GM Improvisation Aids

[Psikerlord]

What "GM improvisation aids" would you like to see in a medieval "sandbox" setting book ?

[JAL_1138]

I'd love to see a huge selection of premade level-appropriate encounters, typed by terrain (town, wilderness, mountain, dungeon, cavern, aquatic, etc) and rough idea of creature type (guards, bandits, bar brawl, animals, dungeon critters, supernatural, etc), and if necessary by level.

Above all else as a DM, I am both lazy and slow at encounter-building. Pulling one out of a hat on the spur of the moment is a PitA.

[Jama7301]

I'd like a rollable list for cities and maybe landscape. Being able to quickly put together a city, complete with dominant religion, governmental type, dominant forms of industry and trade would be fun. I'd probably end up using it to design every city in my game, if I'm being honest.

[Psikerlord]

thanks folks that is a big help :D

[Kami2awa]

A long list of names, divided by species, character class, and possibly social class.

Useful pre-made generic NPCs (town guards, experts, and so on).

Map segments of towns (not complete maps, but bits of town that can be used for different purposes). Premade maps of locations the PCs are likely to find themselves in (a tavern, for example).

[Koo Rehtorb]

For what game? D&D?

[Batou1976]

How about a section on what trades and shops would be available in a city, with details on how likely a given trade is to be found (and how many tradesmen practicing it) in a given population size. Also, information on how the trades would be organized within a city, role of guilds in city politics. Information on city charters (what they are, what they're for, who issues them, etc), trade fairs, and so on.

[Incorrect]

I'd love to see a huge selection of premade level-appropriate encounters, typed by terrain (town, wilderness, mountain, dungeon, cavern, aquatic, etc) and rough idea of creature type (guards, bandits, bar brawl, animals, dungeon critters, supernatural, etc), and if necessary by level.

Above all else as a DM, I am both lazy and slow at encounter-building. Pulling one out of a hat on the spur of the moment is a PitA.

I would like to see this with a small setup story, and some kind of dilemma or complication. To make it more engaging than just a list of battles to play out.

[JAL_1138]

I would like to see this with a small setup story, and some kind of dilemma or complication. To make it more engaging than just a list of battles to play out.

I usually come up with that myself, often as a response to player activity. Having a bunch of premades handy that I can just yoink out of my proverbial hat. I wouldn't just have a string of pointless battles (except possibly the wilderness or dungeon encounters). The town guard, for instance, would be used if there was a reason to call them out (for instance, someone caught tge Thief stealing, or the players killed someone in a barfight, or the town government is corrupt), not just "and now there's a fight for no reason." I'm not looking for a sequential list of battles that must be fought with no context "because combat," but a library of stuff to use when I need it in response to campaign developments. More like a bag of lego pieces than a model kit, essentially.

Of course, there's often no reason the fluff couldn't be ignored, but I'd really want the sorted encounters alone as well so I could have it handy to use when I needed, instead of flipping through too much fluff and hunting for the right page in the right chapter that had one or two plausible encounters on it, which is one of the problems when "borrowing" prebuilt encounters from most story-focused modules.

[Braininthejar2]

When my GM needs to improvise, she draws a card from a tarot deck, and builds the idea around the reading she gets