Free Frugal GM Product: The Noerglein (a new OSR PC/NPC Race)

I've been kicking an idea around a bit regarding a potential NPC race for an adventure I'm working on and after looking at the Swords & Wizardry rule-book I figured I could just take a minimal amount of effort to flesh them out to a full on PC race as well.

The races in S&W don't exactly have a lot of extra text so I didn't set myself up for a huge amount of work. Normally I don't stat stuff out for specific system unless I'm writing a tournament adventure, but I figured...."why not, I'll give it a go".  Not like I'm trying to write Shakespeare!

The idea of The Noerglein is that they are a true race of humanoids descended from various bastard offspring of Human and either Ogre or Hobgoblin "relations". Sure, most of these half-humanoids would be sterile, but a few might not be and eventually were able to breed to a "true" race that had some of the attributes of their ancestors. I pictured them as noble savages with their own strong moral code and a penchant for staying the hell away from other humanoids.

They'll have a role in the adventure I'm working on, but GMs and players can easily put their own spin on it. It either works or it doesn't......

Click on the lead-in graphic or use this link to get the free download from my Patreon page. It is available on DriveThruRPG as well.

Free GM Resource: The Stone Alignments of Kor Nak

Since the adventures lately have bee such a big hit and because Gary Con is right around the corner I thought it would be appropriate to somewhat mash the two together the best I can with this week's Free GM Resource.

GP Adventures (AKA Ernest Gary Gygax Jr. and Benoist Poiré) have put together a hex for Tenkar's Landing. Called The Stone Alignments of Kor Nak, this 6 mile hex comes with two maps and an 18 page companion PDF. The adventure seeds are suitable for OSR characters of 4th level and......

....and I haven't personally gotten beyond the to maps yet. I'm kind of stuck on the awesomeness of the maps because I always dig (no pun intended) surface and subsurface maps of the same area. The maps look like they were done in colored pencil and they have a pretty cool simplified look to them. Somewhat childish without being amateurish, if that makes any sense.

Anyway I think it is worth a read and I'm looking forward to the whole collection of hexes when they all get finished.

New Tweak & Toss Short Encounter Set: The Situation in Salzberg

I've just posted a new item to my Patreon page and as a PWYW at DriveThruRPG entitled The Situation in Salzberg.

This is the 1st item I've produced using Adobe InDesign and I like the way it (eventually) came out. The setup for this adventure is a little different and I envisioned it more as a method for a GM to either "clean house" or possibly save his campaign in the event of a likely TPK.

Of course, that is just how I envisioned this being used, so there's that......

There are really two main components to this adventure and most of what I've put together is just one part, with a little bit of info for the other. It could be the BBG is actually a good guy and his men are a bit over-zealous in enacting his wishes. Maybe the "off-screen" antagonist is more neutral and figures a little bit of bad now will be outweighed by the good he can do later. Of course he could just be a BBG through-and-through.

Perhaps the party will desire to take a more "political" approach to put the situation to an end.....

...I like to think there are a lot of possibilities with "The Situation in Salzberg"

Frugal GM Review: The Undercroft #1

As part of the GM's Day sale at DriveThruRPG I picked up a number of items off of my wishlist, including a couple of Zines. Last week I reviewed The Stronghold and this week it is the 1st issue of The Undercroft.

Unlike last week's Zine, this one I got in PDF form and right off the bat I think I'd have liked this better had I gotten it in a physical format. I was quite surprised that this download came in two separate PDFs that combined were 69.2 MB!

"What....what? That can't be right?!"

Free Map045: Underground River Network

This has had me spending waaaaay too much time trying to learn how to use Adobe InDesign. The good news is that I'm actually learning something useful and have already gotten a bit of a lead on a couple larger projects. The bad news that some of those lessons have been a bit painful, like when I deleted a half-day of work because I thought I had screwed some basic settings up, forcing me to start over from scratch when all I had messed up was choosing the right printing options!

Ugh....

I'll have my normal Friday review up later this afternoon as I spent this morning finishing up this week's free map. Again I've been trying some new things and this map took a lot more time than normal, but I think the end result was worthwhile. I wrote a bit about what I was trying to accomplish on the Patreon download page.

If you have some ideas for maps you'd like to see, feel free to drop my a line. My Patreon's opinions carry a bit more weight in these matters, but the majority are quite quiet on the matter.

Really Small Preview

Like usual, please click on the lead-in graphic or use this link to get to the map.

Free GM Resource: RPG Knights Adventures (and some bonus content!)

According to my blog stats you guys really like adventures for Free GM Resources, so I'll have to keep with that theme for as long as I can milk it......

This week is a couple of adventures from the RPG Knights blog. Now there is actually a good quantity of downloads at their Free Stuff Page, and that's what I'll link most things to, but the two particular items I want to draw your attention to are the DCC adventures  The Serpent People of Skiterborne Swamp and Tomb of the Ghast Queen. The former is written around Matt Jackson's map and the latter has been "translated" for a couple of systems (including Pathfinder and D&D 5E).

The author of all this, Mark Knights, has graciously made them free for everybody. Definitely worth checking out.

Frugal GM Review: The Stronghold

Last week I received Issue #1 of a new Zine called The Stronghold. Now I'm not a huge fanboy of Zines in general, but I've been wanting to make a Zine of my own for some time and so I've been wanting to take a look at what is already out there.

My first, quick glance through The Stronghold had me noticing a lot of little quirks and flaws with this Zine. I noticed the paper wasn't cut quite straight, which prompted me to break out a ruler to see it's been trimmed down, presumably to even-up the edges of the folded copy. I saw tables that didn't quite line up right and art where you could see the edges, as if it was a photocopied production (but clearly wasn't). At least one article had me going WTF?

Oh yes, The Stronghold is a bit of an ugly duckling and a bit below the self-imposed standards that is keeping me from putting out my own Zine, but you know what? I fricken loved it! I will admit that I wasn't into Zines back in the day, but I do remember some non-gaming ones and The Stronghold had just enough rough-edges to remind me of those Zines and clean & modern enough that I'll actually read it.....seriously though, a lot of those Zines really were rough reading piles of garbage.

The contents of #1 vary a bit in usefulness, to me, but I really did enjoy reading it. I've been paring back on my physical collection of RPG "stuff", preferring the digital, but I have just the spot for this Zine.

$5 shipped is a good price-point for The Stronghold and I'll be looking forward to more issues in the future. If they keep this up I might need to add another category to my +12 Links of Helpfulness just for Zines.

Free Map044: Bugbear Crossing

I have another map up on my Patreon site for download. There are actually two versions, one with contours and one without. The map is sized to print out on a standard Letter page at 300 DPI.


I'm digging using Patreon to put up my maps since it doesn't take any space up on my Google Drive.

Like usual, click on the lead-in graphic to get right to the appropriate download spot, or use this link.