Frugal GM Review: One Page Dungeon Shamble

I've been keeping tabs on the One Page Dungeon Contest, eager as anyone to see what gets put together.

A pretty cool teaser is looking back to a small collection hobbled together from last year's contest. One Page Dungeon Shamble is a collection of five loosely-related adventures.

The premise is roughly that all of the PCs have died and come back as altered undead and by working through these five adventures they have a way to come back from their state of undeath. In some ways the PC's new state makes them a bit more powerful than they might have been in life, but there are some measures within the adventures that take some of the bennies of undeath away from the PCs.

I liked the general theme of the adventure and if I was planning on using the One Page Dungeon Shamble I know I'd need a lot of tweaking to make it work, and for some game systems it would never work.

Still, if you have the right system and the right players, this could be a fun way to let them stem the tide of death......once. The price is right and it is available now on DriveThruRPG. This adventure might work best if you did all the prep work and had it waiting for a TPK, so you might want to download it sooner rather than later.....

Free Map 027: A Small Tavern

I've had a couple of ideas kicking around in my head for this week's map, but getting said ideas down on paper is a lot harder than it appears.

I started out with a tavern map that I thought was a cool idea, but I had difficulty making these meat clubs I call hands draw something delicate and stately.

If I was going to post anything today I had to change tact and do something I could manage. In this case it is a rather simple small tavern. My original idea was to take a small fortification and convert it to use as a tavern. The walls are mortared fieldstone and the entrance is over-sized, with a large bar.  There are some generous supports holding up the ceiling so there is a load bearing wall or support basically every 15'. This place is supposed to be a bit on the small side and over-built. There are no windows for light as those would be weak areas of the wall. Perhaps this tavern is actually underground, or at least buried enough so the outside of the roof is ground level. There is a trap door going down into the depths under one of the torches.

I think I spent more time playing with the torch and fireplace lighting effects than anything else.

Let me know how you end up using this tavern, if at all. Almost all of the objects have come from various contributors from Dundjinni forums. Like always, you can click on the lead-in graphic for this file, or you can use this link.

Free GM Resource: Risus Monkey's Dungeon Geomorphs

This week's Free GM Resource is a bit of a twofer from the Risus Monkey blog.

The first is a collection of 100 geomorphs that have been bundled up together into one kick-ass PDF. Instead of directly linking to the file, here is a link to the blog page containing the file.

If you were to poke around the interwebs a bit more you'd find those same geomorphs working together to create another cool GM tool. This random map generator stitches these together into a default 4x3 tile map, which can be altered and refreshed to suit your needs.

Taken together, this is a pretty cool selection of dungeon geomorphs that is worth a check-out. I know I'm glad I did!

Frugal GM Review: Assault Against the Menace on the Mountain

A while ago, when I first discovered New Big Dragon Games Unlimited, I downloaded one of their cheaper adventures. This one is called Assault Against the Menace on the Mountain and for some reason it isn't available for sale on DriveThruRPG. I'm hoping that will change soon

This is written as a low-level (1-3) adventure for "old school" games. As such, everything is super easy to adjust for just about any "close enough" game system.

The real value of this adventure....the reason you should really snap it up if it ever comes up on market, is that this adventure does a great job of introducing some "big" ideas that I think a lot of GMs, myself included, could pick up on to make their own adventures seem so much bigger than what simple level-limits would imply.

When I first read Assault Against the Menace on the Mountain, or more appropriately first skimmed it, I had difficulty believing this was a low-level adventure. There was a lot going on and the BBG at the end, well it is a very Big Bad Guy....

Richard J. LeBlanc, Jr., the author, did a really good job of condensing a lot of extra "stuff" into what is realistically 10 pages. A couple of random tables and a much-needed flow chart allow the players to go a bit "off script" while still keeping the GM in control.

It is really hard to not toss in any spoilers, so you'll just have to believe me that this is a great low-level adventure that doesn't feel small by any means. Even if you don't ever plan on running it, there are a lot of good details/tips/ideas that a GM can glean out of it for future use.

Free Map 026: 3rd and "Final" Underground River

I've been sick pretty much since I posted last week's map, but there is a spot of light on the horizon thanks to a doctor's visit and some scripts. Today is the first day in almost a week I haven't woken up with a fever and I thought I was "good to go"....right up until my first normal adult interaction outside of the house.

