Free GM Resource: Mazes & Perils

After last week's Free GM Resource of 2013 ENnie award nominations for Best Free Product I received a note from someone associated with one of the items up for the Best Free Game category.

While I could simply do another posting of those free games, you can just as easily go over to the ENnie page and look for yourself.

This week's Free GM Resource is just one of the nominations. I'm only listing this one because it hits a soft spot for me. For many "old school" players there is a bit of pride about when you started playing Dungeons & Dragons.

My introduction to Dungeons & Dragons goes back to 1978 when I was seven. I had one uncle that is a few years older than me and he wanted to play AD&D after seeing another uncle's PHB. We both read and re-read the rule books until we got our hands on the D&D blue box set. Our games were more structured fantasy than bona fide games of D&D and all I really remember is playing with all these rule books and one really absurd adventure.

My first "proper" game of D&D didn't come until 1983, but by then I had years of these infrequent sessions with long stretches of just the rule-books to tide me over.

Mazes & Perils really takes me back to the early days of gaming when it was more about the shared story & experience and less about the rules written down on paper. This 61 page Core Rules book is inspired by the Holmes version of D&D and is a great way to get a few folks new to RPGs around a table and slinging dice in no time.

I encourage you to check it out and possibly vote for it to win an ENnie for Best Free Game.

Hefty 12¢ Miniature

Over the years my miniature collection has waxed and waned according to my whims and needs. I used to have a bazillion paper minis, so many that the collection became too unwieldy to use.

I eventually switched over to a flat paper mini that I could use with Alea Tools markers. I still use the Alea Tools markers and highly recommend them. A good set of these magnetic markers travels easily and can be used to relay quite a bit of information in-game.

My preferred flat "paper" mini is actually mounted on a 1" fender washer. This gives the miniature some real heft, making it easier to pick up and move around with or without an Alea Tool marker underneath. My goal was to get the price down to 10¢ a mini, which is doable, but realistically my final cost comes down to about 12¢ a mini.

Supplies needed (preferred option):
Printed Monsters (Magic Cards, or other Collectible Card Games)
1" Craft Punch (Fiskars squeeze punch)
White Glue (Aleene's Original Tacky Glue)
1" Fender Washer (Bulk Box)

The process to make a mini is super-simple and really only two steps, punch out your monster and then glue it to a washer. If you have Alea Tools markers, they make great clamps for gluing. Just put a marker on top of the card-stock after you've glued it down to the washer.

I used to source my Magic cards from the Favorite Local Game Store (FGLS). The ones that run Magic tournaments often have big boxes of common cards that you can sift through. You might also ask your Magic playing friends for old cards. It had been my experience that if they knew you were cutting up the cards you could get them much cheaper. The first time I tried this the FLGS wanted a dime a card, but when I explained what I was doing I got them to halve their price.

It never hurts to ask.....and if you bring your punch with you it might help prove your sincerity.

For the washers, shop around. You can usually find a pound box of bulk washers much cheaper than grabbing a handful from a bulk bin. I was able to get my per-washer price down to a bit over 6¢.

Finally, I highly suggest getting a quality Fiskars squeeze punch. It will make getting the right part of the card punched so much easier. Saving $5 on a tool you will get a lot of use out of isn't worth it. Now I don't count the cost of my tools in the overall mini price, but I end up with:
   5¢     Card
   6¢     Washer
+ 1¢     Washer & Glue
12¢       Total Cost

If you glue another card cut-out to the other side of the washer you can get your price down to under 10¢ a miniature.

Free GM Resource: 2013 Ennie Nominees

GenCon is coming up in a few short weeks, and at the convention (Friday, August 16 at 8 p.m. in the Union Station Grand Hall to be exact) is the Annual ENnies Award ceremony. Voting is open starting today and ending on the 31st. You can see the nominees here and vote here.

The ENnies are a good deal for Frugal GMs for a couple of reasons. One good reason to be interested in the ENnies is simply the fact that this is a fan-driven award so those items that have been nominated and especially those that win should be somewhat vetted, meaning that they are at least worth a look-see.

The second reason, and the underlying purpose of today post, is that the ENnies have an entire category devoted to free RPG products. There is also a category for "Best Podcast" and "Best Blog" I've yet to pay for a podcast or blog, so presumably there are some free goodies there as well.

You should check out the free products before voting...after all, you do want to be an informed voter, right?

2013 ENnies Free Product Nominees (Click on picture for download sites)

Battletech: A Time of War Quick-Start Rules/Shadowrun Quick-Start Rules (Catalyst Game Labs)

EPOCH: Road Trip (Imaginary Empire)

Fools Rush In (Privateer Press)

Night in the Seyvoth Manor (Darklight Interactive)

Wayfinder #8 (Paizo Fans United)





I find it difficult to believe that any GM couldn't find some good ideas from one of these free products. Please check them out and vote for your favorite before the end of the month.

Frugal GM Review: Printable Pawns

I've noticed that when going through materials to review I tend to cherry-pick stuff I like the most and leave the rest, still mostly good stuff, for review "later". This would explain why most of my reviews are 5 Star reviews.

