Closing the Book on 2015....Where are my Dice?

I don't know about you guys, but I'm glad to be shutting the books on 2015 and looking forward to gaming in 2016.

I have some specific goals in mind for the upcoming year, projects I've been working on for some time.

Usually my personal gaming life takes a bit of a hit during the mad rush of retail hell that is the "Christmas Season" starting a couple weeks before Black Friday and ending a few days after Christmas. This year, however, I've been working in a different retail setting where the 3 busiest days of the year are the day before Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, and New Year's Eve....pretty much in that order.

Things were bad enough (maybe not the right word to use) that I just had to take a week's vacation from being the Frugal GM. Now I actually have a week of vacation from work so I can pick things back and start digging into this year's projects. I think on of my 1st projects will be creating my own personal travelling GM box/kit. I've got something special in mind.....

I do wonder if others find the the holidays too much to be able to game regularly. If so, how do you manage to get your gaming fix on during the interim and do you have anything special planned for getting the group back together post-season?

Frugal GM Review: Wormskin #1

This week I'm reviewing the inaugural issue of Wormskin, an OSR Zine.

This issue is currently PDF only and is labeled as the Autumn 2105 issue and was posted to DriveThruRPG on December 15th. Technically that is autumn, but I think most people see December as full-on winter. I know that is just semantics though....

This $3 PDF is pretty big, coming in at 41 pages and 25.2 MB. Right off the bat I noticed the 41 page count, which doesn't make much sense for something made for printing.....you need the pages divisible by 4. While reading the PDF it occurred to me that page 37 is largely superfluous because it gives explanation of stat-blocks which shouldn't really be needed by this Zine's intended audience.

The PDF is A5 sized and password-secured, which really isn't a big deal here.

Frugal GM 2015 Year in Review

It has been a pretty good year for the Frugal GM as far as meeting & exceeding the goals of this blog.

Last year we finished up with the number of products "sold" on DTRPG at 1201, with actual sales (retail and PWYW) of $59. The percentage of free products downloaded by folks like you was 92.34%, above my goal of 90%.

This year the number of products "sold" went up by over 600%! The year ended with 7705 downloads with combined net sales of $94.14 and the percentage of totally free downloads went up to 97.88%

I don't think you'd normally see sales figures from publishers putting their stuff up on DriveThruRPG, but my participation there was driven by my initial goals for this blog. As you can see I'm not making any real money with this effort, but that really wasn't the point to begin with, hence my ability to share this information. I roll everything I get from DriveThruRPG back into purchasing things to review here.

Glossing over these numbers, 2015 has had a couple of other minor milestones. The 500th post was made here last July, my Patreon campaign started this year (which is what I credit the aforementioned numbers to), and we even got a shout-out in a Knights of the Dinner Table article. 2015 was a pretty good year, but I hope it is just a warm-up for 2016.....

Thanks to you all for helping me reach my goals and to give something back to our community at large.

Frugal GM Vacation

Just a head's up that I'm taking a vacation from the blog for the next week.

The next post should be a review on Saturday, January 2nd, but if I get a bit restless I might sneak a post or two in the interim.

I hope everyone had a great Christmas (or Friday......Friday is good too), and I'll see you next week!

Free GM Resource: B0.5 Secrets of the Unknown

This week's Free GM Resource is another free adventure. This time it is adventure B0.5 Secrets of the Unknown from Pacesetter Games & Simulations.

This is a small OSR/1st Edition ruleset adventure design to bridge a gap from the original B1 In Search of the Unknown to Pacesetter's follow-on adventure  B1 Legacy of the Unknown.

At only 7 pages (with cover) it is a short adventure, but it has a new spell, 6 new magic items, and 2 new monsters. Definately worth checking out, especially at this price!

Frugal GM Review: Combat Accelerator

As Christmas is just around the corner and free time gives way to prepping for the holiday, gaming often takes a backseat....at least for me.

This week's Frugal GM Review is going to be as short, which is in-line for the item being reviewed. In this case it is Combat Accelerator from 10 Spot Games.

This 3 page (including the cover) PDF is nothing more than an idea being put forth to speed up combat. Since my favorite RPG is HackMaster, speeding up combat feels like a cardinal sin, but I can totally see where the ideas put forth in Combat Accelerator could be useful. I actually picked up this free supplement with the thought of tweaking it for use with a play-by-post game where the emphasis is more on roleplay than intense combat.

If you need some help speeding up combat in your game, I think this is worth checking out. You can't put a price on a good idea, and the un-credited writer didn't.....

Free GM Resource: Under Xylarthen's Tower

This week's Free GM Resource is an old-school dungeon crawl adventure created largely from random tables. The author, Jeff Rients, has a blog I used to read regularly, but he hasn't posted anything since last summer. It is worth a read for some thoughts and posts relative to OSR material, but I'm specifically highlighting the adventure Under Xylarthen's Tower.

Instead of linking directly to the adventure, which is a bit unfair, I'm providing a link to the appropriate blog post from 2008 (!) that has his direct link to the adventure. The post itself was a good read....

Frugal GM Review: Dungeon Monthly 2015 Compilation

This week's Frugal GM Review is on a "free" map-set that you can pay $1 for over at DriveThruRPG.

I really like the idea of this product because...well you can pretty much get it for free if you want, or you can pay a measly buck and skip a bit of hassle. Now I'm all for saving a buck or two when possible, but there is being frugal and there is being cheap......

Spending a lot of time to save $1 isn't being frugal....

Crooked Staff Publishing has a blog where they put up some good content (I should add them to the +12 Links of Helpfulness) and part of that content is a monthly geomorph map. Now you can easily just go through and download those monthly maps in either 50 or 70 pixels per grid, or you can spend $1 over at DriveThruRPG and get the Dungeon Monthly 2015 Compilation.

There are definitely pros and cons for downloading the free maps vs. paying a buck a year, with the freebie option winning out if you want the "larger" 70 px/grid maps. OK, downloading 36 geomorph maps (the last three year's worth) is pretty simple and pretty much one click if you use Google Photos. I like the bigger map parts myself, but the downside if you get one option (aside from size).

For $1 (per year) you get a download of the "complete" map, with the pieces all stitched together. There are three files to download. The 1st is a Letter-sized overview map, pretty cool, but only good for the overview. The next two files are the assembled maps at the "50px" size. One map is on a dark background, like the free monthly maps, and the other is on a white background. These two maps are actually 150px per inch and 38" square. I'm fairly certain this will work out fine on a VTT where a lot of folks prefer 100px per inch resolution.

In my opinion what you are buying for your $1 is a heck of a lot of convenience. The download of individual files might be relatively easy and I guess you could search through the blog to find out how the individual maps work together, but then you have to go and assemble them yourself in Photoshop or the like.

That is a bit of work, more for some than for others, but for $1.......this is pretty damned good. The only way Crooked Staff Publishing could make this even better would be to use the 70px grids. Odds are I'll end up downloading the larger individual maps from the blog and be thankful that I can do something else other than trying to figure out how to assemble it into a larger map and taking the time to do it as well.

I really think this was a buck well spent.....and now I need to buy the other two year's of compilations.