New Frugal GM Product(s): Menu Generator & Drop Table

Once in a while I get one of those creative itches that I really need to scratch and this week I've spent too much time taking care of that needy feeling.

Earlier this week I had an idea for a simple drop-table to create a fantasy RPG menu. I had an idea in my mind how it'd work and after creating the original background graphics and doing a fair bit of research I realized that my concept was far too simple and trying for an "authentic" sort of medieval meal was just unrealistic.

In addition to the whole idea of when & where, as "medieval" encompasses such a large swath of time & space, there were some considerations for poor meals and better meals. Before I knew it I was looking at a slew of menus with different price points and complexity. Eventually I had to just stand back a bit and hit the subject with a rather wide brush that "felt" right to me. I took some historical information into account and just hammered a few points around until it felt right to me.

In the end I came up with a series of tables that allow you to use a full range of "standard" RPG dice. I also made sure that the tables had some extra entries so the GM could add some regional fare and even had some room for an extra table. I didn't forget the drop table, but tweaked my original idea and made a rather simple table. The drop table is available as a freebie and I put a price on the full PDF.

Here is the drop table, just for a look-see. If you want it I'd download this copy from DriveThruRPG. If the full-on version interests you, use this link.

Frugal GM Review: Mad Monks of Kwantoom

This week I managed to pick up the Mad Monks of Kwantoom, a Labyrinth Lord compatible sourcebook. Truth be told, "sourcebook" is a bit of an understatement. This thing is not just a Oriental Adventures sourcebook, but also a solo-campaign generator. There is a ton of cool stuff in here to "lovingly borrow" and the author knows this, going so far as to note "just rip off whatever you need for your game". Now I don't need permission to do that, but this acknowledgement tells me that Kabuki Kaiser (an interesting nom de plume if I've ever heard one) "gets it".

Right off, there is a metric butt-ton of content in this download, 229 pages of it. The PDF was obviously created for A5 printing, but doesn't look too bad when expanded for letter-sized printing. I'm not a fan of the huge side margins and single column layout. That empty space is put to use often for little notes and asides in red text, which is visually striking but leads to probably my greatest frustrations.

I am extremely disappointed in this product as a PDF download. I bet it is glorious as a printed book, but as a PDF....not so much. There isn't a single bookmark in this PDF! The PDF is also needlessly locked down. You cannot change the document or extract pages, which means you cannot add your own bookmarks or even make your own PDF section from the book. Imagine as a GM you wanted to go ahead and actually make all these little bits of red break-out text do something. Nope! Do you want your own Monster Manual PDF? Not going to happen. Heck, even if you want to go to the Monster Manual you need to either know it is on page of the PDF or mouse up to page four, which is marked page two...., see it is listed as page 134 and either type that in to your reader's navigation box, or do a shit-ton of scrolling.

There are other little things here & there, like an almost full-page of a cool monster graphic (on page 116/118) when you know they have a color version, because it is on the cover! Going through and listing all of them would just be piddly, but mostly just an effort to vent because of the ungainly PDF. Seriously though, the PDF is enough of a pain I doubt I'll end up using this without printing it off, unless I attempt to crack the password and go through fixing things myself, which is a lot of PITA for a nearly $13 PDF.

Lucky for me I got this on sale for $5 and there is a lot of good content. Even if you aren't running a full-on Oriental Campaign, the information for new classes, races, monsters, and magic items can weasel their way into your home campaign. Heck, I could see some folks just picking this up for the variant Monk classes. With minor tweaking the 1001 Pagodas of Doom can become just a "regular" random dungeon crawl. My favorite though is probably the roughly 20 pages of content that is "The Little Tome of Lucky Charms". I've always loved minor magic items and this collection of 100 is pretty cool. Again with some minor tweaks this would fit in with any style campaign.

Overall the Mad Monks of Kwantoom is a bit of a mixed bag and it really depends on where you want your campaign to go. There is some great content, but accessing that content is a bit of a pain. If you want to simply borrow some elements and if you can get this at the cheaper price point of $5 I think it'll be worthwhile, but if you want to use this as a PDF and you have to pay the full cover price, I'd rather just get a printed copy and save some of the frustration.

If you are itching to run an oriental adventures campaign.....then all bets are off and you should definitely pick this up.

Free GM Resource: Dragon Age Inquisition Tavern Songs

A fellow HackMaster player and new blogger Andrew Bush gave me a head's up last week about some free RPG themed music that is up for grabs until February 9th.

