Frugal GM Contest: Inked Adventures Hand Drawn (Large) Geomorph Tiles

I think it is about time I've gotten rid of some of my crap, er had a contest....yeah....a contest.

OK, I'll come clean. I'm clearing out my office because I really let things go this winter and when I came across one of my many small storage boxes containing the bajillion Inked Adventures Geomorph Tiles I painstakingly put together. I had them professionally printed, mounted on high-end self-stick foam core, and then laminated with high-end lamination. These things are a bit larger than 3" square and come just short of completely stuffing my photo storage box (11 x 7.5 x 5).

I think these things are pretty fricken sweet, but I also know I'm probably not going to use them. I already have plans for the electronic files and if I had been just a bit smarter about making these things I would have sized them to about 4" square. That size I'd have more of a use for because they'd fit the large collection of generic tokens I have.

Maybe some day I'll re-do these tiles, but for now.....well, something this nice has to have a good home. I've already reached out to Billiam Babble and gotten his permission to give these away. He liked the idea well enough that he's offered to let me give away a free download of the set as well!

So here is the deal:

• Check out the original review post on the Inked Adventures Hand Drawn Large Geomorph Tiles, to make sure this is something you'd be interested in. This set I printed much smaller.....
• Shoot off an email to iacontest@frugalgm.com

and/or

• Follow this blog by clicking on the little "Join this site" with Google Friend Connect. 

The contest will run for 1 week, ending at midnight (my time Mountain Time) on January 15th...as in when the 15th starts for me. At that time I'll open up the email account, count the number of entries, count the number of blog members, and use a random generator to figure out who won the tiles and do it all again to see who won the digital download.

I'll pay for standard shipping here in the US and up to $10 for any international shipping. I like to think we're all adults here, but in case I'm wrong I'll just go on the record to say I reserve the right to make any necessary changes to the contest as I feel like. A little bit or me feels dirty for even having to type that......

Please help spread the word about this contest and help me find a good home to this excellent product.

Free GM Resource: Omniglot

In the last couple of weeks I've been made aware of two particular font-based resources I plan on sharing as Free GM Resources. I'm a sucker for new & unusual fonts to use for gaming props...which is "funny" because I don't actually get to use them all too often....

.....but I can, and for some reason this pleases me more than it should.

Omniglot is an interesting little website that has quite a few good uses...even for players.

My current HackMaster is one of those "once-in-a-lifetime" PCs, a statistical anomaly for sure, but he started off the game being rather racist and didn't even know any language other than Dwarven. Well, technically he knew a little bit of one of the human languages, but not much. I played this up by using a crib sheet of phrases in Dwarven.

"But Chris....you don't know Dwarven....it isn't a real language!" OK, you got me there, but I simply decided that I'd use Icelandic as a substitute. Google Translate helped some, but in my experience a lot of common phrases don't necessarily translate directly (some swears come to mind), so I need a little linguistic help. Omniglot has some nice (i.e. "Clean" references) as well as some links to more. I especially like the help with pronunciation so when my Dwarf asks a foe "Viltu dansa við mig?" I can say it right.  Oh....."Viltu dansa við mig?" translates to "Would you like to dance?"

My first stumbling upon Omniglot was to find some obscure fantasy fonts, which can be found in the "Fictional Scripts" section. Fricken jackpot! Some even have downloadable fonts to use.

I highly suggest just getting to the site and poking around......if you find a font you like and want to use, but doesn't exist, I'd suggest this Free GM Resource.

Frugal GM Review: Mead & Mayhem

This week I have an interesting little RPG supplement that covers probably the wildest and most chaotic thing I can think to GM: a bar brawl.

Mead & Mayhem is a 6 page PWYW supplement pretty much consisting of a single bar-brawl table. The general idea is to consult the table at specific intervals and use the results to guide the brawl to its inevitable conclusion, which is the utter destruction of the establishment.

Put out by D-oom Products, Mead & Mayhem uses the much-maligned d30. Most rolls have a positive modifier to the next roll and when you hit 30......well, it is time to find a new watering hole.

I love the fact that this uses a d30, that the PDF is open, and that they've also included a "printer friendly" version of the cover. I think a little more work could have been done with the "printer-friendly", since the woodcut is not black and white, but it is a minor point. Since it is an open PDF I can (and did) "fix" the cover for my personal file.

