A Long, but Worthwhile, Interview from the Dorks of Yore

I thought that some of my 12 regular readers might get a kick out of the Dorks of Yore YouTube Channel, specifically the rather long 2 hour interview with Tim Kask.

You can see the interview here.....or watch the video below.

Last summer I lucked out and got to play in one of Tim Kask's games at NorthTexas RPG. I managed to survive the game and got my PC Sheet signed with an "I survived" by the man himself. It was an enjoyable game peppered with some talk of the olden days.

 Growing up I had trouble trying to game and getting to hear stories from those days of the games/systems/companies I wished to play with.....

Free GM Resource: Abulafia Wiki (RPG Generators)

I don't know quite what happened to yesterday's scheduled post, but here is this week's Free GM Resource....

Abulafia is an...interesting random table generator in that everything is set up as a special Wiki page. You can navigate to the tables you want and just refresh the page to reset the tables and get new results.

While I find it a bit clunkier than dedicated table generators, the fact that it is basically a web page means you can use any browser to get some results. The wiki's built-in search feature is quite helpful as well.

Take Abulafia for a spin for yourself.

Frugal GM Review: Hexbox

After reviewing the Hexed Places: Crescent Lake a couple weeks ago, DriveThruRPG evidently thinks I need to see more hexcrawl "stuff" and suggested Hexbox.

At first I was a little "meh" on even looking at Hexbox, mostly because there was little to no useful information in the product's previews......but the PDF was free, so why not?

Hexbox is a little over 1 MB in size and consists of 59 unsecured pages that are 6" x 9" in size. The PDF is also bookmarked, which is a must for a product like this.

While Hexbox is clearly written for D&D 5th Edition, I could easily see modding this to work with other systems without too much difficulty. There are a couple of worksheets included and there is a helpful link to downloading separate log sheets from the writer's website.

Hex crawls are relatively new to me and Hexbox did a lot to educate me on possibly running a hex crawl campaign, not that I'm planning to, but with this guidance I think I could. The only real problem I had with this product was some sort of nagging in the back of my mind that this could easily have been written system-neutral, which would allow the writer to shave off three pages of Open Game License.

Of course, I could be quite wrong on this front...wouldn't be the 1st time.

There are only two color pages in this PDF, the front cover and a small hex map on page 40. I think I'd rather have seen the page 40 map in black & white to match the rest of the book and at 59 pages I think a nice back cover could have been included, bringing up the page count to an even (and US Letter booklet printing appropriate) 60 pages.

Because this material is not only new, but a bit foreign (5th Edition) to me, I suspect I'm going to have to re-read this a few more times and figure out how to include some of my other hex crawl resources. After, or if, I get to mark up my copy of Hexbox to make it work for generic OSR games I may have to come back and revise my rating...

Free GM Resource: Low Fantasy Gaming

This week's Free GM Resource is a rules light Fantasy Role Playing Game self-described as a "hybrid of old school and modern game design".

Low Fantasy Gaming is a 184 page PDF from Stephen J. Grodzicki's website lowfantasygaming.com (you can get the PDF's page by clicking on the graphic or by using this link).

I'm not doing a review, but a quick glance through makes a lot of Low Fantasy Gaming look like other OSR clones, but there are some creative differences here & there. Ru it as-is, or incorporate some of the "new stuff" into your other games.....

Frugal GM Review: The Ytroth Larvae of the Scarsea Cliffs

This week I was compelled to pull an item off of my "Personalized Suggestions" list over at DTRPG as this week's Frugal GM Review.

A quick peek at the product's page made me think that The Ytroth Larvae of the Scarsea Cliffs, would be similar to my Tweak & Toss adventure seeds. Two pages, not tied to a specific system, and only $1....close enough.

OK, I'll freely admit that I was drawn in by the cover image, shown left.

November's d30 Table is a Plant Generator

This month's free d30 table is a companion piece to last month's d30 table that generated natural potions & poisons.

The d30 Plant Generator isn't a sexy-sounding table at all, but if you want to throw some random plants at your players, this will help out.

I was inspired to create this table not only from a perceived need after making the last one, but also because I remember time when I've been surprised a bit by plants in different parts of the world. One of my neighbors has a Catalpa tree and the only other time I've ever seen one, well actually it was a whole grove, was while deer hunting some 2,000 miles (or so) from where I live now. I could envision sending the PCs to find the fruit of the Catalpa as an ingredient for something.....

Now instead of trying to fit in a real-world analog into your campaign's flora, just throw some d30s into the mix and come up with something "unique" to your game world....

Free GM Resource: Natural Crit's Homebrewery

Today's Free GM Resource is a pretty cool site that exists to help GMs create official-looking home-brew rule pages for D&D 5th Edition.

Homebrewery is a pretty cool site and just because it is designed for one edition it doesn't mean you couldn't use it as a tool to create pages for your own preferred system.

Homebrewery allows you to share the created pages, either as read-only, or even to allow multiple collaborators.

Frugal GM Review: The Cave Hideout

One of the reasons I like to do reviews, aside from adding content to the site, is to make the things I try to create better. Not only can I mine other creator's content for ideas big and small, but I can (hopefully) look at specific details and see what I think works and doesn't work. I think we are all naturally overly critical of our own works, but if you can develop a good critical eye when looking at other's work....maybe you can develop a sense of fairness towards your own things.

Or at least that is one of my goals. I'll try to share some of my "internal" monologue to show what I mean....

Today I saw a free map on DriveThruRPG that caught my eye. It is the only product/item currently available from Filippo onez Vanzo, the artist. Entitled "The Cave Hideout", the product page is quite bare and the full-sized preview doesn't work. I don't know what format the map is in, which could be an issue.

Now I tend to be a bit light on the download page description myself and I wonder if the problem with the full-sized preview is a publisher issue or a OBS issue. Looking at my last item...neither preview seems to work.

The map is in a PDF file format and 24.54" x 34.72" at 72 DPI.

What sized paper is this? Sounds close to A1, but that is 23.4" x 33.1"....I wonder if the map was created on A1 paper, scanned in, and then pushed out to add the title. Changing the DPI to 300 for printing makes it 5.89" x 8.33"....way too small for much in-game use.

The map is presented as an unsecured/locked-down PDF. Unfortunately the map isn't layered so there is no option to remove the numbers & letters.

Well I could open this up in Photoshop, remove what I don't want, and then import to Illustrator so I could get a vector map before bringing it back in to Photoshop and get the size that I want. That is going to be a fair amount of work and some of the details I want to remove are over details I'd rather keep.

The artwork on the map is pretty good. I love the artist's version of hatching and the room detail is good enough to accurately depict what is in each room without being "too much".

That hatching looks like it'd be a pain in the ass to do.....won't do that, but the trees...I think I can do that. That room detail is right out though as I don't have that level of skill drawing.

Overall a nice map, but I really wish that the identifying details (room letters & numbers) had been omitted, along with the grid. Getting this map in a larger printable size would have been much more useful. As-is I think it serves as a GM aide that would have to be re-drawn if being used at a gaming table. A lot of work would be required to turn it to something I could use with something player-facing.

Most of my maps that are like this one are secondary copies included in the Tweak & Toss-es. Keep on making the large-scale "clean" map 1st and then mark it up and re-size for the follow-on project. Try out that tree method soon and add some more elevation/motion lines to the tunnels and water bits of your map..if/when you go hand-drawn again.