Free GM Resource: Pinterest

I don't know of too many GMs using Pinterest, probably because I've always thought of it as the domain of women's arts & crafts sharing, but recently I've discovered it can be used as a useful tool for the Frugal GM.

In the past when I saw something I liked that I might want to reference later.....maybe a product I want to buy, a map I might use, or even some game concept/idea I want to borrow....I'd have to go through a whole "thing" where I'd create a file to save a picture or PDF printoff or even the URL. Information would end up getting stored in one or more places and maybe I'd get back to it.

Now with Pinterest I have a quick shortcut on my browser tool bar that pretty much lets me store a graphic and link altogether easily and quickly. Lumping items together into a single "board" is easy to do and sharing the board is a snap. You can follow boards and use Pinterest to search for things as well.

Right off the top of my head I can think of several ways this would be useful for GMs, but I'll only highlight one (the biggest IMO):

Click for a bigger view.

Here is a board for Fantasy RPG Battlemaps. If this particular board interests me I can use it to get more information I'll probably enjoy. In this case I can "follow" the board, getting a social media link I can check in on easily, and I can "drill down" to look for more stuff. In this case I end up at another cool board and see some links for sites I'd never come across yet.

Today I found a "must have" accessory that, while not obviously designed for in-game use, is the perfect thing for me integrating my iPad at the table. With luck I'll have something put together by this weekend!

I also found this gem of a video. Although it is for a system I don't play, it was a good watch. Luckily I saved so much time from saving ideas on Pinterest that I could waste them watching this video.

Frugal GM Review: Inked Adventures Blocks

These last few weeks I've easily dwindled down any DriveThruRPG credit I had on purchasing a ton of new products. While not intended for review, I'm sure I'll review most of it eventually.

This week I decided to work on the new Inked Adventures Blocks set. I'm lucky in that the creator, Billiam Babble, and I have a friendly exchange of emails and he's pretty much offered me any his stuff I want for free. Well, I'm Frugal, not cheap, so I try to pay for things I want to use and play with. Things I get just for review (hint, hint), feel free to send my way.

Free Map 040: Some Underground Beaches

I started on what will prove to be a HUGE map that there was absolutely no way I was going to be able to finish in a short amount of time....and by short I mean a free day's worth of time.

It is big enough I'll probably have to do the map in sections because I don't my new computer has enough RAM to do the work...and it has plenty of RAM.

Anyway, last night I was working on something else altogether that required me to break out my colored pencils. That "coloring project" got boring way too quickly and I ended up drawing out the beginnings of a map. After a HUGE mistake that I couldn't exactly use a Ctrl-Z to undo, I figured I was done. I was hoping to be able to just scan it in, but I had to use Photoshop to un-screw the map up. Since I had to do that I figured I might as well add some fill.....

I won't pretend it is very good.....and no, I'm not fishing for complements.I think I should have started with my markers and then used the colored pencils, but maybe next time. I'm not sure about the addition of some underground beaches. I'm not sure what I was thinking but I kind of like the idea.

You can click on the lead-in graphic or use this link to get the map.

Free GM Resource: Aeons & Augaries Geomorphs

As much as I love making and using RPG maps, I kind of hate the amount of work that has to go into them, especially for a one-off. I also love me some random tables. I don't mind putting work into a map or a random table if I get to use them multiple times.

For this reason I really enjoy some good geomorphs, which I like to think of as the random tables of the map world. The only problem is usually the level of standardization you need to pull them off. I've had some ideas about creating some geomorphs, but like so many of my plans and projects, it hasn't gotten much past the brainstorming stage.

Aeons & Augaries is "just another RPG blog", but there are some great non-standard (but still standardized...bear with me) geomorphs. There haven't been any geomorph posts in over a year, but because it is a Blogger site you can always append the url with "/search/label/[insert label]". Of course you need to guess at the labels because if you already have a label list then you can just use that instead of screwing around with the URL.

I don't put a label list on my blog either, but if you go to the "Table of Contents" page and click on a label from one post you can then filter the TOC to only show posts with that label.....

.....and thus ends the Blogger lesson for today.

There are some great geomorph gems on Aeons & Augaries, but to find them you either have to dig through a lot of posts, do some creative searching, or just use this geomorph search link.

