Sandbox Adventure for $1 -Limited Time Offer-

This isn't a review per se, but more of a head's up that there is a good deal on an old-school adventure over at DriveThruRPG.

Valley of the Five Fires is an adventure from New Big Dragon Games. Until the end of the day it is a whopping $1.

$1!

Now I haven't had the time to do a thorough reading, much less a review, but this "adventure" looks pretty awesome. It is triple stated for old-school gaming (Oe, BX, & 1e), which means it is easy to convert to a lot of retro-clones as well.

A quick scan, however, showed me this adventure is more of a sandbox mini-setting than anything. There is one main adventure and a few side quests, as well as a whole new adventuring class (6 whole pages!). If you need....heck, just want....a sandbox adventure for levels 4-9 and have a buck lying around.....go for it! Just a head's up you don't have a lot of time left......

2014.05.14 Edit ......and now that time is gone.

Free GM Resource: Adventure Generator from Dizzy Dragon Games

Have you ever been.....I don't know....a little rushed when it came to GM prep for your regular game? Have you ever just wished you could sweet-talk the players into a simple dungeon delve, perhaps something you didn't have to plan out to the nth degree?

Fear not fellow Frugal GMs because the fine folks over at Dizzy Dragon Games have an absolutely free random dungeon generator that provides a lot more than a simple map!

You have three main options to generate your random dungeon: d20 Pathfinder, Moldvay Basic, and Moldvay/Cook B/X. You can set the appropriate party level or just say "screw it" and go completely gonzo (er...random).

I'm a huge fan of the fact that map is randomly generated and even has the rooms numbered, with additional information (assuming you want this) about the contents of some/most of the rooms. It is easy enough to populate a dungeon, tweak the rooms as you see fit, and be on your way in short order.

Spend less time prepping and more time killing!  If that isn't your style, then just spend more time checking out the rest of Dizzy Dragon Games' freebies......

Frugal GM Review: Herick's Dungeons (Dungeon Rooms)

Today I was perusing DriveThruRPG and came across Herick's Dungeons. Two things quickly came to my attention: that it was a 41 page PDF and that it was under $2.

A large file at a cheap price...along with a good-looking preview file.....yep, I was gonna pull the trigger on buying this file.

The download itself is quite straight-forward. You get 39 pages of Dungeon Rooms, 1 page of doors, and another page of arches. There is not one bit of wasted space outlying the artist's other offerings, ads, or really anything else....not even instructions for putting together the doors or arches. Now I don't think instructions are needed, so this isn't a detractor at all.

The PDF assumes you are printing on A4 paper, which is great for everyone in the world except Americans. We have to either reduce the page size by about 6% or just print the file up on legal-sized paper. I don't think this is that big of a deal. I do have two minor qualms however. The first is a common gripe that the PDF is password-protected so I cannot open it up in Photoshop so I can use these rooms in a virtual table-top. The second is that the tile layout is all the same from room to room.  It looks like the artist basically made one big room and then just brought in the walls to make smaller rooms.

Now for under $2, it might be a lot to expect the floor tiles to be shuffled around some, but I think that minor effort would have gone a long way in increasing the visual appeal of the rooms. The artwork is great, don't get me wrong, but the rock-steady floor pattern from room to room is not so appealing.

Still, it is a minor qualm and I think overall this is a great download that a Frugal GM can get a lot of use out of.

New Map Project in Progress

Now I'm quite cognizant that I haven't put up a map in several weeks. I have a couple ideas I've been kicking around and truth be told I simply haven't pulled the trigger on executing said maps. Blame it on my job, the car repairs I've needed to do on my days off, or (probably more accurately) I'm not sure how to bridge the gap between what I want and what I can do.

I have my sketches and maybe I'll scribble out some more test maps trying to bridge that skills gap, but it is hard to sit down and work on a map that I truly doubt will ever seem good enough to share.

Anyway, enough about the maps I'm not working on.

May current map project is set to be more than a bit on the large side. Printed out at 300 DPI I'm expecting this to be something in the range of 10' by 3'. Of course that might be my plan now, but plans change. My initial thought was this will be a multi-layered map.

The base layer will be the underground river and the associated underground caves....mostly because I like doing them. The next layer will be the "ground" level with at least a couple settlements. This whole area is a large "hidden" mountain valley, which opens up a lot of potential for mountain caves and lairs....essentially another layer.

The graphic above is just my little guide for how my map slices piece together. I haven't done any cleaning up of the map yet, so this is quite rough. When I finish everything up I'm planning on having a nice "little" sandbox.

Free GM Resource: Dungeon Robber

This week's Free GM Resource is...well, depending on how you look at it isn't free, but kind of is. The folks over at the Blog of Holding have a über-cool poster of the old 1st Edition D&D dungeon chart for sale at $15.

