Frugal GM Review: Gygax Magazine Issue #5

I've been a bit conflicted on whether I should review this issue of Gygax Magazine since I went and reviewed issue #2 & #4, but I did buy the thing and because of one major issue I could see a review being relevant for some people. Besides, one review a year for this magazine should be acceptable, right?

I'm going to go right on ahead and address the "elephant" in the room: Gygax Magazine's release schedule blows chunks, and their problems getting an issue out in time is problematic to the point where I expect it hurts sales and interest. This is issue #5 of what was intended, and by all accounts still pretends to be, a quarterly publication. I picked up #1 two years ago, so this being #5 pretty much makes Gygax Magazine biannual.

OK, I've Officially Put My Hat in My Hands......

I did it.....I took the plunge and started a Patreon campaign for the Frugal GM. There are a few things I've really been wanting to do here and I just haven't had the resources. To some extent it is all my fault since I tend to put stuff up for free, but pointing out &/or making resource-saving "stuff" for GMs is really the whole point.

My attempts to "save up" some "extra" cash to finance these extra efforts is a bit futile (to say the least). It doesn't help that I'm currently unemployed.....

....and that isn't an attempt at sympathy. It just is what it is. I do make a few bucks a month from DriveThruRPG, but that just gets rolled back into DriveThruRPG for stuff to review on Fridays.

If you are the patron(izing) sort, please check out my Patreon Campaign and donate (or not). The thing is I'm not planning on changing anything as far as releasing products for free/PWYW, with the exception of doing more of it. If I get enough I'll be able to do some "extras". First on the extra block is a regular Zine (every other month) and I have some designs for a regular series of NPC booklets.

Mrs. Frugal GM is on a Podcast!

Nothing like a little good-morning plug for a podcast. Now I'll be the first to admit I was a bit "meh" on the BrainStorm podcast when I first heard it, but wisely gave it a second chance. I'm pretty sure I've heard all of the episodes since I have it on my iTunes feed and if anything the short (30 minutes or less) format has made me dump some of my longer podcasts. Those 90 minute or longer formatted casts are just too damned long for me.

Recently my wife was asked to contribute to the podcast and this morning, as in about 10 minutes ago, her 1st episode, is up. This isn't her 1st podcast experience, but her old podcast with a diverse group of gamer girls (their term, not mine) only lasted about 10 episodes.

Ok, I'm off to listen to the podcast, which you can find here.

Free GM Resource Expanded "Against the Giants" Super Adventure (G4-G9)

This week's Free GM Resource is "an adventure", but really I should state it is a "Big-Assed Adventure". How big? Like 6 adventures rolled into one big. Like high-level campaign big. Like, this is all we will be playing for the next year of Sundays big (YMMV).

Some time ago the good folks over at the Roll For Initiative podcast reviewed the 1st Edition Giant Series of modules from TSR. Now it's been a while so I might be a bit off, but they either reviewed or simply mentioned that some folks were working on a huge expansion of that series. IIRC they promised to get that mega-series "posted" for folks to download.

Now I've been mislead by their promises lies before (I'm still waiting for my reward from last year Vince!!!!!), but I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Last week (or so) they came through and had a link to the G4-G9 adventures. This link just goes to a "shared" Google Drive, so it is one of those things you might not find if not specifically pointed out (which is why it is being shared here!).

The files consist of two maps, a "complete" PDF of all the adventures, and adventures 4,5,7,8, & 9 individually. This really seems to be a working drive of some type as file names are a bit off, but everything seems to be in order.

• G4 Sanctum of the Stone Giant Lord
• G5 Curse of the Cloud Giant Queen
• G6 Forge of the Fomorian Smith lord
• G7 Giants in the Deep
• G8 Manor of the Mountain Giant King
• G9 Secret of the Swamp Giant Steward

If you don't already have it, the Official G1-G3 Against the Giants series is on sale at DriveThruRPG.

Frugal GM Review: Temple of Qultar

Today I was gifted a free download of The Temple of Qultar from Chubby Monster's Matt Jackson.  Right off I have a couple of admissions. 1st, I consider Matt a "friend" (even though we've never met) and 2nd, generally speaking, if you send me something RPG related for free I'm going to review it.

