Frugal GM Review: Decks Miniatures (Currently on Kickstarter)

This week has been an interesting week as far as selecting a product to review. I'm sitting at my desk Monday, fat, dumb, and happy as always when a G+ post came across my way about a RPG Miniatures Kickstarter.

Normally I'd be all BFD, but I decided to go ahead and check it out. I thought the minis were decent enough, but you can only get so much out of a video. One thing that caught my eye was that this project was from someone here in the Treasure Valley and about two seconds of digging led me to some of Brian Bartlow's other RPG products I had. It's been my intention to review some of those offerings once I manage to secure a cutting machine because I am so over trying to screw with a hobby knife for paper modeling. I love the attention to detail a good paper model can give, but I get tired of the cutting work too quickly.

At any rate I wanted to reach out to Brian, the creator of Decks Miniatures (and Lone Tree Games) and see if there was any way I could check out the prototypes he had. I figured it wouldn't hurt to ask and I was fortunate in that he works not far from where I live. A quick meeting over lunch is the perfect excuse to be able to hit up one of my favorite pizza places.

Free GM Resource: Pymapper

This week's Free GM Resource is a mapping program that really made me think it was the love child of MapTools and Dungeon Crafter. Pymapper is a tile-based map generator that has a decent amount of functionality. It isn't as straight-forward (or easy) to use as DC, but it does have quite a few non-obvious bells and whistles that remind me of MapTools.

Of course the fact it is available, unlike DC, means that it might serve as a substitute for that program. I installed and played around with Pymapper this morning and it took me a while to simply load up some of the tilesets I had downloaded from the website. Evidently it didn't like the fact I had renamed the folders of each tileset.

There are some tutorial PDFs online, and in at least one case, in the Pymapper files themselves. While I doubt I'll be using this program for my gaming needs, I think that there are a few folks who would find this a perfect fit.

Frugal GM Review: King for a Day Map Pack

My home game players are about to venture forth into a new area and while I had some very specific ideas about the maps I needed to make, I also had a map pack saved in my DriveThruRPG wishlist that looked like it would fit the bill.

The King for a Day Map Package is a $4.99 download that I decided to gamble on because the preview looked like it would fit my needs. There are three downloads to this product:
     A 24" x 18" jpg map that is 100 DPI
     A a set of 2 pages of 24" x 20" PDF maps
     A 32 page PDF of maps, handouts and GM aides that is 6" x 9"

My first impression was pretty good, especially since this will probably meet my needs, but honestly...it went downhill from here.

Free GM Resource: Tablesmith

OK folks, I have a wee bit of a confession to admit to here.....nothing serious, but I discovered today that I have been quite remiss in sharing one of my favorite "free" GM Resources.

My go-to random table generator has always been Tablesmith. This is the program I use as a basis of measurement for everything else. Tablesmith is a shareware program designed by Bruce Gulke (nice guy) and is $10 to register if you like the program. I registered what feels like a bazillion years ago and have been happily plugging away at it since.

If you have any familiarity with the program, or get some from downloading it, you'll notice my start-up screen is different. Back when I was making a LOT of tables for use with my 4th Edition HackMaster game I went and changes the start-up screen.

I found that making tables with Tablesmith was a breeze. The "language" is easy to use and file maintenance is easier than in most programs I've tried. Create folders for your tables, as in windows folders, and they show up as categories in the Tablesmith interface. The tables themselves are simple text files saves as .tab files and can be created/edited in any notebook program.

As much as I've used Tablesmith over the years I know I'm just scratching the surface.....and I'm OK with that. The only thing that might make me use a different program more would be if Bruce releases Tablesmith for Android and/or IOS. I'd love to be able to create tables on my desktop and import them to my portable devices.

Two New Frugal GM Downloads at DriveThruRPG

Today is a special day and I doubt I'll be online worth a damn (well at least not on Blogger), but I wanted to let you know that I've put up two new products over at DriveThruRPG.

Click to go to the product page

The first is what I'm calling an "Adventure Seed", which is just a fancy-schmancy word for "hook". It is written in the style of my earlier Tweak & Toss Encounter Sets and can essentially be another Encounter Set all on its own, but that would be up to you.

This Adventure Seed uses the treasure map I posted last week. You have been looking at my maps, no?

Click to go to the product page

The other product is an Encounter Set that works with that Adventure Seed, taking the players to their doom treasure. Of course the treasure isn't there, as in the Encounter Set. The treasure seeking will continue into another Encounter Set I'll put together next week.

Please, go ahead and check them out!

Frugal GM Review: Murderhobos

I was planning on reviewing a particular product when I discovered it isn't publicly available, so I didn't see the point. When I was searching DriveThruRPG for something new I almost just went ahead and grabbed an item off of my wishlist, but I wanted something new.....

....and that is when Murderhobos caught my eye. As some of you know I play HackMaster predominately (almost exclusively) and this isn't HackMaster, but it is peripherally related only to a few folks in a nonsensical way. One of HackMaster's game designers joking refers to PCs as "MurderHobos", which always made me laugh.

Free Map 036: Mountain Valley

The map I've been working on this week was an attempt to use some  bits and pieces of things I've been learning with other maps and try to piece it all together on a map pretty much from scratch.

This is the "actual" location from last week's treasure map.

I'm not enthusiastic about how it came out, but on the plus side with some additional tweaking I think the B&W version for the Tweak & Toss I'm working on came out a lot better.

Free GM Resource: MediaWiki

As long-time readers of this blog, well...both of you, might know, I've used several methods for keeping track of in-game information, and I've shared these methods with anyone who might be interested.

First I used a simple wiki that you could keep on a thumb drive: TiddlyWiki. It was just "OK" for my needs and I didn't really use it for long. Of course part of that might just be I didn't have an active campaign at the time and I couldn't be motivated to set my wiki up. For the longest time I was using Blogger, and for just a simple campaign journal it was perfect. With some difficulty I was able to use hot-links from one page to another, but on more than one occasion those links didn't work. The blog did a great job of making things prettier for "outsiders" to follow the game, but it didn't do as well as I wanted for campaign management.