Free GM Resource: Menu Generator from Inkwell Ideas

This week's Free GM Resource is something I don't think I've shared before, but I may have danced all around it.

Yesterday +Erik Tenkar (yes, that Tenkar) did a guest post regarding a GM's "go to" resource. While I have to admit his choice was way high up on my list I have to go a bit beyond and just admit that random tables in general are my "go to". I've highlighted Tablesmith before and I'm trying to learn how to use Inspiration Pad Pro 3 because I want something I can use on one of my tablets at the table.

In the meantime I tend to make my own smart-book of random table results I can pull from as needed in-game. One of the many generators I use is the Random Inn/Tavern Menu from the folks over at Inkwell Ideas. Loading a few results into a word document helps me pull a menu out of my butt.

Now I'll admit that I don't use this one so much anymore since making up my own menu generator, but if I need something quick and easy, this is still a great way to go.




On a personal note I'm out of the hospital and finally off pain meds, but sitting at my computer is a bit taxing and just hammering this out makes me want to grab "the good stuff". Thanks for all the well-wishing & positive thoughts. I'm hoping that I'll be back to 100% in the next couple of days.

Guest Poster - Tenkar - What is Your Go To GM Resource?

+Christopher Stogdill asked me to drop a guest post over here at the Frugal GM blog and I was honored to be asked. Chris has posted over at The Tavern a few times and it's nice to be able to return the favor :)

Of course, being that this is the Frugal GM blog, I had to put my thinking cap on as to the kind of
post I'd be writing. It didn't take long for it to come to me - GM resources.

I think most of us have certain resources or inspiration fountains that we return to, whether it's during game prep or when the party goes left and all you have prepared is to the right.

For me, the one thing I nearly always have close at hand is the d30 Sandbox Companion by +Richard LeBlanc . In the 21 months or so since it's release, I've gotten more use out of the 50 some odd pages of charts and tables than probably the rest of my gaming collection combined. It's inspired game prep, it's been used in game sessions and it's even been used at The Tavern to inspire gaming posts. It's like the swiss army knife of the OSR for me. All I need now is one for the White Star RPG and I'll be ready to run scifi games on the fly.

Now, what works for me won't necessarily work for others. We all have our own quirks and backgrounds that make us what we are.

So, tell the readers here at the Frugal GM what your go to GM resources are. Maybe you'll open the eyes of others to some excellent products or ideas that may have been overlooked.

Unexpected Frugal GM "Vacation"

Just a brief head's up that the Frugal GM blog will likely be short on posts because I've had a bit of an accident and am currently in the hospital. With any luck I'll be released in the next day or so, but I'm likely to be bedridden.

If I'm lucky we'll have a guest post or two and if I can manage it, I'll spend this down time work my trusty pad & pencil. It is hard to post from my phone and the WiFi isn't working to post from my iPad.

The Winner of the Monster Stand-In Giveaway

My apologies to anyone who might have tuned in to last night's Tavern Chat over at Tenkar's Tavern hoping for the winner results, but I hurt my back yesterday and literally wasn't in a position to attend. I'm not faring too well this morning so I won't be spending too much time drawing out the results here.

Luckily for me there were 16 folks who wanted a chance to win the Monster Stand-Ins I picked up from GenCon and reviewed here. I was able to bust out my very own d16 and roll.....a 16! Must be lucky dice to get the max result right out the gate...

That means our lucky winner was Tony T. Tony...I'll be in touch.

Frugal GM Prep Tip: Pre-Drawing Your Battlemats

I know a lot of GMs are fans of using Battlemats, I know I am.

The thing with battlemats is, obviously, you can draw on them, but that great benefit is also that you usually have to interrupt the action to draw on them.....if you do it in-game. Because of this, what usually happens is you end up drawing something rather crude.

Personally I don't think players really mind since crude outlines of rooms and obstacles on a battlemat is the de facto standard for most home games, but it doesn't have to be.

The answer is to pre-draw some of your rooms/battles onto pieces of acetate. This was my go-to response for multi-table (i.e. big) tournaments where I wanted all the tables to have a standardized battlemat overlay. You can get thin flat sheets meant for use with overhead projectors at most any office supply store.

Some of the higher-end (& quality) stuff from Dick Blick

My personal preference was a far cheaper roll of acetate picked up at a fabric store. Not just a run-of-the mill sewing supply store, but those larger places that carry upholstery fabric. They usually have long 6' rolls of varying thickness for a couple bucks a running foot. That stuff goes a long way.

I prefer the thick acetate because it is usually more flexible and easier to work with. The thinner flat sheets for overhead projectors are the best, but hard to pick up and place...or at least they are for me. You can solve that problem easily enough by taping a small pick-up tab on a discreet spot along the edge.

