You crest a hill and finally see it. Moedinar, your 2nd childhood home. A flood of mixed memories enters your mind. You stop and your companions follow suit. You look over the large city. You see tall but sturdy stone buildings. You see precise streets and roads laid out in a grid pattern. You see a very large wall all the way around the city. What catches your attention most of all though is the lack of livery. You don’t see the traditional flag featuring a golden deer with enormous antlers, each one tipped with a candle, all on a field of deep green. You don’t see any of that. Instead, you see white flags blowing silently on a chill breeze. Instead of a golden deer with candles, you see the head of a deer with antlers of fire and in the fire the symbol of the elemental cult of fire. Yes, it looks like the cults has been here the whole time. Light snow begins to fall. You look at your companions and ask, “Anyone got any ideas on how to get past the wall guard?” What would you like to do?

Welcome back to How to Be a Better DM. I’m Justin Lewis and I’m your DM today and together you and I will learn how to craft better stories for you and your friends as you dungeon master sessions of D&D 5e. We’ll help the noob DM, the Master DM, and everyone in between.

As a DM, your highest goal will naturally be to achieve full immersion into the world you create. You want your players to feel like they are in the scenes you describe. There are many tools out there to help you do this, but to really achieve full immersion you need to engage all of the senses, including hearing. Therefore, many DM’s have turned towards music and ambiance to help achieve this. Today I’ll be sharing some D&D soundboard tools that you can use to help enhance your experience. 

Before I get to the tools, however, let me go through a few housekeeping items.  First, a big thank you to everyone who has supported the show thus far. We really can’t keep going on without your help and support. It’s you that make this show possible.

Second, I want to give a shoutout to show supporter Robric Vanhelm (Though that is his DM Name). He has given me and Tanner access to an encounter he authored on DM Guild.com. It’s an awesome encounter called The League of Libraries: The Lorecroft Collection. He has generously offered up the Promo Version of this encounter to any of our listeners. We’ll make that available through our newsletter so if you want the promo version of the encounter go to betterdungeonmaster.com/newsletter. But after you get a taste for this encounter make sure to go to https://betterdungeonmaster.com/robric (https://betterdungeonmaster.com/robric). All proceeds go straight to Robtic the DM who is a fantastic supporter of our show so you should be a fantastic supporter of him.

Lastly, if you haven’t noticed, we’ve updated our website domain, so now going to betterdungeonmaster.com will be the home of the podcast. This means that moving forward the one-shot is at betterdungeonmaster.com/one-shot in case you want to sign up and you should! Spots are filling for our September one-shot. We have 3 so far and the target is 5 do get in before they fill up.

I think that is way too many announcements so before I say anything else, let’s actually get to the meat of the show.

IntroBefore I get to my list, let me first give a few caveats. Caveat #1: I have only compiled tools that are free to use in some capacity. I want you to be able to be a better DM without breaking the bank. I know and understand what it’s like to have a limited amount of time and resources to put toward this hobby. These are free so you can spend money on other things (like rent in some cases). Caveat #2: Your ambience/music situation will largely depend on your available equipment. If you have a cinematic surround sound system, great. If you have only a phone, great. It all works. How you use it is what matters. For the purposes of this...