Digital Tools and 3D Printing for TTRPGs — Spreadsheets, Apps, and Minis

The TTRPG community has built an ecosystem of digital tools that range from "spreadsheet that calculates your carrying capacity" to "AI that generates session notes." This guide covers the tools the community actually uses, the 3D printers worth buying, and the spreadsheet templates you should steal.

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Digital Tools DMs Actually Use

Obsidian.md for campaign notes. Kobold Fight Club for encounters. Kenku FM for music. Excel for everything else.

Obsidian.md has become the default campaign management tool for a generation of DMs. It is a local-first markdown note app with bidirectional linking: every NPC, location, and session note can link to each other, creating a wiki of your campaign automatically. Free, no cloud dependency, plain text files you control. The TTRPG community has built Obsidian plugins for initiative tracking, stat blocks, dice rolling, and hex maps.

For encounter building: Kobold Fight Club (web, free) calculates encounter difficulty using the actual 5e DMG math. For music: Kenku FM streams Discord audio bots with local file support — no more YouTube ads interrupting your boss fight. For initiative tracking: Improved Initiative (web, free) is the simplest option. For virtual tabletops: Foundry VTT has the best features and modding community; Owlbear Rodeo is the simplest; Roll20 has the largest player base.

3D Printing Minis: The Printer, the Resin, and the STLs

Elegoo Mars 4 (resin, $200) for miniatures. Bambu Lab A1 (FDM, $300) for terrain. Anycubic Photon for budget resin ($120).

For miniatures, resin printers produce the detail you want. FDM printers cannot achieve the resolution needed for 28mm faces and fingers — they are for terrain, large monsters, and props. An Elegoo Mars 4 ($200) plus a bottle of resin ($30) will print 100+ miniatures before needing more resin. The per-miniature cost is roughly $0.30 for material.

STL sources: Thingiverse (free, mixed quality), Printables (free, better organized), MyMiniFactory (paid, professional sculptors), Patreon ($10/month subscriptions from studios like Loot Studios and Archvillain Games). A $10 Patreon sub typically gets you a themed release of 20-30 sculpts per month. The community also recommends Hero Forge ($20-45 for a custom digital sculpt you can download and print) for PC miniatures.

Put It to Work

Reading is prep — the forge is the payoff. Take what you just learned straight into a build.

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