We’ve found, adapted, and developed a ton of useful tools for online play at The Gauntlet. To make things easier to find, we pulled a bunch of that material together here. We'll also be adding this as an page to the website.
 
BUILDING KEEPERS
Most games on the Gauntlet use Google Sheets to create online character keepers. It lets everyone see each others’ characters. It can also be used to organize reference material and NPCs. We have a four-part series on creating those keepers

• Introduction
• Basics 
• Advanced Techniques 
• Polishing Keepers 

 
KEEPERS AND PLAY AIDS
We have a large collection of pre-made keepers for a ton of games. If you use a Keeper from our folders, be sure to make a copy of it. Then you can edit that copy. You’ll find the full folder here.  That contains:

• Sample Aids Broken into three folders: A-E, F-0, and P-Z
• General Templates
• A collection of Tools & References
• Español and Deutsch materials
• Documentation for all our play aides.

OTHER RESOURCES

• TTRPG Safety Toolkit Your play safety best resource is the ENnie-winning TTRPG Safety Toolkit by Kienna Sunrise and Lauren Bryant-Monk 
• Overview of Video Options This looks at some of the available meeting software platforms. Much has changed since originally written. It needs updating but still has useful options. 
• Helping your D&D Group Try a Monsterhearts One-Shot A blog post by Rich Rogers (+1 Forward, Hit the Streets) with advice about transitioning groups into new games and online play. 
• Open Table: What the What? A look at the Gauntlet’s Open Table approach to online games.
• Sharing the Cognitive Load Includes a discussion of CATS, which is the Gauntlet go-to for presenting games
• Our Overview of Tools of the Table

 
ONLINE COMMUNITY

• Community Code of Conduct Our CoC is based on the existing XOXO Community CoC, modified for an online gaming community. It is licensed CC 4.0, so feel free to borrow or adapt
• GCOG material We’ve begin doing free quarterly online gaming events as a way of introducing new folks to online gaming and indie games. Here’s an overview of that program. You can find our event handbook here. If you’re planning an online event, feel free to borrow from and adapt that.
• Community & Community Leadership A really good post by Pam Punzalan on Medium talking about the challenges of leading an gaming community

 
ABOUT THE GAUNTLET

• We have a strong network of podcasts, including our flagship, The Gauntlet Podcast; +1 Forward, our podcast powered by the apocalypse; Fear of a Black Dragon, our OSR program; The Sixth Ring, looking at the Trophy RPG, and more. 
• You can find out more about The Gauntlet at our website: gauntlet-rpg.com
• We have a Patreon which supports our podcasts, gaming community, forums, publishing, and more. That’s one way to get early access to our gaming calendar and our magazine, Codex. Consider supporting us.
• For gamers from marginalized communities or those suffering financial hardship, we have a program to give you early access to our gaming calendar: Gauntlet Gameway. 
• The Gauntlet Forums is a place where we post calendar games, make public announcements, and talk about gaming in general. 
• If you play a session with us, you can ask to join our Gauntlet Slack. It focuses on the games we’re playing on the calendar. We talk about plans for upcoming games, talk shop about sessions, and request/look for feedback on future sessions. Contact us at gauntletcommunity@gmail.com.
• We have a Gauntlet YouTube Channel which we update each week with tons of actual play sessions. 
• You can also listen to those sessions with our Gauntlet Hangouts podcast channel which converts the videos to a podcast format. 

SYSTEM GUIDES FOR NEW PLAYERS

• Legacy: Life Among the Ruins
• Fate
• Fate Worlds of Adventure
• GUMSHOE
• 13th Age
• Changeling the Lost 1e
• Mutants & Masterminds 3e

If you have questions, comments, or suggestions, you can contact us at gauntletcommunity@gmail.com. 

