Tips, Tricks, & Resources for T2k Refs

[Raellus]

With v4 blasting into the market, a lot of people are Ref'ing T2k for the first time. If you have helpful general experience and/or advice to share with new and/or inexperienced ref's, this is a place to post it.

We also have threads dedicated specifically to discussion of the various established rulesets so please post version and/or ruleset-specific tips in tricks there.

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[Raellus]

When I started Ref'ing my very first T2k campaign, Pirates of the Vistula (in PbP format), I knew next to nothing about Polish geography, culture, history, etc. To remedy that, I bought an illustrated travel guide to Poland (DK Eyewitness Travel is a particularly good series for this purpose, but Insight Guides is good too). It included information on all of the above. Travel guides are really useful for finding places of interest, both man-made and natural, that players might encounter during their travels, and helping Ref's describe them vividly and accurately, really fleshing out landscape and their peoples.

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[Raellus]

Most of us don't speak Polish or Russian, even though many of our NPCs do. To provide a little realism, and reward PCs with certain language skills, use Google Translate (or other similar app) to convert dialogue from your own language into whatever language is being spoken in the game world.

Google Translate can play an audio version of whatever you type, so players can hear it in its intended tongue. You can then pass the player whose PC has that language skill the English version of what you just played. For players with just a bit of skill in that language, you can give them an abridged or even mistranslated version to make it interesting.

Translations aren't perfect, grammatically, but I've experimented a bit with Spanish, a language that I speak fairly well, and they're not bad. I can't speak for other languages, though. Keep in mind that idioms from one language often don't translate directly to other.

ATM, you can't choose whether the bot (which, thankfully, sounds human) has a male or female voice, but it's still kind of cool to hear, instead of just imaging, the languages spoken in your game world.

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[Raellus]

You can create realistic NPC portraits using Epic Games Unreal Engine meta-human creator.

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/metahuman-creator

Thanks to Nicolas Nadeau for calling this really cool resource to my attention.

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[Tegyrius]

If you're running a game on Roll20, Google Earth Pro is an excellent resource for generating battlemap base layers. It has historical imagery, but the satellite quality wasn't great in our era of interest. The modern stuff typically shows greater industrial development and urban sprawl than would have been present in the Eastern Europe of the late '90s, but it works well enough for most purposes.

(linked example image - it's too big to embed in a gentlemanly fashion)

- C.

[ChalkLine]

When rolling encounters, also roll the last few day's encounters for the group that you've rolled.

Example:
I roll a 4-group marauder unit. I decide they haven't moved in five days and just quickly roll five times to see what they've bumped into. I get 'dogs' and 'large military unit'.

Later on I show that two of the group are wounded from gunshots and one is in a stretcher with dog bites. He picked up a disease from the dogs and the marauders haven't realised yet. The two gunshot wounded are walking, their 'horses' were KIA in the previous encounter.
When the players see the group they catch the marauders in the process of hastily getting out of the area from the large military unit.

It's gone from a dry encounter into a story.