Something I've been meaning to do and haven't gotten around to, is creating some flat trees (outlines) that have been printed out onto the acetate that I can use as terrain. I could also do small buildings the same way. IIRC they cost about $1 a page at places like FedEx Kinkos and if you lighted the design enough in Photoshop you can still make out your square/hex lines form the underlying battlemat.
  

Free GM Resource: Far Away Land Adventures, Dungeons, and "Stuff"

Right off I have to make a wee bit of a confession.....this week's Free GM Resource may be a bit premature, but it is one of those things that is only going to get better.

I've highlighted bits of Far Away Land before, pretty much in two reviews (the Quick Start Rules and the Pawns Pack), but I was also collecting the adventures to make into a book.

Yesterday I read a G+ post that was chock-full of good news. Far Universe, the website for Far Away Land, is going under a major overhaul and will be capable of hosting their own webstore. Usually this just means that you can find another place to buy their rule-books, but since they don't have to pay the 30%+ commission to sites like DriveThruRPG, they can sell these products at a cheaper rater and still probably make more on the deal. All too often the publisher doesn't share this windfall with the purchaser, so hearing about this win-win is significant to me.

The new site will also have its own freebie section. The adventures are already free, but being able to easily pick them up with the rules all in one go is pretty sweet. As I'm writing this there is only the one adventure up, but that will get remedied quickly.

I suggest you favorite Far Universe and check back in periodically. I know I will! In the meantime, you can get these free adventures from DriveThruRPG (A1 Isle of the Rat Wizard is on the Far Universe Site):

A2  Whoa! Here Come the Dead
A3  Crazy Maze Daze
A4  Journey Into the White
A5  The Winter Tournament
A6  Pawns and Knights
A7  Temple of Zoko
A8  Outpost Knoll
A9  Barkoon
A10 Love Actually... Sucks
D1  Dastardly Dungeon of Doom

Exchange Contact Info With Your Very Own Gaming Card

For some time, the overwhelming majority of my gaming was at conventions. While I had a great time playing with perfect strangers, sometimes it is much more fun to make friends and play with some of the same folks again another time.

In order to do that you need to have a way to keep in touch and some outside of the table interaction doesn't hurt either.

For a while I was using some custom business cards that had my contact info on one side and something like a coupon stating "good for one free drink at the bar after the game". Needless to say they were somewhat popular, but those drinks can really eat into your convention budget fast if you aren't careful.

I needed a new "gaming card" and I'm not too ashamed to admit I totally stole the idea for mine....

Now it is no secret that my main game is HackMaster and I've spent a lot of time volunteering for Kenzer & Company "back in the day". For quite some time at the summer cons the KenzerCo D-Team had these crudely made cards that mimicked the chance & community chest cards from Monopoly.

The most common card was the "Get out of Character Story Free" card, which was intended to help extract the D-Team from the inevitable parade of PCs stories they'd be forced to listen to. What a lot of people didn't know was there was a second card they made that was "Listen to my PC Story". Over time the cards kind of disappeared, or at best there would be a half-mangled full-page sheet crammed discovered in one of the convention boxes.

What I did was totally steal this idea for my own "gaming card", but I cleaned it up considerably. 1st I started with scans of a couple cards I found online of older Monopoly cards and I figured out the fonts used (or close-enough). Then I went through my ton of convention pictures and singled out pictures of my wife and I, as well as two of the KenzerCo D-Team. My finished cards are black and white, printed on the appropriately colored cardstock.

My wife gets the more popular canary Community Chest version and I grabbed the orange Chance card. Printing these up at Fedex-Kinkos was dirt cheap and a great way to single yourself...definitely better than using traditional business cards.

Now I have a Frugal GM "business card", but I'm still a huge fan of the gaming card.

Horrific Looking Map-in-Progress

I thought I'd share this map-in-progress, which may end up being part of a larger project or, just a one-off.

The biggest reason I thought I'd share this is simply because it is hideous at this stage. I try to do each element of the map in layers so I can tweak each bit individually. On this map I actually started with the outline of a city wall borrowed from another source and then made a rough sketch. The city walls, already having been an auto-generated electronic image, comes out nice and smooth compared to my scanned-in chicken scratches.

No matter, because that sketch is just a rough outline anyway for the next few layers of colored elements in Photoshop. The colors aren't nearly as important as the width and layout of the lines for the rivers and the roads. I want the roads to be more erratic and the rivers to have some "flow". At this point I still have to go in and play with the river widths some since they are too parallel. The colors are chosen more for contrast as I'm working on the screen. They get changed to more appropriate colors and will have textures added later.

Currently this map is an obscene 40" square.....I'm not sure what size the end result will be.

I just thought some folks would like to see how horrendous a map-in-progress can be.