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.

Free GM Resource: Dungeon Builder Demo

I'm a little late posting this week's Free GM Resource because I slept in and because I was too busy playing with the resource itself. We can just pretend it was "product testing".

Dungeon Builder is an isometric map maker for just about every desktop platform. It is currently on Kickstarter for funding, but for now the duo of Aage Jørgensen & Kim Markfoged have put up a feature-limited demo of the program.

The links above go straight to the Kickstarter and any links below go to the demo download page.

While it is only a demo, you can still build some pretty usable dungeons, especially if you are just trying to make the rooms themselves. I built the bulk of the couple rooms below in a minute or two and then spent a while just screwing around to see how the editing went.

You can't save anything you create with the Dungeon Builder Demo, but you can easily take screen shots.

The Kickstarter is already funded and it'll cost about $45 to get the program through Kickstarter. That seems like a lot to me, but since I cannot draw isometric maps and wish I could, that price isn't terrible....

Obviously your mileage might vary, but for the price of free, I think the demo is well worth downloading.

Frugal GM Review: Motley Jerks

Today's Frugal GM Review is on a freebie product from my "personalized suggestions" list over at DriveThruRPG. I have to admit that the title of Motley Jerks drew me in, but what cinched it for me was what this product actually was: a collection of 1st Edition/OSR pre-gens.

When I was a HackMaster 4th Edition GM I ran quite a few convention tournament games, either as a table GM or a Head GM. The biggest/hardest part of the job was writing/editing adventures for tournament play, but the second biggest (and least fun) was making pre-gen characters. Pre-gens took a lot of time, there were tons of details to keep up on and even if it was a pre-gen only tournament, a lot of your work went unused.

Even though I don't really run many convention games, Motley Jerks still hit me as something I want "just in case".

October's d30 Table is Up: FGM037l d30 Natural Potions & Poisons Generator

Since today is the 1st of the month I'm going to slip this week's Frugal GM Review until tomorrow and instead post up this month's Free/PWYW d30 table.

FGM037l is a d30 Natural Potions and Poisons Generator. I was looking at a modern version of some ancient book on medicinal plants and noted just how many of these "helpful" plants also did double-duty as deadly poisons. Sometimes it was just a matter of dosage, but often the poisons were just variant usages for different parts of the plant.

When reading this "updated" version of this one book I also noted that a lot of these plants weren't necessarily identified. Some entries had some "best guesses" as to what the currently-available plant was, and some plants had multiple beneficial uses. The sourcebook, in many ways, was a bit of a mess, which works out well for the purposes here.

This d30 Natural Potions and Poisons Generator generates the Greek-Sounding name of the mystery plant, what it treats, the method of application and required plant parts. On the flip side are tables for poison type, plant parts used (and how), along with mortality (how quickly the poison kills) and just how the victim will perish.

While all the poisons are fatal, the GM is encouraged to tweak things, like a Save vs. Death or maybe just painful debilitation.......

Click on either graphic to go to the DTRPG page, or use the links above.

If you like these d30 tables but don't want to wait for a monthly release, check out my Patreon page. Patrons get the tables as they are produced, along with all my other RPG Aids and a few Patreon-only versions of maps.

Free Map068: A Big-Assed Cave

I know.....I know....it has been quite a while since I tossed up a free map. You know how it goes, you make all these plans and then life gets in the way, sometimes big-time.

Trying to get back on the proverbial horse by playing around and trying to figure out how to do something I shouldn't be able to do with the current constraints of my computer system. I don't have a wimpy system at all, just I tried asking far too much of it.

Needless to say I was able to figure out how to work around these limitations and make a large A1 sized map. My Patrons get a couple versions of that huge map, but everyone else gets this still-large Ledger sized map.

I hope you are able to get some good use out of it. Like usual, click on either graphic to get to the map, or use this link.

Free GM Resource: Norman B Leventhal Map Center at the Boston public Library

Today's Free GM Resource, if you already haven't figured it out, is another collection of old maps. This time it's the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Pubic Library.

Navigation to the maps is a bit clunky, but there are a few really cool collections within the map center that are worth checking out.

Lately I've been receiving links to online map collections and I'll keep posting them, but no more than once a month so that the Free GM Resources doesn't turn into map porn central.

