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.

[Raellus]

Good stuff, Teg & Chalk!

I like to track moon phases for T2k so that I can give my players realistic info re natural lighting at night.

https://stardate.org/nightsky/moon

But what if it's cloudy, you ask? There are also historical weather sites.

AFAIK, this particular site provides historical weather data for Poland, but there's one for the USA as well (and probably other countries).

https://www.wunderground.com/history.../date/1940-1-1

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[Tegyrius]

If you don't want historical weather, I like this one for random weather:

https://www.dwarvenautomata.com/rand...her-generator/

- C.

[unipus]

If you're using Foundry, there's a module that can generate time/date as well as moon cycles and weather for you, it's great and saves almost 100% of the effort, I just check them whenever.

In previous versions it even tied into graphical weather effects, so it would automatically generate rain, cloud, or fog effects along with time of day. At the moment that feature has been broken by updates but hopefully coming back soon, it was very cool.

[Adm.Lee]

Originally Posted by ChalkLine

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

I wish we had an applause emoji, that's a really good idea!! I can usually come up with a little story for an encounter group, but that sounds like it will make such a story a lot deeper!

[Raellus]

Want to know what time the sun sets in Kalisz, Poland, in July?

This site calculates sunrise and sunset times for pretty much anywhere in the world.

https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/@798544

Also includes moonrise and moonset.

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[Tegyrius]

It may get lost in my signature block, but I have a few items on my T2k repository:

Generator, Encounter, Basic - a basic roller for the v2.2 encounter tables.

Generator, Encounter, Expanded - began as a branch of the above but has taken on an unholy life of its own. Considerably more detail, occasional plot hooks, and low-probability weirdness, all built on the shaky foundation of the v2.2 tables.

Discussion thread for the above items to keep this thread from getting cluttered with bug reports.

Loot generator for merchant inventories, Scrounging successes, or looting the bodies of the marauders you just killed. Also has a mostly-useless dumb-fun function for assigning starting PC equipment (discussion thread).

PC starting equipment generator for quick-equipping new player characters or NPCs. Slightly less gonzo than the bonus loadout function included in the loot generator above (discussion thread).

Starting PC generator (includes the equipment generator above) for a one-click build of a new v2.2 player character (discussion thread).

And here's the corresponding character generator for 4th edition.

Vehicle generator to give your randomly-generated PCs some mobility (discussion thread).

And a couple more quick dumb fun items:

Table, Scrounging, Fast - a card-draw table for scrounging results. Not particularly detailed or deep.

Table, Contents, MRE - a card-draw table to determine what your character just ate.

- C.

[ChalkLine]

That encounter generator is seriously one of the best things I've ever seen

[Antenna]

Excel char maker
Make a char in less then 3 min after first terms skills are writen into the excel.

The first file is an empty xls with all the math and the other is an example I made of a char

Antti

[Raellus]

Here are some great resources for 4e Refs, courtesy of Heffe.

https://forum.juhlin.com/showthread.php?t=6500

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[Nowhere Man 1966]

Originally Posted by Raellus

Good stuff, Teg & Chalk!

I like to track moon phases for T2k so that I can give my players realistic info re natural lighting at night.

https://stardate.org/nightsky/moon

But what if it's cloudy, you ask? There are also historical weather sites.

AFAIK, this particular site provides historical weather data for Poland, but there's one for the USA as well (and probably other countries).

https://www.wunderground.com/history.../date/1940-1-1

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I have/had a Dragon Magazine issue from 1992 about generating weather charts for RPG's, I hope I still have it somewhere

[ChalkLine]

Originally Posted by Nowhere Man 1966

I have/had a Dragon Magazine issue from 1992 about generating weather charts for RPG's, I hope I still have it somewhere

Weather is the ultimate mood setter. My campaigns are notorious for incessant rain.

[unipus]

It's also extremely tactically useful for your typical small team raid behind enemy lines!

[Targan]

I use Harnmaster's weather generation system (and watch sheets).

[3catcircus]

Originally Posted by Targan

I use Harnmaster's weather generation system (and watch sheets).

I'll have to give that a try. For the longest time, I've been using Weather master (with a hack to get it to run since it's long out of publication so I couldn't transfer the license to my new computer) and it works great.

[Raellus]

An excellent resource for a v1 European sandbox campaign, C/O Jed McClure.

https://static.squarespace.com/stati...xmap_index.pdf

https://static.squarespace.com/stati...gn_hexmaps.pdf

http://www.jedmc.com/ixdd/2014/1/8/a...h-sandbox.html

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[Raellus]

Brit found this site with Soviet military acronyms:

https://www.safar-publishing.com/pos...itary-acronyms

And here's a pretty comprehensive list of US military ones:

https://www.military.com/join-armed-...-acronyms.html

And modern US military slang:

https://www.military.com/join-armed-...nd-jargon.html

These could add some realism/flavor to your campaign.

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[Raellus]

The US Army had 1:50,000 maps of just about every place on earth (mild hyperbole). The link below is the index page for its maps of Poland, C/O the University of Texas. If you click back to the site's main index, there are maps for nearly every place else.

https://maps.lib.utexas.edu/maps/ams/poland_100k/

According to this site, Soviet military maps of Poland (and other East Bloc) countries are better (more accurate, detailed, etc.).

https://sciendo.com/it/article/10.2478/mgrsd-2018-0034

That tracks, as Poland was essentially under Soviet occupation from 1945-1991.

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[Raellus]

Here's a random blood type generator- helps find a donor when a PC has lost a lot of blood and needs a direct transfusion.

https://perchance.org/bloodtype-gen

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[HaplessOperator]

Wow, this is an untapped gold mine.