A Bit of Impromptu Spring Cleaning for the Frugal GM

This weekend I (barely) managed to take advantage of a publisher's big sale over at OBS and I picked up a bunch of map pieces & parts.

For some unknown reason the website has been a real pain about being able to download my purchases and I've had to try several times before the files were properly downloaded as there were a lot of error messages and incomplete downloads.

While I was going through and figuring out what successfully downloaded and what hadn't I thought I'd organize my files, well at least the files from this one publisher. If I'm going to be stuck at my computer, laboriously downloading only one file at a time I might as well use the time wisely.....

....that sounds all well and good until I realize that I'm missing a lot of files from this publisher....and I mean quite a few. For some reason they don't show in my One Bookshelf library, but when I scroll through this one publisher's offerings I see quite a few "You have purchased this product". I thought maybe I'd downloaded the files previously and just hadn't filed them properly, but nope.....I bought a bunch of stuff on the last sale and didn't square my stuff away. These files aren't in my downloads folder and not in my backup either.

Everything seems to work fine downloading one file at a time...

I figure it is, or at least sure feels like, spring and maybe this is just my GM version of "Spring Cleaning". If you are one of my 12 regular readers, you might want to take a moment and see what you have to clean up with regards to your gaming "stuff". Make sure you have what you think you have and take this opportunity to make sure you have not only a backup, but a backup to the backup.

Free GM Resource: Dice Calculator

This week's Free GM Resource is an Android dice roller called Dice Calculator by DungeonZ.

While I am highlighting the Android version I've downloaded, there are also Windows and iOS versions available. The programmer put links to all the versions on his blog (this post specifically).

When I first took a look at this program I was quite disappointed. It really didn't look all that functional or altogether user-friendly. After a but of poking and prodding I realized the program is pretty minimalistic, and I think my expectations were for a bunch of extra "overhead".

There are three pages to the program, which you can reorder. The main page looks like a calculator, but with some extra letter buttons. Another page is there for you to save custom dice functions and the last page has a history of your rolls. Odds are you'll need some help figuring out the notation, but there is a little blue button with the "information" symbol on it. One click and I had everything I needed to know.

There is some sort of "lobby" feature on the history page I haven't figured out yet.....but to be fair I haven't even tried.

If you want/need a simple die roller that comes in a variety of flavors for your different devices, I'd give Dice Calculator a go. Just having one program for most of your devices in and of itself might be the reason for using this.

New d30 Table up on DTRPG: d30 Random Sculpture Generator

Hard to believe it is May already.....

I've put up this month's d30 table and it is a continuation of alternate treasure generation tables. This month it is a random sculpture table that was made with OSR games in mind. A lot of OSR games don't really have art pieces as part of their treasure tables, so the values for these sculpture pieces were created so theses sculpture pieces could be subbed in for gems, which every OSR game I've seen has.

The pieces generated with this table are vaguely specific, which I know is an oxymoron. Your first d30 roll will be used to determine the general type of sculpture and the subject matter, but the GM will have to fill in the blank some. For example, if you rolled a "22", the result would be a high-relief carving of a monster. The GM would determine what the monster was....hopefully that explains "vaguely specific" enough.

My Patrons over at Patreon received this table when it was completed back in March. If you want to be ahead of the release curve and get some things earlier and other things with a few more options (like larger sized maps), you might want to consider becoming a Patron.

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

Frugal GM Review: Castles & Towers III

This week's Frugal GM Review is on an "interesting" new DTRPG product uploaded yesterday.

Now normally I keep well enough away from products like this because I'm just not a fan of paying good money on what essentially is a simple list. Now to be fair, the ones I normally see are simpler and more expensive, like a list of 100 baby names for $1 (I actually haven't seen a list product like that, I'm just making some commentary here)

Castles & Towers III is basically a list product that retails for 50¢. The description and "quick preview" really left nothing to the imagination, so I pretty much knew what I was getting with this purchase. I was a bit intrigued that the file was close to 5 MB in size, so I was expecting some art in the six page PDF.

New Frugal GM PWYW Tweak & Toss: The Sacrilegious Sage

Just a head's up that I have my latest Tweak & Toss adventure seed up at DriveThruRPG.

This one is entitled The Sacrilegious Sage and it is a bit broader than I usually go for with these types of adventures. I started to make it a lot more detailed, but I realized that for this setting unless I wanted to actually write up more of a standard adventure it would probably be better broad enough that the GM could merge it with another underground adventure, using the map for both or just adding some of the story elements into the other adventure.

You can download this PWYW adventure seed by clicking on either graphic or by using this link.

Free GM Resource: Theorems & Thaumaturgy

I was looking into another table generator that seemed to be pretty cool, but it was so not user friendly. If I can't get a table to load in 15'....well, screw that noise, I'll have to go to plan B.

This week's Free GM Resource is a cool collection of magic (spells, classes, items, etc.) released for Labyrinth Lord/OSR called Theorems & Thaumaturgy. I found this originally on Lulu, but the listing there shows it is also on DTRPG, which is probably a better place to download it because of the way OBS keeps track of your "library" of downloads....

The title there is PWYW, but the original listing on Lulu has it as "free" so that is what I'm going with. I suggest you download it for free and if you like it, repurchase it for a couple bucks.....

Fallout 4 Interactive Map For Those Interested

This is most definitely NOT this week's Free GM Resource, but in some ways I wish it could be.

I'm making what I have to consider a pretty safe assumption that those of us who love RPGs tend to love other games as well. I know a lot of my friends have been having fun with Fallout 4, especially since we're getting to the 2nd DLC and the new Survival Mode.

In the stretch between finishing my 1st play-through and the introduction of the new content I've spent a little bit of time trying to collect all the bobble-heads, magazines, and I think I'm up to about 45 suits of power armor (amazing how profitable it can be to make and sell Jet). This interactive map has been quite the boon.

I'd love to be able to have a map like this setup for my RPG campaigns. Lay out the map, and then populate it with markers for towns, tombs, caves, etc. Of course I'd want to be able to share it with the players, so it'd have to kind of work in reverse. While I'd put the markers in, the players would start with a blank map and then uncover the markers, as opposed to having the big populated map where you get to mark off these special spots.

Cool Map Tiles Available Through Kickstarter

I hope I have a decent record of not pushing Kickstarter Projects unless they seem to be a good deal for my 12 regular readers here.

A couple months ago I reviewed the Small Dungeon Maps, which I picked up via Kickstarter. I really thought these maps were not only cool, but pretty useful, especially for virtual table-top (VTT) use. I was looking forward to adding the new sets to my collection when the became available....

.....which is "now".

The creator of the Small Dungeon Maps, Jean Francois Senay, has another Kickstarter that looks like it'll be even better than the last one. Dungeon Map Creator is a collection of 9 sets of 32 5x5 map tiles. As of the writing of this post not all of the sets have example images yet, which I'd normally be quite concerned with.

Fortunately Jean Francois Senay already has a great track record with fulfillment and the fact he set such a small funding goal tells me he was always planning on doing all nine sets.

These tiles are pretty much a top-down perspective so they aren't as awesome as the earlier sets for a VTT, they will have a lot more use for all GMs.