Frugal GM Review: The Guidebook to the City of Dolmvay

Last week I finally managed to get my hands on a copy of the Guidebook to the City of Dolmvay, which is the end result of a successful RPG Kickstarter.

Written for Labyrinth Lord, the Guidebook comes in at 223 pages and is easily adapted to any OSR game. Roughly the first half of the Guide is the setting itself, chock full of city details, while the second half was made up of appendices. The Guide comes with a good table of contents and an index. All to often projects of this nature manage to have one or the other, not both.

Overall I thought this was a good sourcebook and I really only had a couple of issues pop up when reading through the Guide. Now I realize this might simply be my personal preference, but when I'm reading about a specific area, I want the NPCs to be more closely aligned with their home location instead of lumped together. The Guide breaks down Dolmvay into wards and in each ward section it mentions specific areas, which are then followed up with NPCs for the ward. I'd rather have each NPC in the appropriate ward area, or just lump them all together in an appendix. The other issue is that I'd like to see better ward maps. There is a single city-wide map on page 30 and then then next map you see is on page 148 in Appendix II.

Now to be fair, there are a fair number of illustrations and, if you pardon the vernacular, there is "a lot of meat on the bone" that is the Guidebook to the City of Dolmvay. I particularly enjoyed the little touches spread throughout the book, things that a GM wouldn't necessarily come up with on their own:

• Basic list of crimes (and punishments)
• Calendar (holidays)
• Common Gestures & Phrases
• Description of tavern food (including local specialties)
• Random Tables

As of the time of writing, the Guidebook to the City of Dolmvay is a PWYW (Pay What You Want) file that has an average contribution of $3.80. Rounding up to $4 I'd say this is an absolute steal. Use the whole Guide, strip it for parts, or just use a single section.....still worth $4.

I highly recommend buying and checking out the Guidebook to the City of Dolmvay today.

Free Map 023: Buildings of Walnut Grove, er Hackston.

This week I had planned on putting together a non-specific dungeon in a particularly specific way. Unfortunately I have a little too-much on my plate this "weekend" and that plan had to be scrapped.

Instead of this dungeon map I decided to delve into my files and share a number of buildings I had made with Dungeon Crafter for use in a tournament I was writing.

That tournament was originally written for HackMaster 4th Edition, the first of a four-parter that would be easily converted for use with about any OSR game. I'm not sure about the legalities of making the adventure available since the old HackMaster license isn't available any more, but I did convert the adventure(s) into a three-part for HackMaster Basic. Shameless plug for Heroes of Hackston 1, 2, & 3 on DriveThruRPG.

The original maps & adventure were set in Walnut Grove......yes, that Walnut Grove.
If I recall correctly, most of these room maps really weren't needed for the adventure and largely went unused.

The maps aren't labeled so to a certain extent you can mix & match as you want.

As usual, you can click on the header graphic for the free map, or use this link.

Blue Dungeon Tiles on Kickstarter

I have to admit that while I like to check out the myriad of projects on Kickstarter, I spend more time making fun of them than anything else. I've backed a few here and there, but mostly I look for the big losers for cheap entertainment.

Since this blog isn't about general stupidity I thought I should point out a "good" Kickstarter that fits in well with the Frugal GM philosophy.

Blue Dungeon Tiles is already funded and the creator, Kevin Scott (of Red Kobold Games), has been pretty cool about tossing free stuff up on his website. We've shared a couple of emails regarding a cool solo dungeon generator he is working on that I can't wait to link to the final product on some Monday.

Now the last time I recall publicly backing a Kickstarter project it was for a metric butt-load of Reaper Minis. That was a pretty good deal and I think Blue Dungeon Tiles is as well and here is essentially why:

• For $30 you get a set of 48 tiles, which is cheaper than a similar number of tiles from those companies currently making this sort of thing. This is a little harder to quantify since you can sometimes find good deals on the other guy's stuff, but.....
• These are generic tiles. I've yet to see generic tiles on the market and even if you can get the full-color specific area tiles for $5 they are still specific tiles you don't get to pull out often.
• As a GM who has to often travel to games, not to mention going to cons cross-country, these pack so much better than the equivalent size of battle-mats. Don't get me wrong, I love me some battle mats, but having to fold my big mat to get it on the plane sucks.
• With tiles you can pre-draw your dungeon, saving a bit of time and a pain in-game. Nothing I hate more than having to stop the action in a tournament to draw out a map on the battlemat. It feels like trying to do math in public.
• Buy what you want and then toss another $5 in the kitty for the files on PDF! If you've ever had to run multiple tables of a tournament you could use the PDF to print off as many customized copies of the map you need for your tables. The GMs can write on them and then toss after the game. Where was this when I needed it years ago?