While I'm on the point of files, this PDF is way too large in terms of size. Storage-wise this 6 pages comes in at 11.6 MB while the "printer-friendly" cover is 3.71 MB. I don't know if this is a factor of the Ghostscript distiller used or incorrect settings, but a quick "re-print" using Adobe Acrobat set to "Press Quality" resulted in a PDF not much larger than the cover. The PDF is sized for A4 paper, which might seem a bit off to Americans, but is perfectly normal for most of the world.

I think I'm more of a fan of the idea of the bar-brawl resolution table and using a d30, but I think there needed to be a bit more to this PDF than a single chart. Another table to two to run in conjunction with the main table could spice things up a bit so the table could be used multiple times with seemingly completely different outcomes. Speaking of outcomes, it'd be nice if there were multiple options for the end-result. Even something as little as when you hit result 40 roll on a sub-table to generate the ending of the bar-brawl.

Personally I don't think Mead & Mayhem is worth the suggested $3, but I love the idea and the use of a d30. With a little tweaking, some of which I've already done, I think this supplement will find a place at my table.

Frugal GM's End of the Year DriveThruRPG Review 2014

At the beginning of each year I like to do a quick review of "sales" over at DriveThruRPG. This helps me gauge my "work" over the previous 12 months and allows me to keep things in check with the initial goals I had when starting this effort.

I think I'm right in line and while some goals may change over the course of 2015 (i.e. I have some plans I'm not announcing yet) at the core I want be able to give back to this hobby that has given me so much over the previous years.

For some of you, these numbers may be surprising and for others it might be useful to have something to compare to.....just be aware that there that are going to be some discrepancies by design. None of these number incorporate the free Lunch Box Heroes game that was put up recently.

1,201   The number of RPG products "sold" by Frugal GM on DriveThruRPG in 2014
   667   The number of "sold" products that were new in 2014.
55.5%  Percentage of new items "sold" in 2014

42.3%  Percentage of 2014 sales compared to all sales since April 2012

$58.01 Gross Sales
$39.34 Pay-What-You-Want Sales
$97.35
      .70 Commission
$68.14 Net Sales

$0.06   Average Net Sale

     6%  Percentage "For Profit" Sales
     2%  Perecentage Pay-What-You-Want Sales
     8%  Percentage of revenue-generating sales


This means that 92% of everything downloaded from Frugal GM through DriveThruRPG was free. My overall goal was to hit at least 90% I think I've been successful in this regard. I'm a little disappointed in that there have only been three product reviews this year, but it's within the expected range of 350-400 downloads per review norm that has been established.

The one thing I'm personally not happy with is that there were only seven new items released this year. While I didn't exactly have a goal in mind, I think I need to shoot for at least one a month.

I do think things have been steadily progressing and as I find more free GM resources to post and more cool RPG products to review I like to think that this blog is slowly becoming a more valuable tool for my fellow GMs. Thank you for being a part of this endeavor and for helping more folks enjoy RPGs.

Game on!

Free GM Resource: Mini Terrain Domain YouTube Channel

This week's Free GM Resource is another YouTube channel, somewhat in the similar vein of the popular The DM's Craft. This channel is called Mini Terrain Domain and I'm digging the videos so far.

There isn't a large offering of videos yet, but it is apparent (at least to me) that some recent setup changes are leading to more videos. It seems that a new overhead camera rig was created to make filming easier and the majority of the videos have been produced since then.

I'm not nearly as big of a RPG crafter as I pretend to be. Sure, I have a ton of supplies and projects waiting in the wings, but some days I think I just collect supplies in preparation for some catastrophic event where I have nothing to do but game or prep for games. I'm not sure if that would be a dream or a nightmare.

At any rate, I enjoy watching the videos as they not only teach me how to make something in particular, but help get me to think of alternate ways of creating things....should the opportunity arise. While I do like watching the YouTube channel directly, because I get a bunch of suggestions, there is something I different to enjoy watching just the videos in the G+ feed. I think I like the clean aesthetic more than anything.

Looking forward to seeing more from MTD.

Frugal GM Review: The Gnomes of Levnec

I've been a little naughty this holiday season because I've bought so many things off of DriveThruRPG.....seriously, my downloads folder is a mess that I have to sort through just to find stuff to review (and file away appropriately for later use). There were tons of offers I just had to have, and at least one that didn't really interest me, but I ended up getting anyway.

