Frugal GM Review: The Alienage District Map (HârnWorld) from Columbia Games Inc.

The Alienage District Map is a large (27.56" x 19.68" @ 300DPI) map of the foreign quarter of the City of Cherafir, one of the many (many) locales in HârnWorld.

Now I don't play Hârn, but I have and it is an über-detailed game & game world that pushes the "realistic" RPG pretty much to the point of absurdity.....but the people who play Hârn love it and if you're like me, you at least have to give Columbia Games Inc. credit for going all out on the crunchy bits.

This huge map is so full of detail you could almost use it as a VTT map.....almost. The map is so big and so....locked down, that it is essentially unusable. Instead of giving us a graphic file a GM could use any number of ways, this map is presented on a big-assed PDF. Unless you wanted to take it down to FedEx Kinkos and pay through the nose for a large-format print of the file, the best you could do is look at it through your PDF viewer.

This would be a great map if it were worth using beyond viewing the PDF. Even if the PDF wasn't password protected then maybe you could import it into a graphics editor, but as it is the best most GMs could handle is printing it off at less than 40% to fit on a sheet of paper.

It is really a shame because they did make a helluva PDF. The layers were used to good effect so you could turn off things like the elevation markers, ceiling height (seriously, when was the last time you saw a ceiling height indicator on a RPG map?), etc.

If this map were just a little more user-friendly I would probably have given it 5 stars, but since the most I can do is look at it in my PDF viewer, it gets knocked down severely. I think just changing one setting (page extraction) would have made all the difference.

If I wanted I could always zoom in about 300% or more and take some screen shots then stitch the shots altogether in Photoshop, but that is more work than I'm willing to do. Hell, if the map were available to purchase in a better state I'd consider it......

Dagnabit...I Fumbled Again!

Here we are, just a scant few days before Origins and my trusty laptop decides to try and die on me. I've got it going again and basically had to do a fresh install of everything...after backing up my files.

Everything seemed to be ok, I was only missing some emails and passwords I had stored in Outlook, but when I went to restore my RPG directory the overwhelming majority of my files weren't on my backup drive!

Oh crap!

Evidently my backup of pretty much all of my paper models and all of my digital tokens are gone, as were gigs of PDF files. My backup's backup has most of the files, and some of the missing files I can either transfer from the physical medium I have or DriveThruRPG. The biggest thing I'll be missing is a plethora of digital tokens I've collected over the years. Somehow they didn't get saved to either backup.

I think this will be a good week for vacation....starting last Friday. I have posts lined up already starting this Friday. I'll be spending my free time trying to recover and reorganize my RPG files....and doing multiple backups.

Free Map 031: A Micro Campsite Map

I'll be the first to admit that today's free map isn't a lot to look at. I've been playing around a bit with attempting to add in some colored pencil "effects". Some time ago I scanned in some large spots of color derived from scribbling with a set of colored pencils. Instead of using any given Photoshop effects I basically just insert my colored file behind the layer I'm working on and erase the top layer of color to expose the irregular colored pencil layer.

I like the effect, but I thought I might toy with it a bit to see what kind of tweaks I could achieve.

While I don't particularly care for the end results, especially factoring in the extra time (way too much extra time), it was worth the shot and I learned from the effort.

If only I could say that about all my endeavors.......

Here is the original file, a tiny campsite map that I was creating for #MicroMapMonday (next week obviously):

Nothing fancy, just a small clearing with a log, campfire pit, and some space for a tent or two. I think I'd normally not draw the outside edge of the tree ring, but I wanted more border to work with on the coloring experiment, which also involved some extra use of Adobe Illustrator.

This was my end result:

A bit "meh" for my tastes.....I quickly re-did the original map a second time, pretty much following my original methodology. I did do a quick pass-through Adobe Illustrator and copy back in some of the resulting AI file. I like this version much better, and it took maybe 1/4 of the time:

I think some of the color variation I was going for with my experiment already existed in my colored-pencil scans, which explains why I took too much time and didn't get the results I was looking for.

At least now I know better......

Since there are two maps on this post I went ahead and put both of them up for sharing. I linked the one I like best to the intro-graphic, but you can get it here and the first attempt here. 

Free GM Resource: Bonus Goodies from & Magazine!

It feels like I'm completely dipping back into the well, since I posted about & Magazine almost a year ago, but news about the beginning of a mega-dungeon hit my in-box yesterday.

While Castle Trikelion is the new kid on the block, & Magazine has a few more other downloads that are worth checking out. At the time of this post there are two adventures, two supplements, and an "unofficial publication", in addition to the Castle Trikelion.