The friend bit might make you think I'll give a not-so-critical eye towards a review, but I like to think I tend to be a bit harsher with friend's stuff because I'm emotionally invested in seeing them do the best that they can do. My first-glance review for The Temple of Qultar was 4 stars, but I thought that was more from me being a bit of a nit-picky dick.

This download consists of 3 files, a PDF and two PNG graphics. To me the "real" download is the PDF since you can get the maps from Matt's website, so including them here is a real nice touch. Normally I prefer my maps to be 300 DPI, and these are 150 DPI, but again...nit-picky. Having two versions of the map is a great touch and my preferred map prints up nice. Because I have the PNG it is super easy for me to go ahead and print this out to scale should I want to. Not that I probably will, but I could and being able to do so is often my gold-standard for a map.

Now as far as the PDF, I usually harp upon PDFs being unsecured, which is often a sore spot for me. The thing is I really don't care if the PDF is secured, what I care about is if the file is needlessly locked down, especially if locked down to the point I can't use it. Too many times the PDF is put together so I can't get the graphics I need or even print it off. The Temple of Qultar is secured, but that doesn't really affect the usability any. The included map is a full-page map and there is the PNGs so this isn't a problem. Even though the PDF is only 4 pages, Matt went ahead and bookmarked the thing.

As to the content and layout of the PDF, I like it. The font choice and layout is a bit of a departure from other Chubby Monster games, almost as if Matt has been reading the same resources I have. I've found a typo or two here or there, probably as many as I have in the average post here. Odds are he'll have those fixed before you read this. There were a couple of thematic elements I was like, "I don't get why that was like that", but it made sense later. Spoon-feeding me the information on the spot would have been a waste of ink. There was one encounter where the number of monsters listed....well there is no number of monsters listed. I think this wasn't an omission, but a conscious choice, which I'll get into next.

Personally I haven't seen a whole lot of D&D 5th Edition short encounter sets, which is what I lump this into. I haven't played 5th edition and am not intimate with the rule-set, so overall I thought the monetary rewards for this encounter set were a bit on the high side. That's more of a gut feeling and I am cognizant that I could be way off base here (nit-picky), so I have to exclude that from any rating consideration. There is no "appropriate" level limit listed for this encounter set, so it is up to the GM to figure out the appropriateness. Coupled with the random monster tweaks in the "Getting There" section, this is why I think the one encounter doesn't have a "number appearing" entry. The GM is expected to fill in that blank to make it an appropriate challenge.

This simple aspect of The Temple of Qultar is probably the biggest reason I like this short encounter set and recommend it to anyone. Matt has given the GM a good set of maps and some great recommendations that have to be tweaked by the GM. Maybe I'm a bit biased, but most of the things I have seen for these newer editions is a hard & fast formula for appropriateness that the GM can't/shouldn't deviate from. Maybe this is a bit of the "old school" creeping into this work meant for a newer edition, but I like it. Again, probably biased, but I think GMs really need to be able to make the necessary adjustments to make encounters appropriate for their group and this short encounter set does that without deliberately drawing attention to the fact.

Now I don't mean that GMs should be able to take this short encounter set and make it suitable for their groups beginning 1st level adventure. I'll go ahead and get off my soapbox a bit and back to the review....

TL;DR: Good maps, 3 new monsters, & tweakable short encounter set for $1. The Temple of Qultar is worth it. Made for D&D 5E, but easily adapted to other rules.

Frugal GM Review: The Sandbox

As a small publisher wannabe I have a vision for producing what I think will be some great RPG products that people will love. Of course I am cognizant that a) my appetite for this may be far larger than I can stomach and b) I don't know what I don't know, so there is a helluva big learning curve.

This is why I'm developing a bit of a publisher crush on the folks over at Sine Nomine Publishing. Not only do they put out some fine products, but they are more than willing to share their institutional knowledge. So far it has been my experience that most of the folks that want to "share their knowledge" are people that really have way too high of an opinion of themselves and want me to acknowledge their self-appointment as someone "important" I should be listening to. They also tend to try to pollute my various social media feeds....

...no thank you.

