Free GM Review: Trap-A-Day

This week's Free GM Resource is one I've had tucked away for quite some time.....one of the authors at Mentats of Gaming presents: Trap-a-Day reached out to me when the site was first started.

I think when I 1st checked in there were less than a week's worth of traps and personally I wanted to see that Mentats of Gaming were able to keep it up before sharing it. They have, so I am.

The site lists a couple thousand traps, which I'm sure is way off since each trap has multiple tags. Still, if you are looking for a specific Challenge Rating trap for the newer incarnations of D&D, or just a trap idea you can lovingly "steal".....this is a good place to start.

Frugal GM Review: Mini Dungeon #27 Kaltenheim

This week's Frugal GM Review is a bit different in that I picked up an item being offered on DTRPG in two different formats. Mini-Dungeon #027: Kaltenheim is available as both a download and a printed card with a "special" of getting the card and PDF at the same price as just the card. I have never purchased a printed product from DTRPG before so more than anything I wanted to see how that all worked out.

The shipping option I picked was the cheapest and I expected the whole affair to take a couple business weeks. It was maybe eight days between the order and delivery. The 8" x 10" print was well packed and protected.

Free d30 Table: Random Book Generator

I had this d30 table I thought I'd just knock out......yeah, and that didn't happen. I finished the table and put it up on my Patreon page and DTRPG, but I swear I spent a huge chunk of my day working on this.

On the plus side my cat, who has just recently been "promoted" to the only cat in the house, has become so much more social than she has been for the last few years. In the span of a week she's gone from "I'm feral....don't touch me" to "Is it ok if I cozy up to you at your desk? You don't need this one drawer, do you?"

I'd like to think the reason this one table took me so long was the

background research I put into it, but I think a lot of it was me adding the steps of hand-writing it out first, tweaking everything on a revision, and then typing it up. OK, and frequent breaks to pet the kitty helped.

This table, inspired by The HackMaster Spellslinger's Guide to Wurld Domination, generates the physical attributes of a book. General size, weight, and cover. I can see someone using it in an OSR game to generate a spellbook, but I envision it getting more use when the GM gets asked for the umpteenth time "Now describe this book we also found."

Click on either graphic, or use this link, to go to the appropriate DTRPG page.


Late night edit:

I couldn't leave well enough alone, so I made a "quick" d30 Book Subject/Title Generator as well. You can find that here (or click on the graphic).

Unexpected Phone Call Today

I have no clue how this happened, but somehow my phone made a call to Lou Zocchi yesterday. Now when I say"no clue" I mean it. In order to make that call I'd have to open up my contacts, scroll down to his entry, and choose to make a call. I don't even remember the last time I opened the contacts on the phone or called one of my contacts that weren't already on my "frequently called" list.

Anyway, Lou called me back today and we spoke a bit about the d30 and his efforts to get the high-quality (i.e. not tumbled) d30s back in production. He was also interested in the Order of the d30 and the tables we've been working on, even if it was only to push some folks our way.

Totally made my day.....I'll be sending him some of my tables and pointing him towards our group. I was planning on working on a new table this afternoon...now I HAVE TO.

Free GM Resource: Mithril Mages Random Tables

For the life of me I thought I's already shared this Free GM Resource, but I'm not finding a record of it....

Mithril and Mages is a website with a ton of random generators. If you go to the homepage you'll find a fancy interface/page and many of the generators themselves are also "fancy" pages.

Me...I prefer to go straight to the utilities page, which is quicker loading and lists all the table. I'm also a bigger fan of the Labyrinth Lord tables than the others, but there is a lot of usefulness here....

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.