Free GM Resource: Basic Fantasy Role-Playing Game

I have absolutely no idea how this week's Free GM Resource has evaded me for almost a decade. I wish I knew about this last month so I could have put it up as a Christmas Present of OSR goodness for my fellow uninitiated gamers.

Basic Fantasy Role-Playing Game has been around since 2006 and is currently on the 3rd revision. You can pretty much download "everything" for free or pay to get high-quality prints at Lulu.com or CreateSpace.com.

Instead of trying to describe the game in my own words, here is what the BFRPG homepage says about it:

"The Basic Fantasy Role-Playing Game is a rules-light game system modeled on the classic RPG rules of the early 1980's. Though based loosely on the d20 SRD v3.5, Basic Fantasy RPG has been written largely from scratch to replicate the look, feel, and mechanics of the early RPG game systems. It is suitable for those who are fans of "old-school" game mechanics. Basic Fantasy RPG is simple enough for children in perhaps second or third grade to play, yet still has enough depth for adults as well.

Basic Fantasy RPG is an Open Source game system, supported by dedicated fans worldwide who have contributed hundreds of pages of rules supplements, adventure modules, and other useful and enjoyable game materials as seen on our downloads page. We'd love for you to join us on our forum where we discuss the game as well as creating new materials for it."

The downloads page for BFRPG has a ton of stuff, all for free. You've got the core rules, sourcebooks, adventures and a lot of supplements. Even if you already have a go-to OSR ruleset I'm pretty sure you'll find something useful here.....

Frugal GM Review: The Manual of Critical Hits (and Fumbles & Mishaps)

I'm going a bit off the beaten path here to review a free GM resource for my favorite game, HackMaster. If you don't play HackMaster* I can understand that this review might not be for you, but I'm not looking at this strictly from an in-game perspective....

1st off the details on this item. The Manual of Critical Hits (and fumbles & mishaps) is a 172 page, 7.18 MB file that you can download for free at Kenzer & Company. The file is not secured in any fashion. The page size is 5.83" x 8.28", which is good for a tablet or booklet printing.

The Frugal GM Gets a Little Love From Across the Pond....

Sweet...looks like the Frugal GM got a little bit of love yesterday from The Free RPG Blog in the form of a shout-out for my involvement with Lunch Box Heroes.

Scrolling through my Table of Contents I don't even see an entry for this free RPG that Matt Jackson and I put together...a quick play report, yes, but nothing about the...never mind, found it!

Anyway, Matt Jackson (of msjx fame....check out his Patreon page) wrote the backbone of this rules-lite game called Lunch Box Heroes and he let me give it some tweaks, editing, & stuff....enough he gave me co-creator billing and let me put it up on DTRPG as a bit of a 2014 Christmas gift to folks.

Glad Rob likes it.....

Free Table FGM037b: Random Horse Generator

I just finished putting my newest d30 table up on DTRPG.

The table is for randomly generating a horse. Why a horse? Because in my experience the player rarely ask about their steeds and I wanted to be able to quickly come up with some horses should the need arise.

Now you might ask, "When would the need arise?"

Again, in my experience the PCs being able to afford a horse or even enough horses for everyone to ride is the #1 factor of being able to move the campaign along. When just starting out a horse is usually far more than they can afford and once buying a horse is no big deal, the PCs just start thinking of them more in the lines of "equipment" than a valuable resource.

Being able to take away the horse can help remedy that.

Maybe thieves take the horse(s). Can the PCs identify their steed(s) when the time comes? If not, I guess "that guy" isn't the horse thief.

I'm assuming the enterprising GM can come up with some other reasons to distinguish one horse from another....

Click on either graphic to go to the appropriate download page.

Free GM Resource: Deviant Art

This week's Free GM Resource is one of those sites I've link-hopped to a couple of times and never put much thought into, until now.

Deviant Art is a pretty darned good resource for...well, art. Last time I clicked-through to Deviant Art I was looking for some additional map resources for an adventure I downloaded. The artist's map was there, as well as some other maps he had made, presumably for other adventures.

This particular map listing also had links to the artist's game-world writing and *BAM* that is when it hit me that I should have Deviant Art favorited as a go-to free resource.

While there is a lot of art I could care less about, the Digital Art > Drawings & Paintings > Fantasy had a bunch of potential new monsters and some maps. There are often outbound links on the "good stuff" with even more great material. Now of course, all this art belongs to someone else, so using it professionally is a huge non-no, but for your players at your home game....these pieces would be outstanding.

I feel a bit like a dolt for not recognizing this sooner.

....and the Winner of the Dog Might Games Chest is.....

Ok...I know the graphic reads "winners", as in plural.....but I'm reusing an older graphic.

I counted up the number of eligible entries, punched that number into Random.org and got a surprisingly low number.....10.

Now I could just reach out to the winner discreetly, but where is the fun in that? Instead I just did some screen shots and ran down the numbers.....

...and so can you.

I'll be reaching out to the lucky #10 in the morning.....

Frugal GM Review: Infinite Potions

This week's review is of a simple & inexpensive PDF of tables for creating random potions. Created by Joe Wetzel for Inkwell Ideas, Infinite Potions is all about the randomness.

Now right off the bat I have to say this isn't really my thing. I like my potions to have strong similarities to other potions of the same type (i.e. all invisibility potions are pretty close to the same taste, smell, consistency, etc.). Of course, I knew what I was getting when I bought this PDF, so there are no sour grapes here.

There are some games, DCC immediately comes to mind, where the potential for complete randomness in potions fits in quite well.

The PDF is 8 pages long, password protected and under a MB in size. It isn't as polished as I would expect from Inkwell Ideas and I only have one real issue with the document. Page 4 has a 2d12 table for potion colors and the table itself is in a huge array of color swatches, with the names of the colors on those swatches. Personally I find that one page garish and would rather have a B&W page instead. Some of the colors just seem a bit much and I don't think would translate well for describing to the players. I might be able to convey the color "inchworm", but trying to get across the hue of "almond" vs. "tumbleweed".

Maybe I'm not a good enough GM.

I think it is a minor issue at best. I think these tables (most use d12s) would feed into a random table generator program easily enough and if you wanted random potions....done in a snap. There are a total of 9 tables, a few in-line sub tables, all of which look up to the task of creating more potion variations than I care to calculate.

If you need what feels like a metric-ton of varying potions, then Infinite Potions is worth the current $1.49 sale price.

Free Map056: An Underground Maze

I'm trying to get fully back into the swing of things and kicking off this effort with another freebie cavern map.

This map is inspired by a cave that is on my mother's old (150+ years) apple orchard. It is a cold-air cave that allegedly only has two entrances.

I tried to imagine a confusing mess of small, but long, tunnels that twist & turn unexpectedly. A place you could easily get lost in.....something that allegedly has happened in the real-world inspiration.

The free map is 100 dpi and 8.5" x 11". Patrons get several 300 DPI versions of this map as well as a 100 DPI map for Virtual Table Top (VTT) use. In that version the map size is 33" x 25.5", which is just the main map blown up at a lower resolution. Like usual, click on the lead-in graphic above or the cover image below to get to the map.