Evidently the folks at BioWare had been inundated with requests for the tavern music from the Dragon Age: Inquisition game and they decided to comply. From now until February 9th you can head over to the game's website and download a zip file of 10 tavern songs. If that isn't enough for you, they've also included sheet music for the songs as well!

No I can't carry a tune with a bucket, but I'm willing to bet a few brave souls will take this sheet music and run with it. It wouldn't surprise me to hear some cool versions of these songs floating about eventually. Now I'm personally not a fan of filking, but that's just me......don't let my opinion keep anyone from getting their geek on.

The songs are short, ranging from 1:11 to 2:13, although one song is a whopping 3:23. I'm planning on using these to spice up my in-game sound board (when I get off my but and organize it!).

If you come across this after February 9th, 2015 all isn't lost as the songs will be made available for sale. It isn't as good as free, but then that is what you get for not following the Dragon Age, FrugalGM, or Dungeon Beef websites.

Frugal GM Review: The Grinding Gear

Last week I picked up a copy of The Grinding Gear, and adventure I'll definitely not be running with my current group as I could see this being a complete deathtrap. It is an adventure for a well-provisioned, and well-balanced,  group of 1st through 4th level PCs.

My first pass-through on this adventure I was more "meh"....the formatting left a little to be desired, but to be fair it was far nicer than what I've done in a similar vein. If I was to just rate this on my first gut-check I think I'd have done it a great disservice.

Had I been reading this in say...2007 I'd have gobbled it up for use with the HackMaster 4th Edition system. When I went back through a second reading this dawned on me as a great HackMaster adventure. Things that I'd frown on for my current game would have been quite awesome playing the earlier version.

This adventure is trap, puzzle, and screw with your players (only a little bit) kind of game. Many times I found myself chuckling because I could see the average adventuring group trying to overcome an obstacle by hitting it "from the side" and getting "rewarded" for it. More than once the author thought of things from this perspective and added some insight for the GM.

I don't want to post spoilers, but I have to share one of my favorite lines:
"...the answer to, "Can my character read sheet music?" is "Yes!"....."

There were a couple of points in the adventure that puzzled me (as a GM). I don't like it when there is some incongruities, or something that just doesn't seem to make sense from the game-world perspective. The author thought of this and added a "cheat sheet" that helps explain a few things. I really felt that the cheat sheet was a great touch.

The PDF is open, but that isn't as big of a deal because there is an additional PDF that contains the maps that have been tweaked for printing. If you are printing the adventure though you may want to replace the dungeon maps with the tweaked ones to save on toner.

The adventure and ancillary files are provided in both US Letter and A4 formats, which is a great touch.

If you're looking for a tougher dungeon crawl for your OSR game, I think you'll love The Grinding Gear. I particularly recommend it for HackMaster 4th edition games.

New Frugal GM PWYW Product: Tracking Drop Table

Today the FrugalGM blog has been "down"......well, not "down" like last week, but just not quite pointing right. I apologize to anyone who tried to access the site and went "GAH!" when they saw a huge picture of my mug.

After the all-too-long domain name server (DNS) issue with my last service provider I said "screw it" and migrated the domains over to Google Domains. For some reason everything got diverted to the main index file on my primary hosting account. Luckily it was an easy fix and I shouldn't ever have to screw with it again.

Because of the pending domain issues I didn't post anything since Monday and instead of my usual map I decided to go a different route and make my own version of a drop table. I ended up with something I can be proud of and most importantly, use. This thing is a huge file, but that's what you get with a hi-res full color PDF set for High Quality (or maybe Press Quality, cannot recall). I plan on getting it done up right at the print shop and laminated. Then I might actually make a small box for it, but that is getting ahead of myself.

Here is a quick glance and you can get the real deal as a PWYW product over at DriveThruRPG. You can use this link or just click on the lead-in graphic.

If you're wondering where I got the idea, well I was having some issues sleeping last night and came up with the idea of a drop table based on Chutes & Ladders. The footprints actually line up to the ladders I found on one set.