The stretch goals for this KS aren't readily apparent, which has been confusing to some. The stretch goals are currently $13,000; $16,500; and $20,000. You have to go into the FAQ to find that out.

I'm excited by this project and can't wait until payday so I can set aside some money to chip in towards my own set and help reach some stretch goals. My suggestion is that you check this out and see about joining me!

Free GM Resource: Tabletop Audio

This week's Free GM Resource is another collection of audio files for use as "mood music" during your games.

Tabletop Audio is a relatively succinct site that allows you to play individual 10 minute background sounds that are a mix of ambiance and music.

The cool thing is that it plays right in your web browser and you can even queue up a collection of sounds. Using the playlist is super simple and doesn't require much of your attention as a GM.

I realize that this site won't be for everyone, but it really doesn't get much simpler when it comes to playing some mood music for your game.

Frugal GM Review: Devin Knight's Dark Forest Token Pack

Thanks to the GM's Day Sale over at DriveThruRPG I was able to pick up several items off of my "wish list".

One of these items was Devin Knight's Dark Forest Token Pack. Normally $2.99, during this sale it is marked down to 99¢. Normally I'd have grabbed these up at the full price, but since I'm not currently running or playing in an online game (the place I generally use these tokens), they were shuffled off to my wish list instead of my shopping cart.

Free Map 022: A Small Iced-In Fishing Village

This week I decided I wanted to try my hand at re-creating a "new" map using a previous map as the inspiration. Now I don't want to say where I got this previous map from, but only because I want to see if some folks recognize it.

The cool thing about re-purposing a map from another source is that if your players have any familiarity with the source map you can use that to your advantage. Maybe the PCs should be familiar with the area and by using a base map that your players are familiar with, there is a stronger connection to your game. Of course you can use this familiarity for evil purposes as well. If you players think the can rely on their personal information to gain an advantage, then you can twist that aspect like a knife to stick it to them.

I'm not saying you should do this, just that you can.

This map is the edge of a small fishing village that is iced-in for the winter. There are a couple of buildings, some lower-lying areas, and even a couple of tunnels through the hillsides.

This map only took an hour or so to throw together, but I've spent hours (if not days) on this map.......click here for the hi-res version.

Just A Head's Up on Maybe Saving a Few Bucks

I was checking out DriveThruRPG for something and happened to go into my wishlist. The reason is lost to me, but the important thing is that there is a special GM's day promotion going on until the Ides of March.

Everything that is part of the promotion is supposed to be 1/3rd off, but if you hunt around a bit, or in my case just scanned through my extensive wishlist, you might find some things at an even deeper discount. There were a couple of items, mostly digital maps and some tokens that I found at 2/3 off!

Just a small plug for DriveThruRPG and judicious use of their wishlist feature. It really helps to squirrel things away there to look at later. From a publisher side of things I know your could (I assume they still can) reach out to folks who had your products wish-listed and send them a discount code to help convert them from shoppers to buyers.

...and for you "purists" out there notice it is GM's Day, not DM's Day! ;)

Free GM Resource: 1974 Style Roleplaying Game

This week's Free GM Resource is am interesting minimalist RPG. 1974 Style Roleplaying Game just about defines the term "minimalist", with the single-source PHB/GMG/MM "book" coming in at a whopping 5 pages. The PC sheet is a staggering 4" x 6".

With such a small ruleset you really don't have any problems using  this for any genre.

Coming from a heavy ruleset background (HackMaster 4th Edition), the 1974 Style Roleplaying Game seems like an odd curiosity that couldn't possibly be worthwhile. Seriously?! What's the point in this game?!

Well, after the initial WTF moment wore off I realized that this could really be a perfect GM training tool. With such a rules-light system you really have to "go with the flow" and rely on rulings, not rules. A GM also has to go way beyond simple flavor text spoon-fed from the adventure writer. As somebody who has written (and run) more than a few tournaments, I had learned that I had to go pretty much word-by-word through the adventure's text boxes. If you allowed deviation your players might run rough-shod over the adventure, gaining an unfair advantage, or you might just screw them over in the process.

I'm 110% certain that this led to some bad behaviors as a GM in my home game. I'd also like to think that with my newer edition of the game and not having run tournaments in a couple years that I've gotten better.....

Anyway, I think you should definitely check out 1974 Style Roleplaying Game. It would be great for some quick one-offs or even an on-going rules-light campaign. I could also see this as a great "gateway" game for new players. If I was ever to run a game for my In-laws, this is what I'd choose. To put this statement in context, when we introduced my In-laws to a simple game of Munchkin it took 3 hours......