Public Domain Gear Images

Here are some public domain images of adventuring gear or adventuring equipment that you might find useful for handouts:
Rope:

spikes:

and a Mallet:

Sacks:

Grapnels or grappling hooks:

Torches, candles and a lantern:

and two possible oil containers:

Bottles:

a 10' pole:

Crowbar or prybar:

Basket:

and backpacks or rucksacks:

That should cover most basic, traditional D&D dungeon gear I'd think.  I left out weapons and armor to keep it simpler but can try to post some later if people want.  If there is other piece of gear you might need, let me know, I might be able to scrounge something up.  If you would like these in the same card format as I posted previously, let me know and I'll work on that.

Also, these are not my target quality, I would prefer higher resolution images with a consistent style, but this is what I've managed to find in the public domain in the last five years or so.  I hope you can use them to make some cool stuff.

A Pile of Gear

You're down and out.  You heard a recent landslide uncovered a rumored tomb location.  You and folks you know from sitting outside the alehouse gather all the gear you can and throw it in a pile.  Decide how to share it out before heading off to find you fortune:

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I'm DMing ~7 folks from my work today.  Only two of them have any experience with D&Ds.  I thought I might try this as a new way of starting out.  The cards will be cut up and put on the table between them in a pile.  They'll be asked to sort it out, no rules as to how many each character gets except encumbrance*

You've probably heard of fast packs.  I never really liked them for the same reason I don't like pregens, they sacrifice player choice for expediency.  My solution over the years has been a compromise between those two goals.  You can see my forms here.  I gave players a pre-made character sheet that has a basic set of gear, like food, water, bedroll-- no use spending valuable time on boring stuff like that-- and then had them make a few limited choices about weapons and other typical dungeon gear like rope and torches.  Money wasn't involved.

This has worked fairly well, it's fast, gear is limited enough to be important, and players get to make some choices.  One aspect that it isn't good at is thinking about the gear the group as a whole might need.  Players tend to make individual choices.  With my more experienced players an outgoing player might start quarterbacking "I'll get a lantern, who is getting rope?"  I tried solving this by making a record sheet for the party as a whole, but that was just an extra step and quickly forgotten once play started.

I thought I'd try the method above this time.  Players can assume they have waterskins and some bread and cheese, maybe, but nothing else.  The party as a whole will need to decide who gets the few precious bits of armor, the best weapons and, the few shields.  Hopefully this will also get them thinking about the roles each of them will play in their expedition.

I hope for a more desperate, gritty feel to the first dungeon delve.  I'm hoping this won't feel too constraining or boardgamey.  I plan to include some armor and weapons in the dungeon that players will be able to immediately use.

*Also, I read recently on a blog about "strength-based encumbrance."  I can't remember where.  That phrase intrigued me, encumbrance has always been affected by strength.  So I thought, does it mean encumbrance derived simply from the STR stat?  Interesting, I'll try that.  So today I'll try an even simpler encumbrance system than the one I've been using:  You can carry a number of things equal to half your strength.  Armor and weapons are included in those things.  We'll see how it goes, but I'm hoping this will make hireling bearers and pack animals much more real as the game progresses.

Update

Work is crazy right now.  Here is the collected NPC portraits I promised long ago.  The file is still pretty big.  Also, have a bull, or aurochs silhouette until I can post more substantially:

The D&D Campsite

People gathered around a fire is as old as us.  To cook and eat, to talk and rest and keep the night at bay until the sun returns again.  But, traditionally, the campsite in D&D only exists to give Vancian spellcasters a chance to reload their magazines.  With no mechanics for fatigue or hunger or comfort, players might just push on and travel all night if it didn't feel so fundamentally off for us humans.

Actually, one other mechanic has made the campsite more real in the game, the three watches and the chance of attack.  But this is just the wilderness impinging on the campsite.  And with how abstract wilderness travel in the game tends to be, camp turns out to be just another set of encounter rolls; a single choice about who will be up when the attack in the night comes.

I want campsites to be more than that.  To me they are the extension of the hearth into the wilderness and only if they feel that way, a bit safe, a bit like what we've left behind, will attacks in the night be jarring.  But even if we decide to never roll for attacks in the night again, I think the comfort of camp can be a contrast that helps bring out the work and danger of traveling through the mountains and swamps, and dark forests.  And really, down into the mythic underworld.

Around the campfire is where characters share what they've heard of the dread place they're traveling to and what they miss about home.  But for this to happen in our shared, imagined world, I think we have to provide some mechanics that try to make it feel like a campfire and hopefully give players a few interesting choices as well.
So what mechanics?  As usual, I'm aiming for brutal simplicity; the least bookkeeping and calculating possible that still gets the job done.  Here are a few houserules that might make a campsite feel more real in an adventure game:

Food & Drink
Most characters have rations, or hardtack, or trailbread.  Cooking fresh food would make a fire important and camping for the night more of an event.  I say +1 hp per level per night in camp when you are eating freshly prepared food.  This really works if you have a simple hunting and gathering system.  Which in turns makes different landscapes feel more tangible because they have more or less game available.  (I'm still hammering out the kinks in my own.  See here for it's origins )  But, even without hunting it means stopping in villages and buying or raiding for livestock becomes a reality.  On long expeditions players may even want to take livestock with them.

Music
Music in the wilderness means you are not afraid of being attacked and what reminds characters of home more than the songs of home.  +1hp per level per night in camp where music is played.  The idea came for having bards as hirelings, but I've allowed characters to buy and play their own instrument.  This costs some money and takes up encumbrance space.  And how about the noise?  I wouldn't want to penalize too much, or players would never play music in camp, maybe just a +1 to encounter rolls.

