Frugal GM Review: Winds of the Ice Forest

Going through the list of recent offerings at DriveThruRPG a cover caught my eye and upon investigation I discovered that J.V. West had put out another adventure. I really liked Howler and my group finally got to run through it. I think they liked it as much as I did.

First off, I know that this is only the second adventure, but is there a mailing list or something I can get on? (I guess there is....you can "follow" a publisher on DriveThruRPG)

Of course I had to download this adventure and do a quick review. It'll be quite some time, years maybe, before my group will get to play in this, but I have the perfect spot for this.

GM Prep Tip: Book of Prepped Randomness

Unless I'm GMing a one-off or a tournament/convention game (which are usually one-offs...) I like to have some decent level of continuity and campaign mastery for my players, but I don't want to rail-road them or waste my limited prep time on information I'll (likely) never use.

Many game sessions are just continuations of a well-defined path (i.e. the party is already in the dungeon where we just stopped the session's action for the night) and I don't have to do much additional prep work, but other times I don't have a firm grasp on where I expect the players to go. Sure they might bite on the hook I set for them, but they may also decide they don't want to go "fishing".

Free GM Resource: Blue Dungeons Tile of the Week

Last April I reviewed Dungeons in Blue: Small Dungeon #8, and I wasn't that big of a fan. Looking back the issue at hand seems to have been expectations from the DriveThruRPG listing for the general Dungeons in Blue line, which didn't pertain to the Small Dungeons line.....

.....anyway, regardless of that specific product, I've been eyeing the "regular" Dungeons in Blue line, I think just as much for the nostalgia as for the fact I cannot wait to get my Blue Dungeon Tiles from the recent  Kickstarter. I think if I can get the two to work together I'll be set.

Last week, thanks to a timely G+ post, I was reminded of Mark Thomas' free Tile of the Week, which works with his paid products. There are 28 Tile of the Week entries as of this posting. That is not only a lot of free product, but it just enhances the value of any of the Dungeons in Blue you've already purchased!

Now you can go through and download each tile right from the blog, or you can also get a bundle of almost all of them (I doubt Mark updates the file each week because it would be a PITA) for Pay What You Want at DriveThruRPG. If you go the DriveThruRPG route, you don't need to worry too much about recent updates because when the collection gets updated you can just download the newest version.....unless you have to have those updates ASAP...then you just need to keep on top of Random Diversions.

Frugal GM Review: Blood Cult Temple Preview

This week has been a bit busy with some consulting work and when I had some free time at way-too-early this morning I thought I'd pop over to DriveThruRPG and look for a map I was needing for a potential location I suspect my players are going to visit.

I usually have several dangling threads for the PCs to pull on and I try to have a couple adventure ideas roughed-out, only putting significant efforts into the direction I know the players are going. In my last session the players indicated they may want to return "home" and maybe check out a specific town further down the road from where they first started.

Without going into too many spoilers, I might be needing an evil cult location as a setting, so I wanted to find something that I could use instead of having to devote GM prep time to creating some new maps. While I already have a large collection of maps, I always like to see what new maps are available. My one cult chamber map I have was already used for this group and while I could just reuse it.....I think my players deserve better.

Some of the new efforts from Heroic Maps has been on my radar and right on the main page of DriveThruRPG they have a new free map that is just what I was looking for! At first I was a bit surprised that this map was free and not PWYW, but it eventually dawned on me (remember.....way-too-early....) that this free map was one level of a larger map offering.

Quick Play Report: Murderhobos

Yesterday my home group managed to squeeze in an hour or so of Murderhobos. I'm not writing this with the rules in front of me so some of the names for stuff, er shit, might be off.

Everyone liked the rules, or at least reading the rules. Before I GM'd the players I also created two Murderhobos. I let everyone have 200 GP of weapons and the results were....interesting. I didn't allow the players to name their PCs, so any references are to class.

Our small group had three Murderhobos: a Brutal Fighter, a Sneaky Bastard, and an Unhinged Priest. Most of the weaponry was standard fare, except the Sneaky Bastard that preferred to use a potato cannon as her missile weapon and a rust dagger for melee.

Free GM Resource: Book of Low Level Lairs Volume I

This week's Free GM Resource is a quick one...sorry guys, but I'm phoning it in today.

Today is Labor Day and the first time since....I was going to say Christmas, but that isn't right...it's been forever since my entire gaming group has had the day off at the same time, so we are going to be making a bit more of a day of it.

We'll fire up the grill, I'll GM, my wife will GM, we'll play some board games, and we'll probably have a decent amount of libations.

That means I have more cleaning (OK, some cleaning....but any is "more") and game prep to do. No long post or time spent on an intro graphic:

Go check out And Magazine's Adventure Book 03: Book of Low Level Lairs Volume I. The fact they bother to label it as Volume I means you know there is going to be at least a 2nd volume. I gave it a once-over and it looked pretty good. Definitely worth the cover price! I loved the listing of "texts required" and it has a couple new spells.

Go get it now.

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.