I don't know if is the drugs or just being sick, but it seems like I'm not firing on all cylinders. While up in my own head everything seems fine, when I'm faced with simple situations I'm slow on the uptake and it seems like I'm only getting about 80% of what is going on.

"Gee Chris, sucks to be you....but why do we care, just give us the damned map already!"

Like normal you can click on the lead-in graphic or use this link for the free map. The whole bit about me coming off being sick is that it occurred to me that what I'm feeling/experiencing right now is totally how a curse effect that knocks off a few points of INT would feel like, with the noted exception that the person under the curse just wouldn't care and would just learn to deal with it. Maybe this is just my pathetic attempt to attach a little fantasy into my reality, but it seemed interesting to me.....

....of course I have pretty-much self-identified as being somewhat dumber today so it could just be another symptom.

This map didn't take as long as the others to put together, but at the same time I didn't quite follow the "normal" routine. I think I need to play around with some effects to create more/better variations in the water color, but I haven't quite figured out how I want to accomplish that. Invariably I'll either get someone to show me a super-simple method or it'll come to me while trying to figure something else out.

I don't know what I want to try my hand at next.....I am open to suggestions.

Free GM Resource: Text Adventures

I'm a little late today getting this out due to being a bit sick this last week. How sick? Sick enough we had to skip the weekly game.....which does not make me a happy GM.

I "fondly" remember, back in the day, when I wasn't able to have a weekly game....or really any game. Not old enough to drive, no other gamers within walking/biking distance, nothing I could do.

A few things kept the gaming spark alive for me. Pouring through old copies of Dragon, painting the few minis I could get, and playing with choose-you-own-adventure books.

Man I loved those books. Of course I "cheated" like hell. One thing I did was map out the adventure as I went along, writing entry/room numbers on my map. If I ever got to a dead end, or simply needed to get to a specific room, I just used my map to pick the correct entry. This really helped with the few books that had you actually track hit points and engage in combat. If you knew where the room with the healing font was....well you were much more likely to survive until the end of the game.

Textadventures.co.uk is a website filled with a variety of these text-based adventures, divided among 16 genres. I really recommend signing up for a free account and joining in on the fun!

Frugal GM Review: Instant NPC Personality Generator

During DriveThruRPG's GM Day sale I tossed a few odds & ends into my online shopping cart and one such item was the Instant NPC Personality Generator from DRAKAT Games.

I was intrigued by the possibility of making it easier for me to create NPCs on the fly because this is pretty much how I roll as a GM. I run with a huge list of NPC names, separated by race, and I essentially mark them off as I use them, jotting down any small notes I need to remember about them for future use.

This Instant NPC Personality Generator seemed to be a bit much for my personal take on running NPCs, but I can it is being really useful to a lot of other GMs. The 12 page PDF comes with three pages of random NPCs, just roll a percentile and pick one off of the list. That table is a bit simple, but the author provided another table for you to customize and a pretty good explanation of how they dumbed-down the Myers-Briggs personality types for this gaming aide.

There was some "talk" of how certain personality types will mesh/clash with other types and how you can factor this into how NPCs of one personality type will interact with the personality types of your PCs.......this was a bit lost on me. I don't really want to get this cerebral when running a game.

Still, while there were some things on the tables and in the PDF I'm not going to use, there was plenty of good bits in there that I'll have to consider when creating new NPCs. I'm sure there are some GMs who might be able to use this product almost in its entirety. Since it is less than a buck it might be a worthwhile check-out.....

Free Map 025: Another Underground River

When working on a new skill, like making a certain type of map, I like to do things a few different times in slightly different ways to figure out what works and what doesn't.

With this in mind it shouldn't be s surprise that this week's free map is another underground river. I don't think I've got it down quite yet so there will undoubtedly be another one of these next week.

There wasn't much feedback from last week's map so I'm guessing it wasn't terribly popular, which is something I'm completely OK with. I do these maps more for my own sake than anything else, so expecting external approval is largely an exercise in futility.

This time around I got my river source a bit differently and I played around with my process a lot more than last time. I still "wasted" a fair bit of time, but I think it was more enjoyable this go around. I have one more river already set-aside for the next map and I might try to bridge some of the things I did last week with what I did this week.

If I find the time I might have to go back to my source files and stitch the maps together to make a HUGE underground river map in a consistent style. I'm not sure my computer can take it, but that might be fun to try.....

As always, click on the post lead-in graphic or use this link for the free map file.