Gear
If you have a system of wear and tear for armor and weapons, camp becomes a place to hone and oil blades, tighten grips, and polish armor.  See this post  for Brendan's simple equipment deterioration system and here for how I would tie it to the campsite. 

Stories
I think one aspect of campfires that makes them what they are is the stories told around them.  One approximation of stories could be rumors.  We could use camp as an opportunity to introduce rumors from hirelings "My gran all used to say . . .?"  But I also like the idea of giving players a chance to make up stories of their own.  The problem is some players will be more comfortable doing so than others, but as long as one person can manage a goofy or spooky tale maybe it would be fun enough to implement.  How about story responsibility rotates through the players, one each camp night (it is an abstraction meant to stand in for lots of talk) and if the player pulls off one then everyone will receive a +2 to saves made in the location the story was told about.  So, for multi-day travels through the wilderness it might not be a big loss to skip the story, but the night before reaching the dungeon or the dread location, it would be worth an effort to come up with something.  Rotating through the players allows shy or reluctant players time to think up something or get suggestions from other players.

The Hearth
If the campfire is the extension of the hearth, maybe it should offer some protection against the dark.  I'll repost an idea here:

A cleric, or anyone versed in the Old Ways, can take a stone weighing a half-stone or more from the night's fire.  By incorporating it into the next night's fire ring they make that fire a hearth.  Each night of doing so makes the hearth magic stronger.  Undead and shape changers can not enter the light of a true hearth.

Half-stone is ~7 pounds which is one of my simple encumbrance slots.  I'm not interested in the bookkeeping part now.  Maybe just, using the hearth a second time on gives the protection, but skipping a use in a fire will mean you have to break the stone in again.  Particularly old stones taken from ruins or abandoned cottages might function as magic items that give extra bonuses.

Stars & Weather
This is an idea that just occurred to me.  It seems that when we camp is when we notice the sky.  I'm sure this is more because we live in post-industrial places with tons of light pollution, but then we are the players of this game.  So, what would looking at the stars do?  Maybe a chance of auguries, like comets or supernovas.  Maybe some kind of weather mini-game that would determine or allow affecting the weather of the next days travel.  Maybe a place for the DM to parcel out little bits of campaign world lore "That constellation is called the Hag because . . ."  I don't know, something to think about.

In General
Once you introduce the campsite and these mechanics, they become things you can leverage as class knowledge or feats gained by level.  Here is a post where I do some of that for fighters.  Undamaged gear shown attention might get bonuses.  Special recipes are something characters can learn and can give bonuses above general food gathered or hunted.  Bonuses for well chosen sites, and even time to reorganize packed gear can become tasks with meaning in the game.

Sandbox Lessons from Westeros

I finally got around to reading the books of A Song of Ice and Fire at the insistence of one of my players.  I'm not quite done with the last book currently out, but I've enjoyed them quite a bit.  I think Martin has done a good job of providing plots that both provide for genre expectations at the same time as surprising me every now and again.

Anyway, as with anything I approached the books with the eyes of a DM and I found some simplifications Martin adopted to help him tell his stories that might also help DMs trying to run players in a big, imagined world.  Some simplifications you might consider for your fantasy world:

1. Simple Family Names - There are some allegiances in the books that are complicated by marriage, but most are related to your immediate family and families in the books are clear because they have the same last name.  Bastards are also clearly marked by a traditional last name, and marked in such a way that you know where their family is from (Snow, Rivers).  This allows you to have a lot more characters floating about with out losing track of where they are from and where their allegiances most likely lie.  (Many, though not all, of the place names in the books function in similarly simple ways: Oldtown, King's Landing, Winterfell, Riverrun).
2. Simple Coats of Arms - Along the same lines, heraldry is simple and almost always utilizes an object appropriate to the location and vocation of that family.  And soldiers wear badges of these arms.  So you can usually tell just by looking who different troops belong to.  That's the point of heraldry, but in real life it is much more complicated.  I think that for many of the arms of Westeros players might even be able to guess where the family hails from without former knowledge.
3. Simple Long Range Communication - Ravens - By sending message via the ravens, word of deaths and crimes can spread relatively quickly.  And while uncertainty of arrival is always mentioned as a possibility, it's never been a plot point in what I've read so far.  So, in effect, the castles become points of civilization where news is heard and only someone traveling between them won't be privy to important goings on.  Individuals can also send messages, using the ravens like a mail system.  This means you don't have to have a complicated system to track the spread of news based on travel times of merchants or peasants, just have ravens carry the news and get on with the show.
4. Assumed Knowledge NPCs - Maesters - Every castle has a source of history, technology, and healing.  And because of their vows, these maesters while serving that family, are generally neutral and not seeking power or wealth of their own.  Have a wound or question about historic lore-- head for a castle.  Priests are a similar resource, a septa or septon in every castle, but because of the low magic beginning of the series, they are less important in the books.  It might be more important in your world that every castle has a chapel and a priest.
5. Assumed Dumping spot for troublesome NPCs - The Night Watch - It seems a neutral faction with its own military but concerns other than ruling, might be handy for many reasons.  Having an order to put criminals or potential threats to succession in means these threats never disappear, can be questioned by players, and can become threats again if they break their vows.  Also, the faction can be a place for players to look for aid, if it aligns with the order's goals.

Another smaller one might be simple cultural rules shared across the whole world, like any knight can make a knight, or that any marriage can be annulled if it wasn't consummated, or breaking bread with a host means they can't harm you.  Then, if players know these rules, they know the import of someone breaking them.

Anything you would add?