I’m definitely a homebody, and when I am out and about, I prefer not to take anything with me – I don’t enjoy packing with its millions of decisions of what to leave behind, what needs to come with me, and the worry of leaving something vital behind or worse, something of mine getting damaged while out and about. I’m hard-pressed to GM outside of the game space I’ve curated. So with all that in mind, you can realize how important it must’ve been for me to GM a game away from home. Earlier this month, I did just that, though – On a trip to the east coast, I offered to run a one-shot for my newly-married best friend, his wife, and my girlfriend.

Game Prep

One-shot games can exceed their allotted time all too easily. As a result, I opted to run a familiar prewritten adventure with a slight twist. I ran The Fiend of Hollow Mine, an adventure from Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel. I’ve run this adventure before, so I was able to make some minor changes for both balance and aesthetics. Because there were only three player characters, instead of reducing the number of combatants, I decided to up the party level from level 4 to 5. Secondly, I tweaked the setting to function more as a Western and allowed my players (and the humanoid enemies) the option to use firearms based on my usual house rules. In my prep, I also flagged several of the potential combat encounters detailed in the book as “if we have time.” (None of these scenes ultimately made the cut, and I even had to pare down one of my favorite combat encounters from the adventure, but the clock is not your friend for this type of game.)

What I Packed

This box was a simple choice – it was a Goodwill find just a week before we left, and it fit the bill almost perfectly. It was big enough to fit the important stuff, but small enough to keep me packing light. After all, I didn’t want to be hauling a bunch of stuff onto the plane, and after some incidents with my luggage the last time I flew, I didn’t want to take anything I wasn’t prepared to leave behind.

When I’m at home, I carry a much larger box of dice that can hold up to 30 sets, but I pared myself down to only five sets of dice – one for each player and two for myself. I’d already set myself the goal to fit everything I could into the box on this trip.

Since I’m particular about keeping my books safe on the road, instead of hauling my Player’s Handbook and Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel, I opted to print out a writeup of the adventure and the statblocks for the enemies in the must-have combat encounters (like the eponymous Fiend of Hollow Mine), as well as the character illustrations from the book. You could definitely get away with digital tools for this, but I wasn’t confident about my phone’s data connection at the venue. This precaution served me well, though. We did have some connectivity issues, so we had to keep rule lookups to a minimum.

I’m not a big fan of “Theater of the mind” play, so a way to visualize battles was a must. The Noteboard is a great solution for this on the go. The board is made of laminated 3×5 index cards, blank on one side, and featuring both a 1-inch hex and square grid on the other. (There’s also a centimeter grid as well, but I haven’t found any particular need for that yet)

I think the most controversial choice I made were these blank miniature bases. I didn’t want to carry around miniatures on our trip, so I needed something durable and generic to represent combatants. Originally, I was going to run to the hardware store and get some metal washers and paint them black, when I noticed this bag of mini bases in my Pile of Shame of unpainted minis.

You might be asking how I kept track of individual combatants’ hit points when these bases were identical. I wish I could tell you I’m just that good at tracking individual objects, but I promise, we’re about to get to the coolest part of my off-site GMing kit here.

Oh man, I love these dry-erase cards. While I don’t mind tracking hit points and spell slots on a character sheet, I much prefer to put things that change often onto one of these little dry-erase cards. One too many of those nasty smudgy erasers, and I was looking for alternatives. These dry-erase cards are actually blank ID badges, which you can purchase in bulk for probably less than you’ll spend on snacks at your next game night.

As I promised, here’s the MVP from my traveling GM kit. In my junior and sophomore years at my first college, I had to prototype several board games, and these gemstone beads are absolute lifesavers when you need game components or tokens. (And dirt cheap at your local craft store!) They take up next to no room – I filled up only three old Chessex boxes with these gems, but even this wound up being overkill!

One of my players at the game table has some degree of dyscalculia, which makes it a challenge for them to track changes to their hit point total quickly. However, with these physical tokens, they could easily add or subtract from a hit point pile. Plus, if you remember when I was talking about tracking combatants’ hit points, my solution was to keep clusters of these tokens nearby to show how much damage they’d taken and moved the clusters along with the combatant’s mini. For our table, green represented 10 hit points, blue represented 5, and red represented 1.

Postmortem

I think minimalism paid off for this traveling GM kit. If I were running a game away from home again any time soon, though, there are a few changes I’d make. Firstly, I’d use a smaller box for the kit. I had far too much loose space in the box, and I could’ve packed things even tighter than I did. Second, this adventure featured combat encounters with a very limited monster variety, so I was able to get away without having to distinguish between multiple types of monsters in a given combat encounter, but if I were to do this again, I would’ve marked maybe a dozen of those mini bases so a player could tell them apart. I also would’ve made sure to paint a few in bright colors for players’ tokens. Fortunately, our hosts had a few minis! I could’ve also gone to the length of printing some character art for these NPC tokens to make them into more effective visual aids. You can also see that my Noteboard is feeling its age a bit – there are smudges and battle scars on it from adventures gone by, and on some of the folds, the lamination is starting to wear down. Unfortunately, the Noteboard is a little hard to come by these days. Evidently, it is available for sale through Magpie Games at about double the price that I originally paid (then again, what isn’t about double the price you’d expect anymore?). You could certainly make one for yourself using clear packing tape and index cards, though, which you could then customize to suit your needs. Finally, while I didn’t want to bring a Player’s Handbook, I think that it would’ve been wise if I had included some form of quick reference for gameplay. Everyone at the table had varying familiarity with the 5e ruleset, and a paper reference could’ve saved us time when the dice hit the table and electronics were failing to answer questions quickly.

Overall, though, I was pretty happy with this kit. Even though I was aiming for minimalism with the kit, I had a LOT of space for the “it’d be nice if I had…”-type items. If you GM on the go, though, is there something I missed that you wouldn’t leave home without? Let me know in the comments if you think there’s something essential that I’ve left out!