Even if you don't want to use these geomorphs, there are some great ideas for making your own.

New PWYW Product: Gone to Ground

Instead of being a productive member of society I decided to try and turn my last map into a Tweak & Toss short adventure set. After playing around with it some I figured it was anything but a short adventure set.....

.....more of an intro (possibly) to an underground campaign. The setup is obstinately to recover a merchant's "possessions", but I didn't actually write any encounters that further that mission. Instead I stretched the map out to an absurd scale, something like 30 miles to the inch on the full-sized map, and put in a series of different happenings.

Because my map was so long I really changed up the way I presented the information on the interior page. I figure it'll either work or it won't.  I've called it "Gone to Ground" and it is available at DriveThruRPG as a Pay-What-You-Want.

I make jack squat on these....which isn't a complaint in the slightest, just if you find this useful please rate it or drop me a note or comment. I've given away over 500 of these short encounter setup since I started this summer and I've gotten exactly zero ratings or comments at DriveThruRPG.

Honestly I don't know if I should be continuing.......

Frugal GM Review: Side Treks The Village Vol. 1

I'm still in the middle of reviewing a slew of items I recently bought off of my DriveThruRPG wishlist. This week I'm going through the Side Treks: The Village Vol.1 from Chubby Monster Game's Matt Jackson.

Now in the honest of fairness, I like Matt and have been buddying up with him on a new project (i.e. Somehow I manged to shoehorn my way into something fun & exciting). Matt's blog is listed in my +12 Links of Helpfulness and you would have every reason to assume I'm biased going into this review.

You'd be right, but you might want to actually read what I'm typing here because the real bias comes from choosing what I want to buy and review, not the rating I choose to give. Granted if I thought this product blew chunks I'd probably not be reviewing it and instead spending some time asking Matt something along the line of WTFO?! He'd get what the "O" stands for, or at least I'd hope so.

Free Map 039: Surprise, It's a River!

Personally I've always been drawn to water features. When shopping for my 1st home it had to be by some water, which isn't easy to do at the edge of the high desert. When looking for maps to create I always enjoy incorporating some body of water. I've probably been a bit apologetic about it before, but screw it....if I'm giving away a free map I might as well enjoy making it.

This time I tried making the map in only an hour. I didn't quite make my self-imposed deadline, but mostly because I had a helluva time trying to find some of my base graphic files. Seems like I'm due for some more file house-cleaning.

This river map isn't too far different from other maps I've done, but this time I decided to cut away the sections of river that were not "visible" from the open areas of the map. You could use this as an underground river or maybe a river surrounded by steep cliffs.

The large map is 20 inches long and 300 DPI, so it is a rather large 8.84 MB in size. You probably don't want to download this unless your think you'll get some use out of it. If you take and drop the resolution to 100 DPI you could stretch that to 60 inches, which might rock on a VTT. Might being the operative word.

Anyway, have fun with it. Click on the lead-in graphic for the file or use this link.

Quick Play Report: Lunch Box Heroes

For a while now I've been on the lookout for a "simple" game that is less rules and more story. Now do get me wrong, I'm an old HackMaster player through and through, but sometimes I just want to let loose and have a few while running a game.

My group tried Murderhobos and it was "ok". I actually thought the rules were great and there was a lot of potential, just not potential to use it quite like I wanted. That could just be me after knocking back a couple, or maybe something just didn't "click". If nothing else it helped guide me in what I was looking for.

Bean! really seemed to pick up where I thought Murderhobos was missing. I liked the idea of a "simple" set of game mechanics, like can you distinguish between two numbers and count to six? I saw some serious potential there as well, but the use of beans as a probability generator, in the art, all over the text....it was a bit much. I was actually considering stripping down the game to get something going while tying one on.....

....until one of my interweb friends told me he had his own rules-light d2 system of his own he was working on. It is called Lunch Box Heroes (LBH) and it isn't out yet. "Rules Light" is almost an understatement. LBH doesn't build off of Bean!, but they tread some of the same ground and in most of the areas I care about LBH does a better job.

Now this isn't a review, but I figured I'd set up a little backstory. This weekend my group got to playtest the current rules and have fun. Sadly we were all playtesters for HackMaster and we take that role a bit too seriously to imbibe and play...for the most part. The real playtest will come later no doubt.