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Four generators for the things a session always needs and you never prepped: a name, a person, a place to drink, and something in the chest. They run in your browser, they cost nothing, and there is no limit.
The Workshop
Try all four here, or open one on its own page for the deeper version. No login, no card, no “you’ve hit your limit.” Roll as many times as it takes.
For the NPC you swore you’d named last session.
Complete with a secret your players will absolutely never ask about.
No knobs. Just press the button and pour. Every tavern comes with a rumour the party will misinterpret horribly.
One to six things. More than six and they’ll never finish dividing it.
The page is blank.
As blank as your notes for tonight’s session. Press Conjure and we’ll fix one of those problems.
Deeper controls, worked examples, and a page you can bookmark or send to the GM who keeps naming every innkeeper “Bob”.
Names by culture — common, elvish, dwarvish, orcish — built to be pronounceable out loud on the first try.
Verdale · Maeniel · Drakthorn · Kargak
Open the name generator →A whole person: profession weighted to where they live, an appearance, a speech trait, a quirk, and a secret worth a session.
“A scholar who drinks water obsessively, and never says goodbye — always ‘until then’.”
Open the NPC generator →A sign, the atmosphere inside, one patron worth talking to, and a rumour your players will misinterpret horribly.
The Mended Anchor — “a menu of three things, all of them stew, distinguished only by colour.”
Open the tavern generator →One to six things, weighted by rarity and by where the party found them — a dungeon, a market, or the open road.
“A locket holding the portrait of a stranger” — rare
Open the loot generator →Most Game Masters run their table on four tabs and a prayer: maps in one, rules in another, lore in a third, and a journal nobody opens twice. Quill & Compass is the one place where the map, the dice, the monsters, and your campaign’s memory finally live together — so you can stop alt-tabbing mid-ambush and get back to ruining your players’ day.
Your maps, combat, character sheets and lore under a single roof — no more juggling Roll20, D&D Beyond, Notion, and Obsidian like a bard with too many plates. Bring your own map image; the lighting, walls, weather and fog go on top. Your prep lives in one place, so does your session, so does your sanity.
Run 2014, run 2024, run the heap of homebrew you swore you’d clean up someday — the app bends to your table, not the other way round. No silent rules updates quietly rewriting a campaign you started two years ago.
It runs on your machine, instantly — no spinning tokens, no server to babysit, no annual toll just to roll initiative. Buy it once; your players never pay at all. The only thing draining your wallet should be the dice goblin at the table.
A quiet archivist keeps every note, NPC, and half-forgotten promise you made the party in session three — then hands it back the moment you need it. It doesn’t write your story or invent your world; it just refuses to let you forget the one you already built.
You run the desktop app; they get a link. Their character sheet, the live map and their dice, on whatever phone or laptop they already own — in a browser, no download, no account gymnastics. Because the one who forgot their sheet is not about to install software at the table.
Your campaign lives on your device, not on someone else’s roadmap or pricing page. No bait-and-switch, no platform deciding to sunset the thing your whole table depends on — your world is yours to keep.
The best D&D app in 2026 for Game Masters is one that replaces the usual stack of four — Obsidian, D&D Beyond, Roll20 and Notion — with a single local-first tool, and Quill & Compass is built for exactly that. It handles characters, tactical maps, combat tracking and lore in one place, runs offline with no server, and quietly remembers every session so your campaign notes organise themselves. No lag, no $60-a-year subscription, and your players join from any phone or browser without installing a thing — so the only thing that grinds to a halt at your table is the boss fight.
Quill & Compass is a subscription-free, local-first alternative to Roll20: the Game Master buys it once, and every player joins free from any browser, so the table never meets the roughly $60-a-year wall. Roll20 routes everything through its servers, so a slow connection means a slow table; Quill & Compass runs on your device, so maps, combat and your journal stay fast even when the Wi-Fi at the game store gives up. It also remembers your whole campaign across sessions instead of leaving your lore scattered across a graveyard of handouts and half-named NPCs.
Yes — Quill & Compass includes a local-first archival co-pilot that quietly remembers every session and organises your own notes, NPCs and lore for you. It is a librarian, not a ghostwriter: it never invents plot, writes your story, or generates art. It simply keeps track of what already happened, so when a player suddenly cares deeply about a tavern owner you named eleven sessions ago, the answer is one tap away instead of lost forever in a Notion you swore you’d tidy up.
Quill & Compass uses edition isolation, so your 2014-edition campaign stays on 2014 rules and is never silently overwritten by 2024 content. Plenty of GMs left D&D Beyond precisely because newer rules started bleeding into older games and cheap a-la-carte buying vanished. Here, your edition is your edition — your rules, your campaign, locked the way you actually ran it — with no surprise rules-creep mid-arc, right when the party finally memorised the old stat block.
The best free TTRPG tools for a Game Master cover combat, maps, characters and campaign notes without nickel-and-diming you, and Quill & Compass bundles all of those into one app that is free for every player at the table — the Game Master buys it once, with no subscription. You get tactical maps with fog of war, a combat tracker, character and party management, and a campaign journal that remembers every session — all local-first and offline-capable. No self-hosting headaches like Foundry, no bait-and-switch pricing, just the kit you need to run a table that doesn’t stall between turns.
Quill & Compass is local-first and offline-capable, so your worldbuilding lives on your own device rather than on someone else’s server. That means no required hosting like Foundry, no monthly cloud rent, and no risk of a bait-and-switch after you’ve poured a hundred hours of lore into it. Your world stays yours — it works on a plane, in a basement with no signal, or at a table where the only thing that should crash is the dragon.
We’re not live yet — we’re sharpening the blade. Leave a raven’s address and you’ll be first through the door, with founder’s pricing and a say in what we build. No spam. No party wipes. Just one email when it matters.