I probably need to just pick some items at random and go to town, but not quite yet.

Even though I've decided to stop using paper miniatures, I still seem to have a soft spot for them. Printable Pawns, from Fantanomicon Press, is probably one of the better offerings of this nature I've seen. Fantanomicon has four different sets of Printable Pawns and the Basic Dungeoneers is free to download off of Drive Thru RPG.

Printable Pawns are not hyper-realistic and for some that would be quite a turn-off, but here I think it is a good feature. While I admit to liking the fine detail of paper minis like those from the Cardboard Heroes line (Steve Jackson Games), I've noticed that in use at the table the fine detail is often lost. It's

Preview Taken From Fantanomicon Press Blog

the same with awesomely detailed painted minis. They look great in your hand and in pictures, but in play one Dwarf looks much like another unless the colors are different.

These Printable Pawns come outlined in thick black which makes the figures "pop". This outlining also smooths out the fine edging of the figures quite a bit and it allows you to cut out the figures much more easily, should you choose to do so. Cutting out the figures can be a bit of a PITA, but it does really make for a great miniature.

While a nice touch, the outlining in and of itself isn't all that special. What really sets Printable Pawns apart are the instructions and the options.

• Included with the Pawns is a 9 page instruction booklet. This booklet is laid out simply and is quite easy to follow. Unlike pretty much every other instruction book/PDF product I've seen. The extent of the advertising for Fantanomicon Press is a logo, a copyright notice, and a welcome paragraph. I don't think I've seen paid products with less.
• Instead of one PDF with a variety of printing options you have to toggle through, Printable Pawns simply gives you all the Pawns set up three different ways: A Frame, T Frame, and Based. You are also given a couple different bases to use.

There is only one minor quibble I had about Printable Pawns, and that is that the cut and score lines are pretty thick and after printing and cutting/scoring they will be a little too prominent on those figures and bases.

Overall, this is a great seat and realistically it is one I would highly recommend to those wanting to try out paper minis for the first time.

Frugal GM Quick Craft Tip: Storing Super Glue

I have a variety of glues that I use with my modeling, from good old fashioned white school glue to some fancy cyanoacrylate (CA) "super" glues.

Most glue does quite well being stored at "room temperature". Basically if you are comfortable, so is your glue.

If you are using "super glue", you need to know that this type of glue generally has a shelf life of a year when unopened and a month or so once opened. You can get a little extra shelf life by storing the glue in your refrigerator.

Don't buy more than you can use in a short amount of time and for best results, let the glue come back up to room temperature if you've had it in cold storage.

Free GM Resource: Labyrinth Lord

A couple weeks ago I featured a fanzine as the Free GM Resource and it occurred to me that I never put up the game the fanzine was for.

Labyrinth Lord is one of the "old school clones" made to emulate a specific version of a well-known Fantasy Role Playing Game (FRPG). Depending on which specific version/printing of the rules you want to emulate there is a version of Labyrinth Lord for you.

The great thing about Labyrinth Lord is that you have a lot of choices. Not just on which rule-set to pick up, but how you want to get the rules to begin with. There is a free PDF option which has no art, a rather inexpensive PDF option with art, and you can even get the rules printed up with a variety of binding option through their Lulu storefront.

I'm going through the rules now, but I don't plan on offering a review, mostly because I don't like reviewing complete game systems. What I really like is the wealth of options for getting these rules. These days I just about require my RPG materials to be in physical and electronic formats. A lot of my gaming occurs outside of my house and I love having my reference materials on my iPad for gaming on the go.

While I have my preferred FRPG, I wouldn't mind playing a one-off now and then. Being able to supply my players with needed reference materials for free is great. If they wanted to start a campaign using Labyrinth Lord then we could all just purchase the versions we preferred.

I like it when a publisher gives us a "gateway" to encourage us to try their game.

GM Prep Tip: Wiggle Room

There has been a recurring theme I've gleaned from a string of conversations with newer GMs over the years. Sometimes it is an open question, others a complaint, but the theme is that the GM is frustrated when the players don't fully take the adventure hook and go along the prescribed path.

I'm not trying to insinuate that newer GMs want to railroad players, but more often than not they expect the PCs to behave in a certain way. Truth be told, I don't think this expectation really goes away with more experience.

The core issue is that as a GM we are working from a different knowledge base than the players are. We get to know more about the bigger picture and less than the PC's motives.....and even less about the player's motives.

The key to preparing for this as a GM is to integrate a little bit of flexibility to your adventures. Do you really need to have everything mapped out into fine detail? If the players take the Northwest trail out of town instead of the Northeast trail can they still manage to find the monster's lair? Sometimes you do really need to have things set in stone, but other times you can be really flexible and others you can give yourself just a set amount of wiggle room.

You have the adventure all planned out, left the clues for the players to find, but still they go along the "wrong" path. Instead of that cave being NE of town can you shift it to the NW? If the players go SW then maybe you can decide that is too much of a deviation.