One of my interweb buddies alerted me to an odd-ball promotion being offered by Zzarchov Kowolski regarding his The Gnomes of Levnec adventure: The $5.59 adventure was PWYW until 13 people had downloaded it for free. Now I don't know how many were downloaded as PWYW, or how long this promotion lasted, but I can tell you from experience that with PWYW I'd say only about 3-5%

OK, while I didn't really care to get an adventure I'd probably never run, what the heck....I had to take part in this....and I'm really glad I did.

There was very little I didn't like about this adventure and I think even those things were pretty insignificant. I'm not even sure "didn't like" is an appropriate term.

The first, and biggest, is that the PDF has a lot of dark, almost muddied, pages and each page has a huge black band. It is really obvious that this was designed as a professionally printed physical product that was sold as a PDF. I looks great on the screen, but I wouldn't want to print this at home.

Another thing that bugged me a bit is that this is a low-level adventure for the "Neoclassical Geek Revival and OSR Roleplaying Games". Now I don't know what this NGR game is and the first mention of this other system is on page 5 when a "stat" is listed as OSR & NGR. I didn't have a clue what NGR was until I read the back cover and then only the Neoclassical Geek Revival name. The level "range" is also on the bottom of the back cover.

Last is one of those really stupid things for me, but is telling (I think) of how the PDF was designed (i.e. What makes me think this was a simple PDF made from the production files.), is that there is a "special thanks" to a blog author for inspiration with a printed URL to the specific blog post. Why that isn't a hotlink in the PDF is beyond me. Another reason I think this was designed as a printed product is that the page count comes in at 20 pages. At least this PDF doesn't have any security and is not watermarked....always a huge plus with me.

I'm not going to go over the finer points of this PDF too much because it is a great read and I really don't want to venture into spoiler territory, which would be far too easy to do. This was one of those rare few adventures that were a sheer joy to read. I don't think I'd ever play this with my regular group because there are elements that scream "KILLER GM", but if it was a one-off type thing with somewhat disposable PCs....oh yes.....let me adorn my GM shield with some more skull stickers....it's been far too long.

There is a great table set for being lost in the woods that is brilliantly complex and simple all at the same time. Just this one idea alone made the PDF worthwhile to me.

The adventure itself is a little free-form and I think it would really work well as more of a setting area for some other adventure where the two were intertwined some. The area map is nothing really needing to be used (it works just fine though) and everything is loose enough to really integrate into something else if you wanted.

The Gnomes of Levnec is a great little adventure that is worth getting to read, get a new table idea, or possibly screw with your players some. I think it is totally worth it, even at almost $6....which is saying a lot for me.

Happy Chrismahanukwanzika Everybody! Here's a RPG Present for You!

I'm pretty stoked to be able to announce "my" Christmas present to you loyal 12 readers (and anyone else who happens by).

Somehow I managed to get involved with the creation...well more editing and creative input after-the-fact (if you ask me) of Matt Jackson's Lunch Box Heroes.

This all started out, at least on my side of things, as looking for a rules-light game I could play with minimal fuss. I'd come close a couple of times, but each step lead me a bit closer to finding exactly what I was looking for.

I'm thankful for Matt letting me get involved and even more so for being able to give this joint-gift from us to you. I know that usually those "it's from both of us" Christmas gifts can be a bit lame (unless the givers are married or some such, then it's not weird), but hopefully you'll enjoy this anyway.

Since it is a gift it is free...not as in Pay-What-You-Want, but free...free.  Enjoy.

Lunch Box Heroes on DriveThruRPG.

You might want to check out the rest of the Frugal GM "line" of stuff, or Matt's efforts with Chubby Monster Games.

Merry Christmas Everyone!

I don't really expect many folks to be online checking this blog over the holidays, but if you do...well I have little more than fond wishes for you......for now. I'm working with someone on a Christmas present for all of you and when it is ready I'll put up a post letting you know all about it!

I get to spend Christmas Day with my wife and later with my gaming group, so I'm set. We'll watch the last Hobbit movie and then come over to the house for a nice turkey dinner.

I hope you all get to spend the day with your family & friends as well.