Frugal GM Review: Anglo-Centric Placename Generator

This week I once again let DriveThruRPG "spin the wheel" as it were, to find me something interesting to review. Obviously I have to find something I think is interesting, and when the Anglo-Celtic Placename Generator showed up in the short list of "personalized suggestion" I was more than happy to grab it.

When running a game a bit on the fly like I was, place names sometimes needed to be created on the run and I don't always do a good job. Any help in that department is probably worth the $1.50 this Anglo-Celtic Placename Generator costs.

The PDF is a locked-down file that is eight pages and comes in at 2.83 MB. The file is A5 sized (5.83" x 8.27") which makes for a nice little printout on a folded US Letter paper. I'm thankful for the fact that the PDF is bookmarked, which is something I probably wouldn't expect with only six pages of content (the other two pages are the cover and a credits page).

What I'm used to seeing with shorter list products or single-purpose table generators like this is basically just a list of items/tables. Maybe a paragraph to show the order for tables. Hell, my d30 tables don't come with much in the way of explanation. This product devotes two pages to explaining the tables and their constraints/exceptions. I really found these two pages helpful because the format of the tables might be too confusing on their own.

The bulk of the naming convention is Element 1 + Element 2.....pretty simple stuff. With not quite 100 entries in each element you'll get some good variation. To spice things up a bit there are also Prefixes and Suffixes, as well as Interfixes. I've never heard of an interfix before and some of these entries have some additional "rules" to get the resulting place name to make sense.

On some level it seems rather complicated, but it really isn't. I plan on entering all these tables into a table generator so I can make up a bunch of names on the fly. I'm sure I'll have some fun trying to code the generator, but thankfully everything is quite well explained.

Something tells me that a lot of effort went into creating the Anglo-Celtic Placename Generator, mostly on the research end, but also in the explanations and the layout. Sequestered Industries didn't skimp on the little touches that make a PDF more user-friendly and overall I think there is a lot of value for only $1.50. Based on this purchase I'd definitely be willing to check out their other generators.

I think these smaller/cheaper PDF products really do add a lot of bang-for-your-buck to RPG games.

Fat Dragon Games has a Cool Kickstarter Funding Now for 3D Printed Terrain

First off, I know some people are going to balk a bit because this post isn't about something cheap by any stretch of the imagination, but frugal has two definitions and I go by the economical meaning, not the cheap one.

A quick search of this blog's Table of Contents shows I've posted about Fat Dragon Games eight times now (including this post). That is a lot, but I've always considered FDG products to be darn-right economical and I've purchased a lot of product over the years.....something to the tune of 3.5 GB of PDFs.

I've also had the pleasure to run into Tom Tullis, FDG's main man, several times over the years at cons. You'll just have to take my word that he's always been a nice guy, that was great to work with (briefly) on some special projects that never came to fruition (when I was working with another game company). A bit of a shame really, but it did make me a bit more eager to pick up more FDG product, especially during a Kickstarter Campaign.

This time around, Tom has another Kickstarter for another one of FDG's Dragonlock sets. This campaign is called Dragonlock 2. Basically Dragonlock 2 is a set of 3D printer files, focused on streets & buildings, where the Dragonlock 1 set was focused on caverns and dungeons. If I had the extra $70 I'd toss in for that as well, an I already own a couple pieces from that set (i.e. $70 is still a better deal that buying it set-by-set off of sites like DTRPG).

Luckily for me I had some extra spending money from unexpected overtime earlier this month.



I'm going to have to assume that the majority of readers here don't have a 3D printer......yet. It's on my wish-list and I hope to have one within the year. I don't think the prices have come down much, but the quality and availability of relatively affordable printers has increased. While I already have what feels like a bazillion paper models, some as PDF and some already printed out, I'm more excited by the prospect of 3D printing my terrain instead of the paper models or casting it.

For me the 3D printed stuff gives the sturdiness of what I'd make with my Hirst Arts molds, with the light weight and cost of my paper models. There is the initial hump of getting a 3D printer, but my gut tells me that if I added up the cost of all the molds and equipment I needed (or at least felt I needed) for casting and compared them to the start-up costs for 3D printing, at worst it'd be a wash. I'm confident that the 3D printer would come out ahead in the long run and also.....hey, I'd have a 3D printer that I could use for other stuff. I can't use my casting molds for anything else.

At any rate, I think there is some great value here and I wanted to make sure those that might be interested in something like this got the word.