Flexibility is even more important when it comes to timing your adventures. You don't want to be completely flexible to the point where it is like a video game where the monsters don't spawn until the PCs draw aggro, but most adventures don't need a strict timeline either.

I once heard a tale of a fan questioning a SciFi author as to the possible top speed of an often-used craft. The author responded that they didn't have a set speed, but instead their top speed was "The speed of the plot." When planning your adventures determine in advance your "wiggle room" and let the party succeed or fail based on their ability to perform within that range. What is the speed of your plot?

Free GM Resource: Blogger

This week's Free GM Resource is pretty much a "gimme" that I cannot believe I've overlooked, even though I've been using it for years: Blogger.

Lately I've been a player in our home group, but I have picked up the reigns and started GMing on a regular basis. Since my campaign is the "side" campaign for the group I've been having some fun with it and breaking from our normal stance of playing "rules as written".

The game is on a different world and I've tweaked a lot of things setting-wise. For the most part we do still play RAW, but there are a few home rules tossed out there and some "secret" tweaks I've made to both facilitate game play and to help with some of the role-play aspects as well.

When I started out I just put everything up on an online forum that most of the players have been using. There are advantages and disadvantages to doing this, with the major disadvantages being that it is an open thread that any viewer can post to, anything I type on that site becomes someone else's IP, and it becomes unwieldy over time to access the information. Now I could simply build a website for the campaign and host it on my server, but I really don't want to spend a lot of time maintaining that site.

The realization that I could easily use a free Blogger site to accomplish all my goals hit me hard. How could I have been so oblivious? I can use Blogger to organize my campaign information, allow players to post in-character journals (should they want to), and share the content publicly for those that want to follow along....all from the comfort of any web-browser.

I'll be putting together the new campaign blog later this week and I'll have to post a link here as an example.

2013.07.10 Edit
While I still have a couple journal entries to do, and a lot of hotlinks, the bulk of the new campaign blog is finished. This blog is a lot more convenient for my players to access and I'm in the process of setting things up to make it easy for me to use at the game table. It really helps me to be able to find my NPCs or to look up some earlier events.

Frugal GM Review: Brave the Labyrinth - Issue #1

I have just finished reading the inaugural issue of Brave the Labyrinth, a new quarterly fanzine for Labyrinth Lords.

Looking through my older posts I cannot find anything already written regarding Labyrinth Lords, so *spoiler*....that will probably be up next week.

As a Frugal GM I have always been interested in both official magazines and fanzines that support FRPG games. While not all are high-caliber offerings, there are usually a lot of great ideas to be found that are a bit off the beaten path. Even if you have players that seem to memorize every aspect of the core rulebooks, this "bonus" content is probably not on their radar.

Brave the Labyrinth is a "pay-what-you-want" offering from Small Niche Games that is available in both download and print (print does have a set price) formats. With the notable exceptions this fanzine is black & white and notable without exception is the high quality/production value of this fanzine. It is a little light on art, but I really didn't notice this until I specifically went looking for the art to comment on this review.

Now I don't play Labyrinth Lord and doubt I will. Nothing against the game, I just don't stray too far

from my favorites. That being said, this fanzine is FULL of content I am going to be using in my own game. I really don't see much of anything I cannot use, unless I really want to stick to rules-as-written for the system I'm playing.

I think that the content of Issue #1 is pretty close to drag-n-drop for anyone playing 1st Edition AD&D or one of the retro-clones. It would work well for HackMaster 4th Edition and with just some minor tweaks any other FRPG.

Inked Adventures Contest Winner

The Inked Adventures contest ended Sunday night, well technically Monday morning, at midnight. We only had enough entries to award the 1st place prize of Inked Adventures Hand Drawn Large Geomorph Tiles.

The winning entry is.......(imagine a drum-roll please)....Dungeon Mama. She had a great blog post showing several different Inked Adventures pieces, including some free pieces, and I'm a big fan of how she broke down what she used and where you can get it.

Congrats Dungeon Mama, I hope you'll be able to put the new geomorphs to good use for your "gnomelet".

Free GM Resource: Random Utilities for Random Games

If you've been following this blog for long at all you know there are a few things I'm just a sucker for. Free random generators are pretty high on my list.

Now I do prefer being able to access my random tables offline even though I'm online all the time. The reason for this is because I prefer to be prepared for running games where I don't have internet access because it does happen.

The folks over at Mithral and Mages seem to pretty much have me covered because all of their wonderful tables can be printed to PDFs online and downloaded. That is pretty fricken cool if you ask me. Sure, I can easily print off a webpage to PDF on my laptop, but let's say I was checking out the site on my iPad and needed to access that list later. A few clicks and I'm done.

They have thirty (30!) different generators to check out. I used a few of the generators and I really liked the results. I wish I could buy some of the tables for offline use and at least with some of the name tables you can. You'll have to do some cut & paste and manipulate for your generator, but if the list is long enough and cheap enough (they are) it'll be worth it.