About This Week's Frugal GM Review...

This week's review will be a day late due to unforeseen complications with Thanksgiving.

Sandbox Gaming Question: How Much Do You Need to Start?

In a chat last week a question came up about how much does a GM have to have pre-planned at the onset of an open, or "sandbox" campaign.

There were several responses, but almost all of them involved using the PC's ability to travel as a factor. Most of the GM's agreed on having the immediate starting area planned out, it was just the mode of travel that was at issue.

Me, I assume the PCs starting out will not have access to expensive horses and will be on foot. I'll plan out the starting town/city and figure that the next villages will be at most a day's walk away. Larger cities will be no less than three day's walk away so the PCs/NPCs could walk there, spend the day conducting business in the city, and walk back in the span of a week.

All I do at that point is flesh out enough of a skeleton to represent those other villages and the city, and have some road encounters, village encounters, and a few dungeons that I can place wherever the PC's decide to go.

Of course, knowing what your players want and how they are most likely to take your adventure hooks helps a lot. I also recommend the d30 Sandbox Companion as a help.

My open question about this is: "How much pre-planning do you think a GM needs when starting a sandbox campaign?"

Last Bit of d30 Height & Weight Tables now Available

I think I've milked the d30 Height & Weight tables enough......

The remaining races I had left were an assortment of "lesser-used" races from HackMaster 4th & 5th edition:
     * Grel
     * Gnome Titans
     * Sil-Karg
     * Pixie-Kin
     * Half-Ogres
     * Gnomelings

I just couldn't see putting these up as individual races, especially since the Sil-Karg entries were doubled because there was some sexual dimorphism resulting in large differences in height & weight.

What I did was combine the remaining tables into two PDFs, one for English units (FGM031ze) and one for Metric units (FGM031zm).

Free GM Resource: The Terrain Tutor

This week's Free GM Resource is another YouTube channel.

The Terrain Tutor has about a bazillion videos and not all of them are ones I want to sit through, but there are a lot of great tips, tricks, and how-to videos well worth your time.

I particularly enjoy these playlists:
Back 2 Basics for Wargames Terrain and Scenery Builders
How to make simple wargaming hills
Quick and Simple Tips

There are several more playlists to watch as well.

Frugal GM Review: A Guide to Hallowfest

I was link-hopping recently and came across this "Halloween" themed Pay-What-You-Want supplement called A Guide to Hallowfest. It was published by Sundered Blade Games.

I had never heard of Sundered Blade Games, but a quick check of their publisher's page revealed that they only have a few titles out and almost all of them are PWYW. They also have one adventure for sale that is written for two systems.

Really not bad for a start-up from earlier this year.

A Guide to Hallowfest is an 18 page black & white PDF in a Zine (5.5" x 8.5") format that  comes in under 4 MB. The PDF is secured, but I don't really see the need to extract pages or reassemble the PDF.

There is a little bit of information on what appears to be a custom game world, but at best it is a couple of sentences and this adventure could be put anywhere in an existing campaign. What this supplement is really about is a small dungeon crawl. The creatures and items listed in the beginning are used in the adventure.

Normally I'd rather have the adventure written 1st and then have a listing/entry for the monsters and items. When I was reading A Guide to Hallowfest the fact it started out with the monsters and then the items before going into the adventure.....didn't really bother me any. The art in the PDF was a  little "cutesy", but not distracting. One monster didn't have a picture but instead some text reading "Image not approved for all audiences". That felt like a bit of a cop-out.

This bit of text and the cover are my only criticisms. I'd have preferred a white cover instead of an orange one so I could print this out for use. An inclusion of a printer-friendly cover would have bumped up the page count to 20 and if they enlarged some of the fine print (like the legal stuff) and/or included a title page they could have gotten the page count to 22. This would allow the end-user to print pages 2-21 (a 20 page spread) in a booklet format and have a nice, full printed product.

This is a minor consideration though and not something I care enough about to drop my rating any. Overall I did enjoy this adventure and think A Guide to Hallowfest would be a fun adventure to run my players through.

Free Map055: A Set of Caverns

I've just posted Free Map055 ocer at my Patreon page. This is a small set of two caverns that are not connected.

When I make these caverns, unless I'm using them for a specific adventure, I usually do not put in things like entrances and features, leaving those decisions up to the GM.

I have been putting in some grids, but I haven't specified the distance. The GM could make them 5' or 5 yards/meters for all I care.

Click on this link or on the graphic below to go straight to the pertinent Patreon post.

Limited-Time Good Deal for a Free Low-Level OSR Adventure

Richard J. LeBlanc, Jr., the man behind the awesomeness that is New Big Dragon Games, has just put out a "Work-In-Progress" or Beta psionics adventure called Vault of the Faceless Giants.

This will be an inexpensive adventure when it is done, but if you pick up this beta version now, for free, you can get the finished version for free as well!

Seems like a no-brainer to me.

Free GM Resource: AD&D Downloads

This week's Free GM Resource is a wide collection of other GM resources that  span a wide array of RPGs, but the focus is on the different flavors of D&D.

AD&D Downloads has been re-branded as a mobile-friendly website listing numerous resources for players and GMs alike.

Site navigation is a bit wonky, but it looks like the whole redesign is still a work in progress. Definitely worth poking around a bit....I know I will be!