Frugal GM Review: 2015 Dodecahedron Cartographic Review

I'm one of probably a couple hundred folks who picked up Dyson Logos' 2015 Dodecahedron Cartographic Review (say that five times real fast!) when it was a Deal of the Day over at DriveThruRPG.

Now I already have most, but not all, of these maps already because I check-in on Dyson's Blog almost religiously. Generally speaking I'm not a big fan of paying for something I already have for free, but I did for a couple of reasons.....none of which really matter for the sake of this review.

Limited Time Offer on a Good Collection of Maps

Normally I don't like to post about things that the blogs I follow post about, but this is a special case.

If you didn't know already, Dyson Logos has a collection of the maps he made in 2015 available over at DTRPG.

Now I know you can get all of these maps on his website (link in the "+12 Links of Helpfulness"), but having them altogether in one place is well worth the current sale price of $3.75....

...and this sale price, which is the DTRPG Deal of the Day, only lasts for the next 20 hours or so. This isn't a review, but after picking this up, it is a no-brainer for this week's review.

Don't wait for the review though....just pick this up while you can.

FGM038: The Ravenous River

I've just put up my latest Tweak & Toss "mission" called The Ravenous River. Like previous efforts, this isn't a written adventure as much as it is a map and a rough adventure/encounter setup.

The idea behind this one is that the PCs are asked to travel down the Ravenous River and find/deal with an unknown problem that is keeping a group of loggers from getting their timber to the sawmills & market downstream.

The Ravenous River is a Pay-What-You-Want download over at DriveThruRPG. You can click on any of the graphics for this post or use this link to go straight to the product page.

Free GM Resource: Old Maps Online

This week's Free GM Resource is a cool map website called Old Maps Online. This website isn't a repository of old maps, like one would expect, but a starting point to finding old maps from one of 33 online map repositories, some of which I have featured on their own.

Obviously had I known about Old Maps Online I'd have just featured this site instead of the individual repositories....

As of the time of this post there are 381635 maps available. If you cannot find something worthwhile in this collection of collections then I guess you should be just drawing your own maps then.....

Free Map057 A River Canyon

This last week I had family visiting and now that they are back home and I've managed to catch up on some missing sleep I'm attempting to do a little catch-up on posts & projects.

I had already started working on this canyon map and know that it is finished I've put on my Patreon page. This is a well-known river canyon in my neck of the woods, but most people probably only know it by name and couldn't recognize a map section of it if they tried.

Now I'm not being dismissive of people's grasp of geography, but this stretch of canyon is not very accessible and is about as wild as you can get in these parts. Astute viewers might be able to make out 13 sections of rapids along the river. I tried to make them a bit subtle and I hope the GM who uses this map for their game gets to have some fun with the rapids.....

Like usual, Patrons get a larger map without the "ad". You can click on the graphics in this post to get the free map, or just use this link.

Nothing to See Here Until Sunday....

Just a head's up that the map I'm working on and the next review are being pushed back until at least Sunday as I have family visiting from out of state.

At best this usually happens once or twice a decade, so understandably this takes personal precedence over the Frugal GM blog.

I do appreciate all of my readers and next week I hope to be able to announce something big, well at least big for me.......

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.