Official ICE Forums
Gamer's Corner => General Discussion => Topic started by: arakish on November 09, 2011, 11:58:07 PM
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Did not see a thread for this...
Here are some helpful links for GMs. These were originally posted at Real Role Playing. I have consolidated them into one post. I actually have many, many more links in my Bookmarks file, but I have pulled out the ones I use most often.
Others, feel free to post your helpful links.
An excellent article by Patricia Wrede at the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer's Association website:
Fantasy World Building Questions (http://www.sfwa.org/2009/08/fantasy-worldbuilding-questions/)
If you answer every last question in this article, there will almost be no question your players can ask that you cannot answer immediately.
Magical World Builder's Help (http://www.web-writer.net/fantasy/)
Language Creation Kit (http://www.zompist.com/kit.html)
Herbs and Poisons (http://botanical.com/index.html)
Almost EVERYTHING you could want to know about over 4442 mineral species:
Web Mineral Database (http://webmineral.com/)
Common Minerals and Usages:
Mineral Information Institute (http://www.mii.org/commonminerals.html)
mindat.org - the mineral and locality database (http://www.mindat.org/)
40,391 mineral names (inc. synonyms, varieties, etc). 224,659 different localities. 403,630 member photos.
Nice thing about this one is if you know the name of a mineral (such as padparadscha, corundum, andradite, spodumene, etc.), you input it into the Mineral Name search box. Once at the page for the mineral, about a screenful down (depends on monitor resolution), you have a link for finding images of that mineral using Google Images. Once at Google images, you get a couple hundred images of the mineral in natural form, polished form, gem cut form (if applicable), etc.
Make your own star maps with ChView:
http://members.nova.org/~sol/chview/chv0.htm
And here are some GrumpyOldFart posted in the same thread.
More gods than you can shake a stick at:
http://www.godchecker.com/
The Handbook of Applied Cryptography:
http://www.cacr.math.uwaterloo.ca/hac/
The Labyrinth (Georgetown Univ. Medieval Studies webpage):
http://labyrinth.georgetown.edu/
And some more I found in Bookmarks later.
Various densities of materials:
http://www.simetric.co.uk/si_materials.htm
There are other links for liquids, metals, woods, etc.
List of Elements at Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_elements
This one is probably posted elsewhere, but...
Map Making
http://www.cartographersguild.com/
Medieval Demography
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_demography (and links to other articles)
Nice Javascript App: http://www.rpglibrary.org/utils/meddemog/
Original Article above app is based on: http://www222.pair.com/sjohn/blueroom/demog.htm
General World Building at Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldbuilding
Omniglot - the online encyclopedia of writing systems and languages:
http://www.omniglot.com/
rmfr