Frugal GM Essential GM Gear: Staedtler Non-Permanent Pens

With arguably the biggest convention of the year coming up (depending what you mean by "big") I thought I might write a few posts about what I consider some essential GM gear, highlighting one small piece of kit at a time.

I will not cover dice though, because I have mentioned before I'm a bit of a dice snob and that is one thing too many GMs and players hold precious. I might as well try to stoke an edition war.....nope, just not gonna happen.

Frugal GM Review: Monster Pamphlet #1

This week I grabbed what looking like a cool little zine-style mini-monster book simply called "Monster Pamphlet #1". Written by Arlin Ortiz and put out under the Monster Pamphlets imprint, this 1st issue of 3 is a Pay What You Want product.

Right off the bat, this PDF is has no PDF security, which really isn't a factor with the exception that means there won't be a PDF watermark on every page. I think that is important for a visual product like this.

Originally running $5 an issue, the 12 page PDFs are being released for $2 each. For that 12 pages you get 2 pages of cover, 5 pages of write-up and 5 pages of art.

FGM033 "Were" Have the Good brothers Gone?

I have a new Tweak & Toss available over at DriveThruRPG entitled "Were" Have the Good Brothers Gone? Obviously the title is a bit of a give-away that there might be some lycanthropy in this adventure....or is it?

This time around I didn't go through and list a bunch of encounters, but instead focused on a couple of "important" points and used the remaining space to highlight a number of specific tweaks that could be made based on the party's strength. It is a bit of a departure from my normal Tweak & Toss short encounter sets, but I like changing it up some.

Gaining a Bit of GM Insight from an Out-of-Table Problem

I don't try to go too-personal here at the Frugal GM, but there have been some times I can't help myself. I've gotten on the old soap-box once or twice and I've saved the really negative post I had for someone else's blog (to be fair it was more appropriate over there.)

I like to think that think, well probably delude myself, that my real-life alignment is somewhere along the lines of Neutral Good, but considering my military and organizations (Scouts, Toastmasters, etc.) background I'm probably in the Lawful spectrum for sure. Most likely Lawful Neutral.

Like many, I have some slightly convoluted personal code that helps guide my actions. I like to think most of us have them and if you could codify them they'd make for an interesting read. A good "mission statement"-ish phrase or two doesn't hurt and trying to get back to the overall RPG theme here, might be useful in creating NPCs.

GM Prep Tip: Tracking Some of the Fiddly Bits

I'm quite certain that the last thing any GM wants is to add a heap of extra work on their plate when it comes to running a game. For this reason I'm willing to bet that most GMs gloss over a lot of the fiddly rules in their chosen game system.

As a HackMaster player I keep track of a helluva lot more "stuff" than I'd ever be willing to do as a HackMaster GM, and even then I've had to go out of my way to make it easier for me to do. My custom PC sheet tracks my PC's carried weight, fatigue, and even the last time I used a skill (well, a check box if I'd used it since I last leveled). I don't even think the "Official" HackMaster PC sheets keep track of this information.

Now I'm not advocating my PC sheet, or even my game, but just noting that often the more fiddly bits of a game can be a royal pain in the ass. It is usually just best to either work out some sort of shortcut or determine what matters and what doesn't.

Free GM Resource: Wyloch's Armory

This week's Free GM Resource is another YouTube channel. Hopefully you aren't sick of dungeon crafting channels because I'm sure not. If it helps any I don't have any more lined up....

Wyloch's Armory is a new YouTube Channel that only started up two months ago and already has 16 crafting videos.

There are a couple of things I love about this channel. 1st is that the videos are clearly labeled. I know it is a minor thing, but depending on how you are watching your videos, having a well-labeled video "still" is really worthwhile.

Wyloch also has a pretty cool intro and I like the overhead camera position when he is crafting. The videos are shorter as well, which is nice. Usually if I'm following along I want to see the highlights, not follow through every fricken second of a build.

I hope you like these as much as I have!

A Bit of Re-Work on my Last Map

I received a comment asking me to post a small full-scale (?) version of the Isometric(ish) map from last week. I'm still playing around with these maps and while I was working on something else I figured, "why not?"

Ugh....I kind of wish I hadn't taken a closer comparative look.

While I liked the end result of Map050, there were aspects from the earlier map that I attempted to "improve upon" and I don't think I did. These are probably minor points that might not matter to anyone else, but I found the newer map to be too far of a departure in some aspects that I didn't realize at the time were important.

Click for larger view

I wanted to make the cavern walls taller, which was easily accomplished, and I like those results. The brown outlines? Ugh...they got to go! I also didn't care for the level of detail of the cavern floor, or even the wall striations. The new map had just too much detail.

A few "quick" trips of various layers of the original map through Adobe Illustrator got me some of the fixes I wanted. I'm not thrilled with the stipple layer, but I didn't bother to re-do it for the updated map. Instead I just put a dark photo-filter on the old one and called it "close enough".

The bonus is that now it will be much easier for me to make a larger version of this map should I want to. Blowing it up 2 or 3 times the original size will be easy. Going too far beyond that will tax my computer memory and is probably overkill anyway.

I've posted updated maps for my Patrons and if there is a call for it I could add updated PDF versions as well, but I'll save that effort for when it is called for.

Free Map050: Another Isometric Cave System

I've finished the map from last Thursday and decided to go ahead and make it available for free on my Patreon site.

I really enjoyed the last attempt at an isometric map and sometime between then and now I had a few ideas for improvement, one of which was a rather "duh!" moment for me.....man the things that come to mind when you are trying to sleep....

Anyway, this map is going to be part of a somewhat inter-connected series and I've taken a minor liberty with the water feature on this map to try and show the lake pours into a waterfall. The WIP map had the waterfall featured much more prominently and I think without the other parts of the cave system in place it looked off. One appropriate remark I got on that map is that this cave system really looked like it was "floating"..and I think that waterfall was a big part of that unwanted effect.

Here is a larger view (but smaller than the download size) of the finished map. The free map comes with two versions as a PDF and my Patrons get the maps as three PNG files (grid, no-grid, and a 100 dpi VTT version).