Frugal GM Review: Goblin Market

This week's Frugal GM Review is a PWYW adventure from QuasarDragon Games called Goblin Market (PO-2). This OSR adventure is designed for an unspecified party of PCs of levels 10-12. Goblin Market is a follow-on adventure to their adventure The Stolen Child (PO-1).

Before I even sit down to read the adventure I went ahead and looked at a couple of things, like I normally do. First off this 62 page (3.65 MB) PDF is watermarked & secured, not unlike most items from DTRPG, and fortunately it isn't overly locked-down. There are no bookmarks or internal hyperlinks, and this adventure really needs both. A lot of information, like maps, new spells, etc., are at the end of the PDF in Appendices A through H. This means there will be a lot of page flipping, either through the PDF or actual pages if you decide to print this adventure out....

Hot Deal Over at Lulu (25% off and Free Shipping)

Generally speaking I'm not a huge fan of posting recent content from another blog, but I thought this was too good to pass up.

Thanks for the 411 Erik!

Lulu.com often has deals here & there. Usually something along the lines of an "ok" percentage off or free shipping. Right now they are offering 25% off and free shipping!

Even though I had just payed good money for a PDF I couldn't ignore this sweet deal. All you have to do is use coupon code "LULURC" to get this deal.

Usually you can only use coupon codes once, so make sure you figure out what you want to buy from Lulu before applying the code and finishing your purchase.

Free GM Resource: Discord

Usually the things I manage to find as Free GM Resources have been around a while. Sometimes I'm just late to the party, and other times it might be a goodie just hidden away and forgotten about on the interwebs.

I'm pretty certain this is a brand-spanking-new resource that will benefit a whole group of RPG Gamers, specifically those that play online with a Virtual Table Top (VTT).

Discord is a free all-in-one voice & text chat program that essentially replaces the need for a Ventrillo or Teamspeak account. Now I know some folks use Google+ hangouts, and if that works for you, great. Personally I always preferred using a Ventrillo server because the quality was so much better.

Discord looks like it is built from the ground-up to work for gamers with an easy-as-heck interface that uses minimal bandwidth. I like the fact it'll work with mobile devices and even has a game-overlay feature you can pop on & off as needed.

You don't need to download the client, but it looks like things can run smoother if you do. I'm just getting into playing with Discord, but I think this will work great for my future online gaming plans.

Frugal GM Review: Deadly Trappings from KenzerCo

This week I ended up picking up an old favorite, well kind of an old favorite, of mine to review.

Deadly Trappings, from KenzerCo, immediately takes me back to my early, way-too-lean days of gaming. Back when the majority of outlets to scratch my gaming itch consisted of choose-you-own adventure books, painting minis with enamel model paint (hey, it is what I had), reading the odd copy of Dragon, and nerd-lusting over mini catalogs or a borrowed copy of Grimtooth's Traps.

Yes, these were lean times indeed for me, but then I grew up and stopping living in the middle of nowhere.

Now, full disclosure, I have written up a trap or two for KenzerCo's Knights of the Dinner Table, but none of them are in Deadly Trappings. I don't know if this is a matter of timing or if my traps simply sucked. I'm inclined to think the former just because it makes me happier than would the latter.

Frugal GM Review Delayed This Week......

Just a quick head's-up that due to a wonderful collision of time-sucks and opportunities I'm going to have to push off a RPG Review until tomorrow.

I'd rather not half-ass a quick review as it isn't fair to the publisher/creator of what I'm reviewing.

Free Map064: An Underground Lake

While I have several writing projects in the works, I felt compelled to try out a few new techniques to see if they worked for me.

For the most part they did. I like experimenting a bit and while not every step worked out the way I wanted it to, I figured out how to essentially fix a few things instead of having to start over.

I was working on another larger map that I re-sized down to Arch D (24" x 36") and today was the 1st time I didn't crash my programs because I was asking it to do just too much. Hopefully this was because I changed my work-flow up a bit to minimize trying to do more than the computer could handle......

....I guess if I pull this off 2x in a row I can consider myself successful. Of course I still have much to learn...like not sizing my web graphics at 300 dpi...whoops.

While the freebie map is 11" x 17", the Patron version is the larger 24" x 36" and doesn't have the Patreon "ad", which isn't shown in the graphic below. Like always, click on either graphic in this post to go to the page to download the free map, or use this link.

Free GM Resource: Prism Dice

This week's Free GM Resource, like every week's free resource, might not be for everybody.

Prism Dice is an older Windows-based program that works as a configurable die roller. Now when I say "older", I mean older, as in the listed system requirements goes so far back as to mention Windows 95.

Of course "old" doesn't mean useless. When installing this program there were some hiccups, but nothing that hitting the "ignore" button didn't fix. I already had a lot of background Windows files on my computer.

Click to embiggen

The running program isn't that big and you can configure up to eight buttons per page. The cool part is you can simply add a page (or three) and toggle between them as needed. There is a lot of flexibility to the dice roller and you can easily tweak how each button/die is rolled. It won't work too well for my beloved HackMaster, but mostly because the die rules there are a bit much.

By default the sound is on but you can easily click that off. Now there are a lot of electronic dice options, usually embedded in as part of another program, but I have yet to see something as stand-alone and functional as Prism Dice.  I can think of lots of times I want to roll dice and not alert the players to the fact I was rolling dice. Since I use a computer a lot when I do GM, having Prism Dice can really be a useful tool.

I know it isn't for everyone, but I think most GMs could find a good use or three for this program.

Frugal GM Review: D30 DM Companion

This week's review is on an item odds are many of my 12 regular readers already have. After being a bit frustrated with my search for something to review (I have a few items already selected, but they need more hands-on time before I'll be comfortable reviewing them) I started searching for some 1st Edition material...because I was in a 1e kind of mood. For some reason DTRPG will let you do a search on "1e AD&D", but they also tack on "Official D&D" and "Dungeons & Dragons". Removing either of these other tags simply scraps the whole search. It is all or nothing I guess.

So here I am wanting to review some 1e material and I'm being forced to only look at TSR stuff....screw that noise. I know I have something that feels appropriate and isn't TSR material- my handy dandy D30 GM (er...DM) Companion.

Now I've already reviewed the D30 Sandbox Companion, and I'm a huge fan of the d30, so I might be a bit biased. I'm hoping that doesn't show too much on this review.