Ok, this is pretty cool, but more of a background to the other thing....

You see, the Blog of Holding took their cool map/poster of the charts and turned it into an online game called Dungeon Robber. The game is brutally hard and sooooo much fun.

Sometimes you need to "game" and don't have an appropriate opportunity to do so. If you want to slug it out, and try to survive the otherwise random and somewhat nonsensical dungeon, you really should try Dungeon Robber. I managed to get my thief up to level 7 before he bit the big one.

It was a complete waste of time that was totally fun and worthwhile......like many of these pursuits often are.

Frugal GM Review: The Hanging Garden

I know I've reviewed several New Big Dragon products in the last few weeks/months, but to be honest....I like their stuff.
          Assault Against the Menace of the Mountain
          D30 Sandbox Companion
          Save vs Dragon (OK, technically not a review)

Now I follow the Save vs Dragon website and try to download any new goodies Richard has made available*, and today I downloaded his newest adventure, The Hanging Garden.

This adventure was submitted in the one-page dungeon contest and Richard has offered up this slightly expanded version on his site. It is a 1st Edition (or 1st Edition compatible) adventure designed for levels 1-3. The adventure is rather interesting, as in I like it, but I think it would be an utter blood-bath for even a large party of adventurers at these levels. I don't think the "big bad guy" would be much of an issue, but the most common enemy....well, they would be really common and prove (I think) to be a huge problem for the party. Toss in the special monster(s) of the adventure and I think this adventure has TPK written all over it. I think the adventure is pretty good except for this one point. The adventure has just the right amount of details without being too bulky and there is a lot of leeway, including a cool future adventure hook, for the GM to tweak the adventure.

Oh yeah....the price is just right at free!







*There have been a LOT of goodies this last month, so do yourself a favor and check out Save vs Dragon.

Free GM Resource: A Twofer from RPG Crossing

Today's Free GM Resource is a bit of a twofer....I like twofers.

RPG Crossing is a HUGE online community of gamers where you can run just about any type of play-by-post game. Membership is free (of course) and setting up an account is easy.

It looks like the site used to have a different name, so you may have heard about it before......

Oh, that 2nd freebie.....they have their own PDF zine called Explosive Runes. At the time of this post issues 3-19 are available for download. Even if you don't ever plan on playing in a play-by-post game, you gotta love some free zines!

Frugal GM Review: Corporia

I have a rather simple rule about this blog....well, I probably have more rules that don't immediately spring to mind, but the one that is on my mind is that if you are a publisher and you send me product I will review it.

Mark Plemmons, a good friend of mine who runs Brabblemark Press, recently came out with his new RPG, Corporia after a successful Kickstarter Campaign.

Now I helped out a bit during the design process, nothing to brag about in my opinion, and got my name in the book as a Contributing Editor. I wasn't expecting to actually get a hardbound copy of the book, but guess what came in the mail today? Yep, number 177 out of 200 limited edition signed & numbered copies.

Now this takes me back to the original blog rule......you send me product and I'll review it.

In a nutshell, Corporia is a "modern" RPG set in the "city" where you get to play a modern-day member of the Knights of Camelot. Now I can go on about the setting, but if that sentence isn't enough, you should just go look at the preview on DriveThruRPG. Seriously....go look at the preview....it's worth at least a good 41K words....

The book is about the size of a trade comic book but hard-cover. The art and layout is great, and I've seen some rumblings about the quality of the paper. I think some were thinking it should be high-gloss super-quality paper. Meh...it appears to be a high-quality matt magazine stock and looks good enough for me. I only have a couple of books with that upper-end paper and honestly I don't really use those books.....looks great on the shelf though. This book is a nice size and a more usable format that most every other gaming book out there. It is a minor touch, but just addition of colored "tabs" on the page sides...tabs that mirror the other color accents in each chapter (great effect!) go a long way with me. Also a HUGE fan of the index with Director-only entries noted in red.

Basically, Mark knows his way around some great layout ideas......

The rules themselves are an easy read and the rules have a lot of leeway for the GM and the players to work together in-game. There are a couple of sample adventures, a rather generous GM (Director) section, and enough sample NPCs to run a couple games.

Now I'll be the first to admit that I probably won't be running any games of Corporia, mostly because I play HackMaster and well.....that's my game. I do hope to get to play a game though at a con.......hope there are some at Origins!

Now I am fully cognizant I didn't go into the specific of how the rules work or the setting of the "City", but with about 1/5 of the book available for preview and a great Character Dossier (16 page character creation guide) available, it is easy to check it out for yourself.

BTW.......the RPG Book in PDF form is on sale for $14.99!