Frugal GM Review: Adventurer Essentials (Iron Rations)

The other day I was perusing DriveThruRPG, like I am wont to do, and I came across the Adventurer Essentials series from Skortched Urf Studios. It caught my eye so I hazarded a purchase to give it a look.

On the surface I really like the idea of an in-depth look at an otherwise all-too-often ignored bit of required adventuring kit.

I don't know how many game I've been in where the last thing anybody bothered with was making sure you had enough food....well, anybody but the GM. A few lessons-learned and I always make sure my PC has adequate provisions.

This eight-page (of content) PDF goes into a little bit of detail regarding iron rations, those relatively inedible foodstuffs we buy for our PCs, but would never stoop to try out for ourselves unless we were really desperate, or maybe hard-core LARPers! The bit of general background transitions into several options for fantasy demi-human versions of iron rations, which, with the exception of the Dwarven variant, sound so much better than the standard fair. Rules are given for starvation and a brief discussion regarding magical means of sustenance is given. The PDF gives a few magical items and some interesting rules for using the survival skill and making your own rations.

This PDF is written for the d20 rules system, but easily adapted for anything else you'd prefer to play with. I particularly liked the way the author suggested arranging terrain types for determining difficulty for using survival checks. It is the one bit I'm most likely to borrow for a number of related tasks (like hunting, tracking, etc.).

One thing I definitely did notice when reading this PDF were a number of typos, including a simple addition error compounded in the next sentence by using a completely different number. I ended up re-reading that paragraph a couple of times trying to figure out the math and why things didn't add up. I thought maybe the second number was referencing some fact or figure from the sourcebooks that weren't mentioned.

Overall it was a decent enough download, but it wasn't enough to convince me to try out any of the rest of the series.