Your players will inevitably end up in some city, town, or village during the campaign. Setting the scene as a DM can be quite challenging, but there’s no reason you have to start from scratch every time. In this article, I’ll introduce some of my favorite tools to build out town and shop experiences for my players in the hopes that you will benefit as well. If you have any additional suggestions, please feel free to contact me and share!

Roll For Fantasy Random Shop Generator

Roll For Fantasy has a ton of creators and generators to choose from, so my first suggestion is to visit their site and look around! In this article, however, we’ll focus on their Random Shop Generator. It’s quite simple to use and there are instructions right on the page. Basically you start by toggling the type of shop keeper you want (Human, Dwarven, Elven, Halfing, and/or Orcish). The next step is to select the type of store you want such as General Store, Magic, etc. The click Randomize All to get your shop keeper and some inventory. 

Sometimes I like to copy the inventory, then click Randomize Store again (maybe a few times) to get more items. You can also create your own customized list by choosing custom from the dropdown and adding the list (see instructions on the page). It’s a simple but useful generator you can use in your games to expedite campaign planning.

Visit Roll For Fantasy Random Shop Generator

TCS Not Another Tavern Generator

TCS stands for The Copper Sanctum and this next generator they built was found on github. It has been very useful to me in creating taverns and pubs and is packed with information. Simply open the page and click “Visit a Tavern” and you’ll get a ton of meta data from the Tavern’s tale, who the bartender is, the clientele, even down to the food and beverage menus. If you like it you can PDF or print the tavern in a very elegant format that’s easy to read and use in your campaigns. Of course you can customize it somewhat, if you scroll to the very bottom there are several radio buttons you can change to get a more personalized tavern setting. 

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5eMagic.Shop Magic Shop Generator

Once again, this particular generator is part of a larger offering by 5eMagic.Shop, so I encourage you to check out their other projects. The Magic Shop Generator has some very simple preset options from village to large city, as well as a general store option. You can customize the options by changing the various values. For example if I wanted 10 mundane items I could just put 10 in the field, or alternatively I could put a dice roll (i.e. 1d10) to get a range of possibilities. You an also add plusses and minuses, so for Rare Items I could put 1d10+5 to get anywhere between 6 and 15. So as you can see, there’s a lot possibility. However, once you’re done you just hit Generate Shop and you’ll get your list. You can also choose to add potions of healing to the results which is nice because I always want to offer my party healing potions myself. 

If you want more control, feel free to expand the Advanced Options to pick and choose more. When you’re done you’ll get a list of products along with their price. The results page lets you adjust the markup and you an download your list as a CSV file. It’s great for your spell slingers when it’s time to run a shopping session!

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Jennifer Brussow D&D Library Generator

I don’t know who Jennifer is, but she created a pretty spectacular Library Generator! Simply enter the number of books you want, what topics, and what languages and the generator auto updates with your results. Having to entertain a party that decides to go to the library can be really challenging so this generator has been just a fantastic help for me. Sometimes I’ll adjust the topics a bit or even languages, but overall it provides me with a solid foundation for those awkward library moments.

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Eigengaru’s Generator

When you first open this page, it offers you a friendly tutorial which provides some helpful information and offers you a list of features.  Once you roll up a town, you have the opportunity to customize it a bit. Once you are done adjusting the features, scroll down and click Save to get the details of the town you just created. You can click on the various options to get more details, even ask it to tell you who else is there and create posters, buildings, etc. It’s a little clumsy to use at first, but once you understand how it works you’ll probably love it because it’s very detailed and very feature rich!

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