​I will tip my hat here to Epidiah Ravichol, creator of a number of great roleplaying games. His game Swords Without Master (found in Worlds Without Master, Issue 3!) is something of a master class in listening and reincorporating. It builds into the mechanics of the game something that might happen in another game and go unremarked upon, namely, when a player narrates something particularly evocative and the table responds with appreciative murmurs or shudders. Epidiah terms these moments Motifs. Here is the rules text introducing them:

“Motifs are created when the narration of a fellow player inspires you to create one. Once enough Motifs have been recorded, it is the beginning of the end. So keep a keen ear and be swift to record whenever your fellow players’ narration evokes that sense of wonder, danger or adventure that drew you to the sword-and-sorcery genre in the first place.”

In effect, this means in a game of Swords Without Master, your table slowly accrues a pile of index cards with epic, sinister, and gnarly phrases written on them. A few examples from a game I ran: “A smooth-tongued rogue rapidly cycling through religious habits,” “A pale queen fading from life as the dead invade to announce her shame.” These Motifs serve as a clock for the game, as it concludes when enough have been recorded—but the rules also require a certain number of later Motifs to echo and reincorporate Motifs recorded earlier. In effect, Swords Without Master is a machine designed to tune players to say swords-and-sorcery stuff that thrills their tablemates.

Now, Swords Without Master draws no distinction between players and GM (renamed the Overplayer here) when it comes to recording Motifs. There’s another game that makes deliberate use of listening and reincorporating as a GM-specific technique, and that’s the feminine horror blockbuster Bluebeard’s Bride.

By Michael G. Barford, Keeper of the Eternal Chime

This is the second post in Michael's Character Keeper series. You can find the first post here.

One important step for game designers in designing a game is designing a character sheet. It encourages players to step back and consider exactly which elements of the game designer’s design a player will interact with and which parts are necessary or overlooked. For a potential player, designing an online tool that we call a “character keeper” can be a similarly illuminating experience. A character keeper is an online tool for all the players to keep the information that would otherwise be on their character sheet. Character keepers are especially helpful in online play because it allows all the players and the game facilitator to access all the information any of the other players have about their characters including rules for moves, descriptions of characters, and other relevant statistics and modifiers. You may find that reading through a rules text through the lens of, “How would I create a character keeper for this,” is a helpful exercise for learning and synthesizing the most relevant player-facing aspects of the game.

Most games that need character keepers for online play will come with character sheets already. The task, then, is to translate that character sheet into an online character keeper. Having the character sheet as a resource certainly makes things easier when designing your character keeper, but with practice you could feasibly make a character keeper from scratch.

In order to demonstrate this process, I will be creating a character keeper from the ground up for Offworlders, a rules-light sci-fi game that’s (as of this posting) free. You may find it helpful to follow along and practice making this character keeper yourself! Read through the text with this goal in mind; How does it inform your understanding of the game?

On page 27 you will find the character sheet presented for play. It is presented in a pretty straightforward and simple manner, useful for our purposes today. Check out the headings and see which information the designer thinks are important for players to have noted. It looks like the designer thinks the following are important to note: Name, Look, XP, Attributes, Health, Supply, Abilities, Skills, Advancement, and Gear. These are things we will keep in mind as we design our own character keeper.

Next, let’s go to sheets.google.com and start a new blank spreadsheet. Wow. A blank canvas. So many rows and columns. A little intimidating! Let’s just go ahead and start getting some stuff on the page so that it seems less scary. Up at the top, click Untitled Spreadsheet and go ahead and give your character keeper a title. Then, click on a cell to start editing it. I like to start with B2, because I think a small margin around the characters looks nice. Cell B2 is the one positioned in Column B, Row 2.

Or you can indicate that the text within the cell should be replaced with the player’s input. This is how I usually do it:​

When you have entered the verification code the 24 hours waiting period begins. ​

will change to

10. The video will now be moved out of your “Live streaming” section and into the “Video Manager section. ​

At this time you can still click “Edit” and change things like the Title, Description, Tags, and findability. This is when I go in and modify the description with what actually happened in the session and possibly new content warnings. I also typically remove the “#hangoutsonair”, “Hangouts On Air”, and “#hoa” tags, as I personally do not care for them. ​