The magazine website has had a facelift and while it is working a bit slow for me (I'm assuming there is heavy Monday morning Castle downloads.....), you should check out the downloads page. Unfortunately the downloads page doesn't actually have any download links....odd....but there is a link to the newest & Magazine page and the horizontal menu has drop-down links to the individual section pages.

Frugal GM Savings Opportunity: Dave Graffam Models

This morning I woke up a bit earlier than usual and did my normal web surf, only to find that Dave Graffam Models is having a HUGE sale over at DriveThruRPG (thanks Mark CMG for the catch!).

I featured the trio of Dave's free model bundle nearly two years ago and his work has only gotten better in the interim. Hell, I'd argue he's the best paper model maker out there...and I really like some of the other guy's work!

I have no idea how long this sale is going on for, but it is a great opportunity to pick up a lot of pieces at a almost-stealing price.

Frugal GM Review: The Goblin Cave

For several reasons The Goblin Cave is not an adventure I would normally pick up. Mostly because it is a solo adventure for a system I don't play and it has little to no value to me for conversion.

What swayed me was the fact that this was written by a 13 year old as a bit of a spin on an English assignment.

In general the story is simplistic and a bit disjointed, but I enjoyed reading it because it felt like it was written by a 13 year old who loved to game. Even though technically I started gaming back in '78 or so, it was simplistic and disjointed to the point that The Goblin Cave is fricken Shakespeare. When I was 13 the best I could do is try to scratch out some notes in the margin of adventure on how I wanted to run them.

Writing adventures was just not something I was capable of at the time.

I highly encourage everyone to download The Goblin Cave and give it a good read. I actually think it would be a) cool to show this young fledgling GM some support and b) maybe try to covert this over to a dead-simple RPG like the 1974 Style Roleplaying Game. I can see getting a bunch of friends over, maybe having a little too-much to drink, and play like we were all 13 again.

I think it would be a blast.....

Free Map 030 (in three versions)

Monday I posted about Google Plus being a great Free GM Resource. On Monday I also took some extra time to check out the plethora of communities G+ had recommended to me based on my current communities' involvement.

One new community I joined was the Micro Map community, where I just had to get in on #micromapmonday. It was fun, and anything that makes gaming, and gaming prep, fun is worth a shot.

I ended up coming up with this small map, which I dressed up a couple of different ways:

Now you can have the two roughly 6 cm by 7 cm maps here and here.

My goal was to do two things for Wednesday....since it is now Thursday you might have properly surmised that I was either lazy or simply failed in my endeavor.....both would be correct in this case....

Anyhoo....I figured I would "blow up" this map to a full page(ish) size and I would try to create another vertical slice view of this cavern. Using my original drawing I made some mark ups, envisioned how things would look, and put pencil to paper for a rough sketch.

I still completely suck at doing vertical/side view maps. Now I'm sure I could probably do a straight-up side view map, but taking a top-down view map and translating that to a side-view....just cannot do it. My brain cannot twist the one projection into the other. I can envision how the different elevations within a map are, but not how they would look. Outside of modelling a cave system and then cutting it in have and using a picture of the cross-section, I don't think I'll be able to overcome this shortfall.

Oh well, maybe I just need to try my hand at something else.

In the meantime, here is the larger-sized map. I experimented around a bit with some different effects. You can get the free map by clicking on the lead-in graphic or use this link.

Free GM Resource: G+

OK, I realize it might seem like I'm phoning in this week's Free GM Resource, and I'll take the hit because it is Memorial Day. I do have to say though that I've found a ton of great resources specifically because I had signed up as a member to some specific communities and added specific people to my circles.

Most of the people I've already posted links to their work before so I'll focus instead on just a couple of communities:

RPG: Kind of a no-brainer, but there are some good discussions and sub communities.

Gaming on the Cheap: Again, what a no-brainer for a blog like this. Some great ideas floating around on there!

The Library of Gaming Maps: A veritable treasure trove of maps.

Order of the d30: I've just been on a d30 kick lately, probably because of all the free stuff that Richard LeBlanc has been doing last month (and before/since...just last month was crazy...)

There are more I could recommend, and even more I personally want to check out, but this is just a quartet to get you started. The cool thing is that as you join more communities, G+ does a good job of recommending even more communities that fit in with your other groups. Just click on the little arrow beside your home tab (top left of your G+ screen) and choose "communities".

I see a few I need to be checking out myself......