Free GM Resource: State Tourism Office(s)

This morning when I woke up I spent some time before getting up thinking of what I wanted to highlight as a Free GM Resource this week. I wanted to do something "different" and a great previously untapped resource sprang to mind: local state tourism offices.

I have traveled a LOT in my life, as a child of a Navy Brat with wanderlust and then in the Air Force. I was lucky to spend all of high school in one place, which was a record for me until I got out of the Air Force and settled down in Boise. I still travel a fair amount, but more as a tourist than an incoming resident.

You know when you drive from state to state there is often a state tourism center somewhere close to the border. My idea is specifically for these centers, but extend to the online state tourist websites as well. These places are great free resources for your games. You can usually get free maps, great location photos, and awesome adventure seeds (with props). If you are running a fantasy game you might want to stick with the more natural tourist spots, but even a good highway map can be great.

Ignoring the interstate highways, many of the state highways were built on top of existing roads. Take a couple counties' worth of state roads, copy them over to another sheet, add the city locations and instant map of villages.

You don't even have to travel to get some great ideas as a lot of folks don't know what they might have locally. Within a 2 hour drive of my home (give or take) are some great foothills, mountains, rivers, lakes, a spectacular waterfall, and even some "ice caves". I could go nuts with the ice caves. Great place to put in some monsters I probably wouldn't be able to use otherwise. I can also grab a map of the caves and even some great photos to show as props.

Next time you are travelling, stop by one of these tourist centers. You might find some great stuff to do on your trip and some great ideas and resources for your game when you get back.

Frugal GM Review: Legend of the Ripper

Today being Halloween I thought I should review one of the "scary" products being offered for free as part of DriveThruRPG's Halloween "Treats".  I ended up choosing Goodman Games' free offering of Dungeon Crawl Classic #24: Legend of the Ripper.

Seriously, if you are even thinking of getting this adventure, ACT NOW!!! It is only free through the end of the day.

The DriveThruRPG listing says it is a D&D/d20 adventure, but the title shows it as a Dungeon Crawl Classic adventure, which is an actual recognized game system at DriveThruRPG, unlike my beloved HackMaster.

I'm not quite sure where it fits*, but I think it is intended to be a d20 game since it was put out in 2006. I think the name was lifted from the adventure series to use for their game system. At any rate, it is a minor point for me because the little corner tag on the cover sums it up well enough: "ALL NEW MODULE FOR ANY FANTASY CAMPAIGN".

GM Prep Tip: A Targeted Approach

A few weeks ago I detailed a GM planning approach gleaned from my military days. While I do use this approach often, I tend to blend it in with some other planning methodologies learned over the years.

Like a lot of young GMs, my early forays into GMing were fraught with an extravagance of planning to the point of absurdity. After a while I wasn't prepping for a game, I was essentially playing a different game....with myself.

Now let's be honest here....how many of us have sat down and basically created an entire game world? Created countries and NPCs on the far side of the world that will never come into play? Made up over-the-top high/higher level adventures that the current campaign group might be able to see some day.

I get it...been there, done that. Sometimes the exercise of creating is just simply fun. No harm in having fun, is there? In my opinion this is only a problem when you are trying to plan for a specific game (campaign/session) or when you really need to use your resources (time) wisely. Since I rarely hear GMs say, "You know, I seem to have way too much time to prep for my game!" I'll have to assume this simple, targeted approach will work for all GMs.

Free GM Resource: Paper Friends

As I've mentioned countless times no doubt, I used to be a HUGE fan of paper minis, even though my personal interests have mostly moved on for a wide assortment of reasons.

Good-looking paper minis still pique my interest and I've noticed that paper minis tends towards the fantasy RPG genre, with significant gaps in available minis for other types of games.

Now I'm not sure who is behind the Seven Wonders website (no listing and Whois failed me this morning), but they have a vast array of paper minis for a wide variety of genres. The Super Heroes really jumped out at me, with tons of minis for DC and Marvel heroes and villains.

This site does not attempt to sell any of these figures, nor does it intend to infringe on copyright. I think it bends the concept of "fair use" a bit, but is probably within the lines.

Frugal GM Review: Village Maps from Paratime Design

Do you know what I pretty much suck at?

I'm specifically referencing making city/village maps, though I'm not vain enough to think the list stops there, not even when it comes to GMing.

Normally I use the Roleplaying City Map Generator, but frankly it isn't always an option and it still takes me a decent amount of finish work to get things where I want. If only there was a relatively inexpensive, yet good, collection of village maps that would work for tabletop and VTT.....

....but there is!

Tim Hartin, over at Paratime Design, has a set of great village maps. I specifically downloaded Village Map 1 & Village Map 3 (shown above) to file away for when I take back over the table in a couple weeks.

