Work-in-Progress: HackMaster "GM Battlemat"

With the Origins Game Fair a quick month away I realized I have to get some of my....."stuff" together for this big convention. I've been to both Origins and GenCon a couple of times, but it is Origins that brings me back year after year......

Part of it is the city, but I just have more fun at Origins and it feels to me like the convention really wants me to have fun, where GenCon has always felt like a hand in my wallet.

I've organized events at both conventions and the experience on that end is night & day....

...anyway, I'm assuming I might be GMing HackMaster and I have to be prepared for some bigger battles. My home group had a HUGE battle our last session and I tested a possible solution to make things easier for me as a GM. It worked out only "OK", but a major limitation was my design.....I only had about an hour of prep time and a local printer.

Since I have a month, and access to some professional printing, I've decided to take another stab at this "GM Battlemat" that I'm going to use at Origins. The key idea is to cram a lot of combatants stats in a small space, but more importantly, line a counter up so I can quickly & easily scan down a line to see who goes on any given count.

Now this WIP picture is hideous...and it should be at the stage I'm at.

Free GM Resource: Barbarians of Lemuria

Continuing with the recent theme I have another rules-lite RPG. This one, Barbarians of Lemuria, hearkens back to the age of pulp fiction with the likes of Appendix N writer Lin Carter.

Set in the world of Thongar the Barbarian, which was the protagonist of a series of books and some Marvel comics, Barbarians of Lemuria is a 43 page PDF that covers player's handbook, GM book, sourcebooks....everything. There is an ancillary document that is barely more than a page which adds two more "stats" for the game and there are a couple of PC sheets.

If you fancy a Conan-ish rules-light game and don't mind learning the background of the setting, which seems to be an integral part of the game, then you might want to pick up the Barbarians of Lemuria. I was particularly impressed by the simplicity of the magic system.

Free Map047: Lake Island

I finished up this map yesterday and promptly forgot to let you guys know about it.

My original idea was nothing more than a huge underground lake and I figured I'd just start with a "regular" lake source map. Since I wanted the surrounding geography to be more....."interesting" I went with a crater lake. Little did I know there are crater lakes all over the Northwest.

This map is based of of "the" Crater Lake in Oregon. I wanted to de-emphasize the contours, but still make them kind of usable, so I scrubbed all the elevation markers and "fixed" the resulting gaps in the index contour lines. The island was moved and rotated...for reasons....and I essentially drew out the scale ten-fold. At the new scale the lake is maybe 50 miles across.

Since my idea is for an underground lake in a colossal cavern, there are obvious no trees. I had thought about giant mushrooms, but I realized that to even be seen at this scale they would have to be something approaching football-field in size. Instead I just carpeted the ground with various assortment of colors depicting different types of fungus & molds. The types of fungi change as you move around the lake and there is some blending as the predominate species give way to each other. There is also a reason the island is a different color......but I still have to write up the associated adventure.

The free version of the map is a 300 DPI JPEG set to print out full-size on a standard letter (landscape) page. My Patrons get the map sized for poster printing at 18" x 24" as a JPEG and as a PDF (both without the Patreon markings). Like usual, you can click on the lead-in graphic to go to the appropriate download page, or you can use this link.

Frugal GM Review: The Flayed King

A couple weeks ago was Swords & Wizardry Appreciation Day. Admittedly I don't play Swords & Wizardry, but I would if given the chance....., but I do love me some OSR material because it is usually good enough & easy enough to tweak between the various systems.

While there were plenty of Appreciation Day offerings, I picked up just one: The Flayed King by Tim Shorts. I particularly liked how it was such a short adventure.

Come Listen to my Crappy Voice! (i.e. The Frugal GM gets to guest-host a podcast)

A couple of weeks ago I was honored to be asked to guest-host a couple of episodes of the The Brain Storm Think Tank Podcast (say that five times fast!). The first of those episodes came out today and I'll admit I'm less than pleased with my performance, from a technical standpoint.

If you go to check out the podcast I'll apologize in advance. If I get asked to come back I think I'll have to use a better computer....or at least that is what I think the issue was. The netbook I was using, because I needed the webcam, was a bit maxed out resource-wise and the audio obviously suffered because of it.

Regardless, I had a lot of fun and wouldn't mind trying to put together some live-play podcasts....assuming I could manage the editing process.

Free GM Resource: Mazes & Minotaurs RPG

I seemed to have fallen into a rabbit hole and I'm not quite sure how far down it goes.....

Over the last few weeks I've posted some RPGs as the Free GM Resource of the Week and somehow I keep finding more RPGs. Some are rather small while others, like Mazes & Minotaurs, seem to have a lot of content to them.

Mazes & Minotaurs has two main editions, both of which are free to download, and both have been updated some. The Original 1972 edition is 74 pages of  "Roleplaying Heroic Adventure in the Mythic Age" while the 1987 Edition is a series of sourcebooks.

Now I haven't really taken the time to reads through all five of these books, and I'm not sure I'll ever give them a go, but I have already seen at least one thing that I might want to study to possibly bring over to some other games.

11:43 AM EDIT
D'oh! Evidently I did some odd Fruedian Slip and called Mazes & Minotaurs by the name "Mazes & Monsters".....twice! I've fixed that momentous blunder.

Mazes & Minotaurs is NOT Mazes & Monsters!

Free Map046: Anthill

I've just put up my newest free map of a multi-layered anthill onto my Patreon Page.

This particular map has taken me a long time to wrap my head around. What I ended up doing was breaking the map down to three distinct layers that were turned into 5 maps: this free overview map, and four maps that show going from layers 1-2, 2-3, and then back from 3-2 and 2-1.

My Patrons get access to those maps as a bonus, but all of them will be used on a smaller scale in my next adventure. Like usual, you can click on the lead-in graphic or use this link to get to the download page.

Frugal GM Review: How to Hexcrawl

I picked up this PDF from DriveThruRPG last month and I'm wishing I remembered why. I know the title alone intrigues me and this is why I'd get it today, but last month? Regardless I have a copy of How to Hexcrawl and I'll be keeping it in my collection.

TL;DR: Right off I want to state that I think this pay-what-you-want product from Taskboy Games is worth picking up, even if you don't play Labyrinth Lord. I thought the information held within is pretty good, but the presentation could use some work.

I have to admit that I enjoyed reading this PDF. Some of this might be attributed to the novelty since I don't ever recall playing in or running a hexcrawl (straight-up overland wilderness...yes, hexcrawl...no). The main usefulness I see is the simple codifying of the procedures used to GM/referee a hexcrawl. I think most GMs would probably naturally take most of the actions listed in this reference, but I know myself well enough that there are some considerations I'd tend to gloss over without a set procedure. The author put forth some good ideas that might seem like no-brainers, but I highly doubt I'd have bothered to think of these unless I had done a bunch of hexcrawls in the past and even then....

Example Page

There is also a great list of resources at the end of this "book" that are definitely worth checking out.

While I liked the content, it really felt more like a magazine article instead of a self-standing product and I think overall this could have benefited greatly by some better formatting. The bottom of each page has a HUGE graphic and while some pages do have text coming down relatively close to the graphic, the realistic bottom margin on each page is just shy of 2.5". The side margins are just under an inch in width, as is the top margin (sans header). Altogether this whittles down the standard letter page 6" x 9" format. Between the truncated page size, overly large graphics, and basic font & paragraph layout it feels like less than a dozen pages of content have been stretched out to the 27 pages as presented.

How to Hexcrawl is a PWYW PDF with a suggested price of 99¢. While the usefulness for your campaign may vary, I found it a decent enough read.