Frugal GM Review: Stranded at the Doomsday Drive-In!

This week I'm going way off on a few combined tangents for this week's Frugal GM Review. You know how OBS likes to throw up personalized suggestions based off of your purchase history? Well on DriveThruRPG I skipped past that and looked at the "Exclusively on..." list. I'll poke through that list but I'd say at least 99% of what is there are items I don't need/want/could care less about.

If I have to spend my money on review products I tend to get things I think I could use.

Today I went far off the reservation and picked up a tiny solo adventure for a game system I've never heard of (or at least don't remember hearing of).

Free Map065: The Great Lakes

Today I spent waaaaaayy too much time working on this large map. I had several ideas I wanted to try out and most of them were a waste of time.....well, I generally don't consider learning new techniques, or more specifically techniques not to use, that big of a waste of time.

This map was inspired by a couple of things, one of which should make it to a Tweak & Toss adventure.

My Patrons get a much larger/better map and a few alternate versions. To get the free map, click on any of the graphics from this post, or use this link.

Free GM Resource: D&D Media Resources

Today I had several things I wanted to share as a Free GM Resource. The 1st item...well I couldn't find a public-facing link to the download and I think it was a Kickstarter backer-only item. I'm going to try and reach out to the creator and see if I can share that resource.

The other item held a lot of promise, but it simply didn't work..as in it crashed hard on my computer.

Actually I had a third item I was tracking down, but it was old enough the links are long since dead. It was basically a compendium of D&D monster pictures. A bit of a spiritual successor to that collection is this link to "official" Dungeons & Dragons Media Resources. This collection of media is organized in a bit of a hap-hazard way, which I do not care for, but if you are patient there are some good graphics to download.

Personally I found a cool wallpaper for my collection...

While there are some comic, videos, and excerpts to look at, I'm only interested in the art galleries and wallpaper.

I'm assuming that this media collection will grow over time.

Frugal GM Review: Random Dungeons

A couple weeks ago I jumped at the chance to get a couple of books through Lulu after I had learned about what I thought was a limited time offer for 25% off. I bought a hard-cover for a game not even 10' after having paid for the PDF because what I saw was just begging for a hard-cover....more about that book another time, hopefully.

The other book I picked up was Random Dungeons, which appears to have been an add-on for a Kickstarter to have the Random Dungeon Generator as a Dungeon Map. This is the Dungeon Robber game I highlighted almost two years ago today. I loved playing that game and while I wanted the 36" x 24" map, the book looked pretty cool as it used the graphics of the map as the cover. The book is 180 pages long and letter sized (8 1/2" x 11").

The book is sort of a hodgepodge of information and is roughly broken down into three main sections:

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.