First post here, but I'm a long time lurker who decided to finally succumb and try to chat with you all. Hey, for all the hours you've helped me waste at work, it's the least I can do! 
Whenever I run a game, I tend to have a folder of stuff by my side. I did try using a laptop for a bit in my current game which took up some of that slack, and if I could perhaps get my laptop hooked up to my broadband connection in a wire-free way I may start this again, but it took up a lot of precious table-space and wasn't necesarilly a huge benefit.
Anyway, I'm just curious as to what else you GMs keep in one handy pile of doom for your campaigns. What do you need to hand, for when those pesky players start foolishly thinking for themselves and forcing you to improvise?
My current game is a D&D 3.X campaign which is coming up for a year and a half. (I'm intending on putting it on hiatus after Chrsitmas to let my players try running games, though: we've quite a few beginners who have played nothing apart from this and a singe Cthulhu one-off we ran one week due to absences.) My folder contains:
There's also usually some notes from the last couple of adventures, so that when players finally get an item identified I can remember what it is.
On a related note, I keep all my old adventure notes in a pile somewhere else, for more long-term looking back. This same pile has a "emergency adventure" section which contains several maps of dungeons, clearings, islands etc for when I might need to pull something out on the fly, along with a couple of populated dungeons and entire adventures from online (WotC's online adventures), though a couple of these have since dropped out of an acceptable level range that they wouldn't be much use "in a pinch."
Anyway, I'm having to juggle all my paper and books in order to fit my DM's Cupboard, so I'm curious as to how much you guys keep to hand, or if you avoid dead tree at the game table.
Whenever I run a game, I tend to have a folder of stuff by my side. I did try using a laptop for a bit in my current game which took up some of that slack, and if I could perhaps get my laptop hooked up to my broadband connection in a wire-free way I may start this again, but it took up a lot of precious table-space and wasn't necesarilly a huge benefit.
Anyway, I'm just curious as to what else you GMs keep in one handy pile of doom for your campaigns. What do you need to hand, for when those pesky players start foolishly thinking for themselves and forcing you to improvise?
My current game is a D&D 3.X campaign which is coming up for a year and a half. (I'm intending on putting it on hiatus after Chrsitmas to let my players try running games, though: we've quite a few beginners who have played nothing apart from this and a singe Cthulhu one-off we ran one week due to absences.) My folder contains:
- A copy of my game world's calendar, marked as the game progresses so I can keep track of how long it's been since X adventure/encounter happened
- A computer-drawn copy of my campaign world map, along with a few sheets detailing the alignment, size and any important figures in the various towns.
- Sheets and sheets of random names, potion descriptions etc, mainly from Seventh Sanctum's generators which I mark as used.
- Some appropriate encounters and treasures for the party, in case I need to quickly invent a random encounter. They're 7 ECL 8 characters, so I include a few from EL 6 to 11 to cover all occasions.
- Mosnters. Lots of monsters. Be it personally created creatures (I'm very fond of templates) or thigns from online e-books, the previews commonly found on places like WoTC's site or creations from people on this very forum, my own personal monster manual takes up most of the folder.
- A few miscellaneous rules articles found online. As an example, the Legendary Captain class was given as a preview for Stormwrack, and it's there becuase one PC has his eye on it. Similarly I just liked th elook of the Archivist from the Heroes Of Horror preview, so I bunged it in as well.
- Some miscellaneous flavour & more meta articles. For example, a Wikipedia list of both Greyhawk and Egyptian deities (my campaign world's humans primarilly worship the Egyptian pantheon) as well as a guide on how to use old coffee and an oven to make prop wrinkled parchments. ;-)
- A few now defunct copies of my PCs character sheets. I tried to convert them into electronic format so knowing what order they took some skills in helped, plus my girlfirend drew some cute drawings of Yoshi on hers.
There's also usually some notes from the last couple of adventures, so that when players finally get an item identified I can remember what it is.
On a related note, I keep all my old adventure notes in a pile somewhere else, for more long-term looking back. This same pile has a "emergency adventure" section which contains several maps of dungeons, clearings, islands etc for when I might need to pull something out on the fly, along with a couple of populated dungeons and entire adventures from online (WotC's online adventures), though a couple of these have since dropped out of an acceptable level range that they wouldn't be much use "in a pinch."
Anyway, I'm having to juggle all my paper and books in order to fit my DM's Cupboard, so I'm curious as to how much you guys keep to hand, or if you avoid dead tree at the game table.
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