1/31/2013

Frugal GM Review: Shane's Delve

Frugal GM Review: Shane's Delve (5 Stars)
Before I went and downloaded a butt-load of free GM resources from Drive Thru RPG, I was doing a quick search on "kobold lairs". My players were seeking out the lair of some kobolds that had moved into the area and while I have plenty of maps I was looking for something new.....mostly because I could.

What I wanted was something I could make a big battle-mat out of. I assumed that this little map might get a couple of game sessions of use, possibly more depending on how the group decided to proceed.  In my GM's prep I had envisioned several different "hooks", all dependent on what the party wanted to do.

This small adventure, Shane's Delve, is a free system-less offering from Chubby Monster Games.  There are eight small encounter areas and a nice little map.  Although I already had a couple of ideas in mind, the encounters meshed really well with what I had conceived already and my final adventure incorporated quite a few of Matt Jackson's ideas.

This was a great little adventure that really worked well as a GM resource because there was already an assumption that you'd have to make some edits to fit it into your setting and game system.  Normally I'm not a huge fan of PDF maps, but this adventure included two maps (one small and numbered and one one-sheeter at the end) and the download from Drive Thru RPG had an additional download for the map as a JPG.  This was a great touch.  I was able to use the larger map to make notes and the JPG to edit in Photoshop to make a much larger map.  I separated the map into pieces, printed them at home, and assembled for the group.

5 Star Frugal GM Review: Shane's Delve
Since the map itself would be a spoiler, I'll embed it after the break.

Overall this was a quick and easy GM resource that was exactly what I needed....even when I didn't quite know what I needed.  It was easily adaptable and added some interesting ideas that made the map useful beyond the initial encounter.

Here is my version of the Shane's Delve map.  This was made for my own use and is depicted here in 72 DPI, which isn't good enough for a GM's home use.  My intention isn't to give you a map you can use since I didn't design the map, but an idea on how you can take a publisher's map and tweak it for your own game use.


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