Sine Nomine Publishing, on the other hand has pretty much just put their advice "out there" and really hasn't promoted it, or at least not that I've really seen. I pretty much had to stumble into it, starting off with The Smoking Pillar of Lan Yu when they included some cool publisher-useful info. That review got me a comment or two that led me to A Brief Guide to Small Publisher RPG Production (some awesome other stuff at that link...), and now on to The Sandbox.

While there are two RPG articles, the bulk of this "irregular journal" is about plotting & running a successful Kickstarter, from a production point of view. The article covers a bit of the same ground as A Brief Guide..., but damned if it isn't needed in this day & age.

I have a particular project that I was considering as a Kickstarter and I'm somewhat happy to see my initial plan is close to The Sandbox guidelines, but I'm not going that route. Even if you aren't ever planning on using Kickstarter the advice in this article is top-notch, or at least it feels that way to me. I have to remember point b) from above, after all.

All I have to say is thank you Sine Nomine Publishing for sharing your experience with the rest of us. I think they seem to get that we are all in this hobby together and bringing up the quality for one of us helps the group as a whole. Even if you aren't a writer, editor, or artist, you might get a great bit of insight off of The Sandbox. At the price of Free (as in beer), it'll be one of the best c

Map Work In Progress: Which Way to Go?

I actually have about five different projects in process that I'm skipping back and forth between. Some of this is due to a couple being larger projects (which need more resources than I currently have available) and some is because I haven't quite figured out the end-game (pardon the pun) for these efforts.

When I was cleaning out my desk a couple weeks ago I came across a couple game world maps I had created twenty years ago. At the time I had found what I thought was a cool RPG resource and I was in the process of translating it into my own campaign world. IIRC the "resource" was a book detailing a number of cities and countries that some series of choose-your-own-adventures books was set in. What really intrigued me was that each entry was quite abbreviated and no more than a page per country. Really just the highlights, but with just enough crunch to satisfy. In many ways I think this early exposure is why I liked the Garweeze Wurld Gazetteer from Kenzer & Company (now bundled with the Atlas to form the World of Aldrazar)

Anyway I found these old maps and some were heavily marked up on tiny hex paper and others were relatively unused. Sine I no longer have that earlier reference material I just tossed out most of the maps and scanned in the best copy I had left. While I have some memories of working on those other maps, the nostalgia didn't outweigh my desire for a cleaned out file-cabinet desk drawer.

My immediate question is what to do with this map now. Obviously I'm going to share it, but how much work do I want to put into it? Do I want to just update the map....do I want to start another game world guide with it? I'm half tempted to make the map the best I can (within reason) and then start to "drill-down" in a series of small products. If I did so I'd obviously want to leave everything a bit fast and loose so enterprising GMs can work their own particular magic.

Do I want to write to a specific game system? I'm starting to come around to maybe using Labyrinth Lord as my default "OSR" stand-in, but really I'd prefer to make it as usable as possible. Of course I really have to have fun doing this however I do it because I'm going forward with the assumption that very few would be interested.....unless I made everything completely free and then most who express interest would just download it and barely look at it.

At any rate, I'm of the opinion that I'll take this base map and start working on it, releasing the tweaks as I go along.

Free GM Resource: Mappery

A lot of times when I'm looking to make a map I start with a real-world map to get an idea of how to lay things out. This is particularly important if your map is supposed to be based on a real-world analog anyway.

There are a lot of places to find maps, but fewer places to find collections of more modern maps (maybe with a few older ones sprinkled in). There are enough collections here and there (I'm sure I've highlighted some in the past), but this one interwebs source, mappery, is pretty cool.

In addition to the requisite map collections there are a few great features worth checking out. One is the ability to have your own "room" where you basically assemble your own collection of maps. The best, in my opinion, is a "Gallery View" where you can pan-in on a big world map and see where the maps themselves are located. You can jump straight to the world view, but it works better if your narrow your focus first and then switch over. If there are too many maps in a small area they don't show up on the global view.

I went to the Antarctica page and then switched to the map viewer and got to see the location of the maps in the collection.  Pretty cool, yes?

Next time you need access to a real-world map, you should check out mappery.