Frugal GM Review: Simple Caverns from Inked Adventures

This week's Frugal GM Review really makes me feel like I'm just "phoning it in" since I could've guessed this would be a 5 star review just by looking at the intro-graphic over at DriveThruRPG.

Inked Adventures is on our +12 Links of Helpfulness for a reason, which is they/he (Billiam Babble) always does a good job. As soon as I saw the Inked Adventures logo I was sold....providing Simple Caverns as a PWYW made this a total no-brainer, must-get product.

The cover photo really spells this product out..."Hand Drawn Cavern Floor Cut-Up Sheets" .....I couldn't come up with a simpler explanation than that. The whole idea is that you can select a floor you want, print out as many as you need, and then cut them out to serve as your cavern floor. You could easily tile multiple pages to make a larger battlemat and these sheets can easily work with any 2.5 system like those from DM Scotty.

You actually get quite a bit in this download because you get a simple 1 page Instruction Sheet, two PDFs (one for A4 printing and the other US Letter), and 10 .PNG files for you to play with. Providing two page sizes for printing is a nice touch, since the idea is to print either out at 100%. I think some would just have made the tiles smaller, as in number of tiles, so that they's work for either A4 or US Letter. The way Billiam went with two different layouts maximizes the number of tiles available, which has the consequence of printing fewer pages.

Of course these color pages will be a HUGE ink hog for home printing, which is noted in the instructions as well. While I could print these at home, I'd probably print them out at the print shop instead because I think that would be cheaper/better quality in the long run. If you wanted to do something like maybe make a large battlemat, professional printing on a much larger paper is an option.

The download also has all 10 layouts available as 8" x 11" 300 DPI .PNG files. That means anyone with a good graphics program could tile a page to create a larger battlemat. I can think of a couple other good uses for these cavern files.....but I'll only mention one other, kind of dumb, usage: dungeon floors. I only think this is "dumb" because while this download is clearly labeled as a cavern floor, there are two greyscale (one with shadow & one without) options that would work well as a cracked flagstone floor. Well you could just as easily go with one of the line art options that would work for anything...

Overall I think Simple Caverns is a good download because it is a well-planned-product. It only aims to do one thing, but you have the necessary options to make that "thing" work for you. The GMs printing this in Germany are on the same footing as a GM printing it in the United States or the GM online running a game on a Virtual Table Top (VTT).