of results you get from one or another.
For example - when using the d30 Sandbox materials, you get a lot more āvanillaā results, things that feel a lot like the kind of stuff that existed in settings in late 1e and 2e - lots of realistic ecologies, lots of consistent terrain sets, no unusual weather, etc.
When drawing from Perilous Wilds thereās a lot of hodge podge thematic collections - monsters that are one animal + another animal + another, etc.
This is all stuff that you can definitely curate and retheme as a referee, but you do get a kind of specific kind of opinion from the results.
So I tend to like drawing from a lot of sources, and changing up what I use, in addition to what I create.
Anyway, tl;dr - what do I rebuild?
This has shifted for me over time but currently in my DnD backpack Iām trying a two binder system. Binder 1 is actually for running and has maze rats and itās spark tables , JG reference sheets, some Ktrey tables that are particularly useful for crawls (how does this door open, dungeon sounds, where is that treasure hidden), a list of names, random encounter tables and monster stats for reference , calender/campaign notes, extra sheets, graph paper, lined paper, blank paper. Extra post it notes and tabs for organization.
Binder 2 is geared towards prep. Stocking procedures, blog posts about theory that I want to keep handy and reread, lore notes, tons more tables that are more useful for prep than running, blog posts that Iām less familiar with that I keep as reading material.
(This is kinda cheating but my other other binder is a tablet with a bunch of Wikipedia downloaded, Dragon magazines, art, and books on it both about ttrpgs and other things that still assist with all that and that goes in the backpack too)