GM Tips: Setting Immersion

For our first-time GM girls, here's something that will be a big help with your campaign setting: the more detail you give your players, the better... up to a point. You don't want to bombard them with pages and pages of text about the world's history and what language all the races speak, but there are a few things you can give them that help them understand the world without much effort.

Maps. If you have the time to either find or draw up a map of your world, do so. It's invaluable to your players to have a sense of place and identity in the world and a map can help. When your characters travel to new places, they can calculate travel times, distance and have a good idea of how far they have to run to get out of that dragon's territory.

In addition to maps, a few other things can also help you along. Giving your players a calendar can help them understand the passage of time in the world. Giving them a timeline can help illustrate the history of the world without making them read all the notes that you painstakingly typed up. Those notes are great--for a GM, but a little omission can help the process. Try giving your players some basic information and they'll probably come back to you for more.

Girl Gamer Attire

Are you out of the gaming closet? Want to show off your nerd-cred to the world? Here are my favorite clothing options for being a gamer girl:


I fight Like a Girl from JINX


Prime Cuts of Unicorn Babydoll from ThinkGeek

If you look around, I bet you can find some other fun things. I have yet to find underwear with dice on them, I but I swear they're out there...

Character Generation Programs

We're well into the digital age now, and it seems like everyone has their laptops around the gaming table. Surprisingly, we still keep our character sheets with our pencils and paper, though. Here're some more technological options if you're still waiting to get out of writing out your characters by hand.

d20 Systems:
DM Genie and Player Genie are two compatible programs developed for the 3rd Edition and 3.5 Edition of Dungeons and Dragons, but are easily modifiable for any d20 game of the same era. Since 4.0 has little open licensing content for independent companies, it's likely we won't see anything for 4.0 anytime soon, unless it is from Wizards of the Coast.
PCGen is another d20 character generator, one I have no personal experience with, but it comes with good recommendations.

d10 Systems:
EdExalted was my go-to for Exalted character generation, but the updates are infrequent, and it's a little clunky to use when trying to integrate player-generated content. A good staple if you're only playing the basic game.

World of Darkness Toolkit for WoD folks. On it's 3rd edition, doesn't include all of the WoD supplements, but has the basics.

Another handy way to keep track of your characters are editable .pdf sheets which you can find for almost any game with a little searching. With luck, you'll be able to keep tabs on your character easily and you won't have to worry about erasing through the paper when your character keeps taking damage.

Custom DM Screens

If you've progressed from being a girl gamer to a girl GM, then the first thing you should look at (once you've designed your campaign, of course), is a custom DM screen. Whether you print out your favorite tables on computer paper and paperclip them to your current screen, or find someone who has a little artistic talent to make up an entirely new one, there's a lot of benefits to be had.

First off, most DM screens have some information you want--but not all of it. There's bound to be more than a few tables and charts that you use in your games more than others and it's really handy to have them right where you can see them. Plus, it saves a lot of time flipping through books.

Secondly, if you do shell out the money to have an artist do the front of it, your players will have the pleasure of seeing their characters whenever they sit down to game. It's great for atmosphere (and your players' egos).

Having a custom DM screen is a wonderful tool for gaming--not entirely necessary, but fun to have.

Non-Traditional Female Miniatures

Reaper Miniatures


Reaper Miniatures


Reaper Miniatures


Reaper Miniatures