I was surprised by these maps a little bit. First off each map comes as a two page PDF, one with place names and one without. Actually this isn't completely true....I should probably note the maps come with and without building names. Village Map 01 still has some labels for the fields and pastures on both maps. I think this was a super minor oversight that doesn't detract from the overall map.

I'm usually not pleased with having maps be PDF only, but when I went to open these PDFs in Photoshop, I could. They weren't locked down and made unusable, which is great because these maps are HUGE, coming in at over 34 x 44 inches at 300 DPI. They are almost to a scale of 1" = 5', so reducing the resolution to that scale but 100 DPI took no time at all. I spent more time counting the number of grid squares to make sure I re-sized it right.

I've already recommended the plethora of free maps available from Paratime Design and I'm happy to recommend their maps for sale as well. These maps were $2.50 each and totally worth it.

Free GM Resource: Icar (It's a Space Opera!)

There are a few free RPGs out there, and I'm always happy to discover a new one, like Icar, from Rob Lang.

Billed as a "Space Opera" (something I'll admit I double-checked to make sure I understood it right), Icar is not only free, but appears to be well supported. It has its own website, forum, blog, and is on its 4th (?) iteration.

I was really surprised by the blog. This appears to be a living, if not thriving game. If you like the genre, you should really check out the game.

Frugal GM Review: A Single, Small Cut

I've had A Single, Small Cut in my wishlist for a while now and finally decided to pull the trigger because the descriptions and the cover really pulled me in...I thought this might be a good "short adventure" to add into my campaign, with a few tweaks.

Of course after buying it and reading through the five pages of content it is readily apparent it will not even come close to something I can use in my campaign. This isn't the adventure's fault because it is just a severe misalignment with my campaign. If I was running a "normal" campaign it'd fit right in with some tweaks.

Now I'm not familiar with the Lamentations of the Flame Princess, but I've seen it labeled as a "weird fantasy". While the cover creature is this adventure is certainly "weird", I didn't get any such vibe from the adventure itself. Definitely no more than any other fantasy setting. Aside from the main creature this product centers around, the adventure setting seems pretty straight.

The main DriveThruRPG page for this product bills it as a "short encounter" but it is essentially a single encounter. Normally I'd be a bit PO'd at spending $2 expecting a short encounter adventure and getting a single encounter. In normal play this would be an encounter....a big encounter with some potentially HUGE campaign ramifications, but a single encounter nonetheless. The majority of the text depicts the building the encounter takes place in, the history behind the  BBG, and a fair amount of set-up, along with a good few paragraphs about concluding the adventure. The map isn't anything to write home about, but I think it is perfect for the needs of this encounter.

Odds are you'll have to do a little tweaking to the setup to fit your campaign, which shouldn't be a surprise. The PDF isn't secured so you could easily change small bits of text or add some PDF notes easily. I think I'd probably get a nicer map of an appropriately sized church (or make my own) and add this location as a known location for my players. Get them familiar with the congregation and the area, and then hit them with this encounter. What I'd usually find an excessive setup for a single encounter would really come in handy when using this as an area the party will revisit from time to time. It would even be possible to have other minor encounters here in this space to get the party familiar (maybe overly-familiar?) with this church so when this encounter goes down it has even more of an impact.

All-in-all A Single, Small Cut is a pretty good resource, regardless of what fantasy RPG you play. There are a couple of great ideas in this encounter that might really shake things up in your campaign.

Free GM Resource: Star Frontiersman

Over a year ago I posted a link to a similar Free GM Resource called Frontier Explorer. Notice I used the word similar......

This weekend I stumbled across Star Frontiersman and had to do a bit of a double-check because I thought maybe I'd just found a new issue of Frontier Explorer. Now this wasn't true last during last year's post, but now these magazines are basically two sides of the same coin as they are both operated by the same group.

If you're up on your Frugal GM Posts you might recall that the base game Star Frontiers is free, which really means there is a metric butt-ton of space-faring goodness all available for free home play.

Personally I'm not up for playing Star Frontiers. Don't get me wrong, this one game has a HUGE sense of nostalgia for me, but you know the saying "You can never go home again?" Unless I found a dedicated group to really do this game justice (as in this was our game), I think playing a one-off would just feel "off" and ruin the memories for me...even though we only played part of one adventure back in the day. My memories were more of Star Frontiers keeping the RPG dream alive for me during a pretty bad time as far as gaming went.

The good thing is, that is part of my gaming baggage and you don't have to deal with that!

Issue #25 of Star Frontiersman is one big old Alpha Dawn adventure which you can get from the website or on DriveThruRPG.