As far as rules go, they are printed on the table, but I didn't go too far into elaborating on how I'd use it because I like the idea of each GM inherently tweaking it for their needs. The way I'm going to use it though, is to use the table to mark progress, with the lead party getting a lead somewhere along the 1st line (boxes 1-12). A d6 & a d8 will denote the tracker and tracked (respectively) and the markers advance that many number of spaces. I'll require a tracking check initially and after any water or wandering monster encounter. A failed tracking check drops the tracker down to a d4 and I'll use the listed bonuses/penalties. If the tracker catches up to the "quarry's" space at the end of any roll, they will have caught up.

Free GM Resource: Drop Tables (Post in Progress)

This week's Free GM Resource is a bit of a work in progress, and I'm hoping that a few of my readers can help out with it. Over the last couple of weeks I've been seeing a few drop table show up in my G+ feed, presumably because Dyson Logos has gotten a bit excited about them as of late.

January 27th Edit: It might be useful if I explain what a drop table is. It is a random table that isn't a sequential look-up chart, but a graphical table that the dice are actually rolled on. The physical placement of the dice on the chart, along with the numerical values, determines the results. 

Now to be fair, I don't use drop tables. I love 'em, but I don't tend to use them. My preference is for electronic tables 1st and compact tables 2nd. Generally speaking I don't use many tables in-game.....tables are usually used when I prep for my games. I tend to have too much "stuff" to juggle when I run a game and more paper often means more mess for me to sift through.

Regardless of how or why I use tables, the drop tables I've seen are just fricken cool. Basically a nice intersection of information & art, I think drop tables are worth collecting just for the awesomeness of it. What I'm proposing to do is post links to the few drop tables I know about and as people point them out to me, I'll append the post.

Frugal GM Review: Schema- Halls Beneath the Hills

It is a rare day when I come across a RPG product I simply do not like, and today is one of those rare days.

Schema: Halls Beneath the Hills is a product I purchased based off of the free low-res PDF version. The low rez was a bit fuzzy, but good for planning layout. Heck, that is what it's advertised for.

The same graphics are used to advertise the "hi-rez" version which is touted as "presented to 100% scale for use with standard 1" base miniatures" Now right off the bat I have to call BS. The graphic files are presented as B&W .gif files that are 72DPI. Now they are large files, but when you re-size them.....and you have to re-size them.....they don't come out to scale when re-sized to 300 DPI. What should be eight inches of hallway (2400 pixels, which is 300*8 for those following at home) instead comes out at 1500 pixels.

The publisher advertises "NO piddly 3D assembly", but instead replaces this with piddly printing instructions. Seriously, if you have to provide a graphic and instructions on how to print your product to scale....when it is already advertised as "presented to 100% scale" when it clearly isn't.....well that is just downright false advertising.

I only opened up a couple of the .gifs and the very first one I couldn't even open in anything but a web browser. The files I did open ended up being Index color .gifs, which makes no sense as these are black & white files. Granted the size difference between an Index Color and Greyscale .gif is minimal...but still.

What are we even doing in this corridor?

I also noticed there was a specific mention of a commercial license available if you wanted to use these files in your product, and there were even some instruction as to how, but if you really wanted to do so you might need to get more information, "For further information and terms of license, see the Game Developer License in the Extras folder." Of course there is no Game Developer License in the Extras Folder.

There is a small one-off adventure and a whole RPG in the extras folder, which is nice....I guess. There is no mention of these goodies in the product description and when you factor in this RPG PDF takes up 62% of the download file it really feels like it was included to beef-up the download size, which is again...false advertising.

"Wow, must be a lot of cool floorplans if the zip file is 43.72 MB!" Nope!

All this could be forgiven if the "hi-rez" graphics were better. Alas, I was disappointed in them as well. I can see why there wasn't a preview, which is a shame because it still looks better on-screen than printed out. There is a noticeable difference between the low and hi resolutions, but it just isn't enough.

$2.98 is too much for a product I won't be using. I'm not even going to keep this on my hard drive. I realize that is a tremendously cruel thing to type in a review, but I pretty much feel like I was tricked on this one.

There is potential though, and I'll be more than happy to re-visit this publisher if some changes are made.

Free GM Resource: An Absurd Amount of Cool Fonts

I've featured fonts quite a few times here at the Frugal GM blog. Everything to a font I made up to a cool collection here or there.....heck, I even featured a resource for creating your own font.

A buddy of mine unwittingly lead me to this HUGE collection of fricken cool fonts. There has to be over 300 fonts represented.

I'm sure not every font is a gem, and it is hard to go through them because the main page is a simple list of fonts, but a little poking around is bound to be rewarded with some great fonts to use in your game.