March was a Great Month!

I've spent far too much time sick this last week and not working on stuff here (Monday's post was pre-written). I won't share the disgusting deets, but I will say everything ended up with a CT scan and a trip to the ER. Thankfully that sounds WAY more dramatic than it actually was.

I'm still a bit weak though and taking my time getting back into the swing of things. One thing I normally do at the beginning of the month is review the previous month's "sales" at DriveThruRPG.

I'm completely blown away by how well things went last month as I pretty much set new personal-best records for a couple of important milestones. The Frugal GM has 652 downloads last month. This might not sound like a lot, but when you consider that we only had 1201 downloads for all of 2014......

I was also able to "make" a little more than $26 through a combination of affiliate sales, regular sales, and PWYW items. This is more than I've ever managed to get in a single month, which is even greater when you consider that the percentage of totally-free downloads is topping out at 96% (actually 95.92%, but I think I can round up). This has helped let me purchase some items for review and get "stuff" I need for future projects.

This last month has been a busy one and I'm hoping that April will prove just as fruitful.

THANK YOU! It's these little boosts that make it all worthwhile.

Free GM Resource: Microlite78

OK, I'll be the first to comes right out and say this.....do we really need another version of 1st Edition AD&D? Normally I'd say "no" as we already have a plethora of retro-clones to choose from. Don't get me wrong, I'm more than happy to put them here for others to possibly find useful, but I'm more excited about retro-clone supplements and not their core rules, which I'm generally not going to be using.

Of course I don't really think these games really fracture the overall RPG community any because....and I could be off-base here...I think most GMs end up running their own unique game table regardless. Even when I try to run as close to the "by the book" game as possible I inevitably end up tweaking some things for ease of use.

Because of these two biases/opinions/thoughts, I'm not too quick to get excited about another set of OSR rules and don't even always give them a once-over. I have at least one more ruleset in my "pending pile" so when I came across Microlite78 it didn't jump out at me. Now this isn't a review per se, but just some additional info on why you might want to pick this up and give it a look (I'm not the only one thinking these things am I?).

1st off, Microlite78 is a complete game and a 158 page download. Like the name implies it is a streamlined "lightened" version of 1st edition, well kind of. It isn't a clone of those rules, but more of a translation of sorts. It really struck me that Microlight 78 is probably going to be an "all or nothing" proposition for GMs and players. The "discussion" on stats is a skimpy paragraph and all the race "stuff" can fit in a single column of text easy. There isn't a lot of extraneous fluff, but it hasn't been pared down to bullet points either.

I think that Microlite78 is worth checking out...it isn't a retro-clone even though if you only skim it you might not get that. The links go to the author's blog, where there is a link to the forum, that has the download link. I know it sounds confusing, but unless I provided a direct download link (which I won't do on principle) it'd be too easy to get a bit lost as the final page is a bit visually confusing. You don't have to join the forum to get the PDF.

Frugal GM Review: Anyburg and the Lands Therabout

This week I picked up a cool little supplement that is currently a Silver Best Seller over at DriveThruRPG, and after reading it I can see why.

Anyburg and the Lands Thereabout: The complete guide to designing your own town or city for use in a fantasy role playing game (say that 5 times fast!) is actually a bit of a misnomer. Oh, it definitely does help in designing your own town or city, and it does actually give you a City of Anyburg, but it does a bit more.

This PDF is 50 pages where roughly 1/2 have is a great analysis and explanation of some historical data with the other half consisting of examples (real-world and fantasy) and some resources. The PDF is sized A4 for printing and is secured, but not needlessly so.

FGM027 20 Alchemical Concoctions for Your Campaign

While I've been busy on a new project I decided to take a bit of a break and come up with a selection of 20 Alchemical Concoctions for Your Campaign.

It's a bit more than just a list of stuff. I've actually done some real-world research to look up medicinal properties of certain plants and tweaked that information by adding in some fantastical ingredients. Since these are essentially the "poor man's potions" they have a shelf-life and some side-effects as well.

I should mention that you might have to do a little bit of work to use these, or at least more than popping off a cork and swallowing it right quick.

There is a simple d20 table (like it's hard to count off 20 items in order...) and I even added a drop table at the end. This OSR-generic supplement is available on DriveThruRPG and on my Patreon site as well.

Free GM Resource: Swords & Wizardry +Several Other Downloads from Frog God Games.

Last week while I was working on that NPC race for an upcoming adventure I decided I wanted to stat it out for a game system, but I wanted something that would be a bit on the "OSR Generic" side of things.

I ended up using Swords & Wizardry, which is available for absolutely free in a couple of places, but notably on the Frog God Games download page. It is up there with a couple of other items that you may or may not be interested in as well. I've already recommended A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming, but there are four other downloads to check out. Two are coloring books and the other two are adventures.

One of the adventures is statted for Swords & Wizardry and available for Pathfinder as well. The other is a 5E adventure. I'm thinking that 1st adventure (The Tower of Bells) might be a good example on how to convert between the two systems.......

...if anyone has already used that as such a resource, please let me know.

Frugal GM Review: Crawl! (DCC RPG Zine)

This week I'm at the last of the of the Zines I've recently picked up off of DriveThruRPG. This one is Crawl!, a Zine dedicated to the DCC RPG and I purchased Issue V: Monsters!

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.