Inspiration

I draw a lot of ideas from African Masks.  They're just so interesting, they get your mind running.

My game has been on hiatus for a while so posts will get a bit slower but I'm by no means done.

D&D software reviews

• DM Genie - the best so far just because it seems like a complete product but very big. Not really sure its something I want to spend money on if I don't end up using. Happily there's a 60 day evaluation so I can try a few things.
• Official D&D demo software from 2002. Unfortunately in many regards this software is completely broken but its simple and clean and works.
• RolePlayingMaster - uses a closed format for generation, not too many options -- couldn't seem to make much use out of it
• PCGen - seems broken. I've talked about this before. Annoying that so much time was put into an obviously huge collaborative effort that simply doesn't work. Every time I try to add items it complains I don't have the money or that I need to customize it. When I read the help on how to customize the items or get money, its useless. The help menu/documentation seems always a version or two behind. I gave up.
• Autorealm - very basic, hasn't been updated in a while, not very easy to use. I gave up pretty fast.
• jMapEditor - so simple its almost unusable. Drawing walls is very unintuitive and slow and it doesn't appear to output to anything printable or other formats. Seems more like a proof of concept program than an actual level-editor.
• Dungeon Crafter III - blessedly simple with some nice, basic map settings. Unfortunately no undo function and the output looks NOTHING like the screenshots. How did they come up with those?
• DM Cheatsheet - A great idea but really ugly on my windows firefox browser. Unusably so and definitely not going to see any more updates since the last one was in '05
• Storybook - untested but might be a good way to keep track of major characters in a more political setting.