Free GM Resource: GM Hold Music

I don't know about you guys, but for me the 1st day of Daylight Savings Time doesn't bother me, but day 2 usually kicks my ass. Between having issues falling asleep and wanting to sleep in on what is essentially my "Sunday"......

Now I don't always play mood music when I run a game, but there is one particular sound file I try to keep handy, especially when I run a convention game. Going strong GMing a four-hour con isn't always possible and inevitably the group wants to take a 5-10' "breather" halfway through.

That is when I like to whip out this little gem and play it on my iPad: GM Hold Music by R. Dominelli. This MP3 is just over 5 minutes long and is usually entertaining enough that those players that don't get up to smoke or use the bathroom are entertained.

This is listed as "Volume 1". I've been searching for a Volume 2, but I have been unlucky so far. If I was funny enough I could see trying to make something myself, but I'm not that talented.....sorry guys.

Frugal GM Review: Classes of Ruin

This morning I thought I'd be brave and blindly purchase something off of the "Personalized Suggestions" list from DriveThruRPG, or at least something that wasn't one of my own items (DTRPG somehow thinks I want to purchase items I produced)!

This one particular item, Classes of Ruin, has been pretty steady on my list for a couple of months now. It is PWYW so I tossed a buck their way and picked it up for review.

Normally I wouldn't have picked this up because the product page is full of red flags for me. First is the fact that the only preview available is the picture of this Yeti. The only product description given is "A collection of Ruin character classs [sic] for use with Labyrinth Lord."

New PWYW Tweak & Toss: FGM040 The Dwarven Delve

I have the latest Tweak & Toss "adventure" up on DriveThruRPG.

This one is called The Dwarven Delve, and it features the free map (Map060) from last week. This Tweak & Toss is larger in (file) size than normal because I just didn't like the way the map looked at a standard print-size.

The general idea behind this adventure is that after a "disturbance", some traders have gone missing and the party is asked to locate them and bring them to the trading site. I'm deliberately being a bit more vague than normal....

To go to the appropriate DTRPG page, click on either graphic in this post, or use this link.

Free GM Resource: Labyrinths of Madness

Today is a gaming friend's birthday: DM Nick from the Roll For Initiative Podcast.

Now I know he plays AD&D (although I suspect it's more HackMaster 4th edition that AD&D...), but he also has a soft-spot for Call of Cthulhu....and as an aside, should I be disturbed that my spell-checker knows how to spell Cthulhu?....

Anyway, I decided to do a little hunting for today's Free GM Resource and I managed to discover Labyrinths of Madness. This is a free PDF download from Lulu, so you'll need to have or establish a Lulu account.

Labyrinths of Madness is a short (13 pages, 8 of content) supplement for using the Labyrinth Lords rules to run a CoC-type campaign. Now this is supplement assumes you aren't running your campaign in a medieval-ish setting, but I'm sure you could with only a couple of tweaks.

Now this isn't my particular play-style, but it occurred to me that even if you didn't want a CoCish campaign, but you liked a little more fast & loose role-play heavy game that the Damage, Injury, and Healing rules (page 6) would be a real boon....

.....anyway, happy birthday Nick!

Update July 18, 2019:
Evidently this has been removed from Lulu and a few minutes of searching hasn't revealed a new source. Probably doesn't help that this is for Labyrinth Lord and had "Labyrinth" in the title, not to mention that it shares a name with a AD&D adventure. If anyone can point me out to a new source for this........

Frugal GM Review: 47 Ancient Maps, Scrolls, and Handouts

This week I picked up an item that was listed as a "Silver Best Seller" over at DriveThruRPG. As such I had some high expectations....after all, who couldn't use 47 Ancient Maps, Scrolls, and Handouts?

I thought it odd that the download was listed as two pages, but the item description said that the maps were attached to the PDF, something I've never seen.....

FGM039: No Place Like Gnome Available Now on DTRPG

I wrote up a Tweak & Toss "adventure" using last week's free map and put it up on DTRPG. It is quite a bit more broad than I usually do with these things, so I'm not quite sure how it will be received.....

.....but since the overwhelming majority of folks will get this for free (it is PWYW), I'm not going to lose much sleep over that fact.

When I run a game I often keep things rather loose, with a couple of ideas half-formed. Depending on with threads the party decides to pull, I then spend more effort along those lines, but keep those other potential adventure paths dangling (or move them forward as needed).

This Tweak & Toss, No Place Like Gnome, is one of these loose threads. Something is happening in this small hamlet. Maybe the PCs take notice, maybe they decide "screw them" and move on. They could take the side of the villagers (what do you call the inhabitants of a hamlet?), maybe they take the other side.....or maybe they ignore everyone and the problem gets a bit worse.

Feel free to click on either graphic in this post to go the DTRPG listing.

Free Map060: Into the wilderness

This week's free map is a nice stretch of wilderness with a nice river, some streams, and some mountainous terrain (nothing too huge though).

This was another one of those, "I'm working backwards" type maps. I had a specific idea for a Tweak & Toss and thought of a good location for it. Usually I find what I think is a nice location, make a map, and then figure out how to use it.

Whatever works, I guess.

The freebie map is letter-sized with a nice white border which would allow people to print it out at 100%. There are actually two versions, one with contour lines (technically edited index contour lines) and one without. My Patrons get a much larger size of this map at 18" x 24".

All of the maps are PDF. I looked at making them layered PDFs, but that jacked up the file size to large than just having two separate maps.

As usual, click on either graphic to go to the free maps, or use this link.

Free d30 Table: Random Gem Generator

This month's freebie (well, technically PWYW) d30 table is up on DriveThruRPG for download.

This table is a random Gem Generator inspired by (not transferred from) tables 13B through 13J of the 4th Edition HackMaster GameMaster's Guide (say that 5 times fast!)

That game had a mechanic for altering the value of gemstones based on quality and size. Of course rolling on five separate tables or sub-tables can be a bit much, especially since you'll need to use three different sets of dice.

Nope, one d30 is all you need with a minimum of two rolls and a maximum of four. These tables should pretty much be drop-in compatible for any OSR game. My next few tables are likely to be for other types of treasure.