Regular Posts Will be Shifted This Week....

This week's Free GM Resource will either be late or simply skipped due to a completely avoidable work trip.......well, kind of. I'm off to an undisclosed location for an unspecified period of time and I've been told we'll have internet, but it might be iffy. Definitely no high-speed gaming, but email and blogging should be doable. If not, I'll have to visit an internet cafe because where I'm off to has those kind of things.

I am taking most of my gaming files with me and I'm really hoping that some of my downtime will let me catch up on organizing my files (fun!) and start working on some items I hope to have for publication in 2020!

I'm not forgetting about you 13 regular readers.....I just had a last-minute opportunity to squeeze in a visit to the family farm (last seen in 2016) before this business trip and I had to take it.

Free GM Resource: Rybonator YouTube Channel

It's been a while since I've been looking through build channels on YouTube, so I was surprised to see Rybonator pop up in my "recommended" videos.

Against what I thought was my better judgement I went ahead and watched a couple of videos. I type "better judgement" because the first video recommended to me was about casting your own dice.

Right off I'm not a fan of copying dice, which is essentially what Rybonator is doing, although he is making cool variations. Now that might make me sound some like ethical-type goody-two-shoes (which I am on some level), but really I'm just a bit of a dice snob and I roll how/what I roll.

What I did like though, was the narration style and I got too much of a laugh out of one early line of dialogue, and I went ahead and kept tuned in for a while.


There are some interesting build videos, but I also know that some people would love the idea of making their own dice and just because I'm not into it......

Free GM Resource: Chartopia

Now it isn't a secret that I like random tables.....even though I have a particular fancy for d30 tables, I dig random tables of all types, shapes, and sizes.

Some of the coolest tables I've made/seen were on the 'ol computer because software lets you call tables from tables and link everything together.

This week's Free GM Resource is not just an online repository of tables, but also a website that can actually let you run tables as well. Chartopia lets you make your own charts, call data from other charts, and even display them on a third-party website. There is a LOT of functionality, much more than I can delve into here in a quick blog post.

I suggest checking out Chartopia.....sign up, putz around with some charts....you can start with these Moldvay Treasure Charts.

New Kickstarter (That I'm Backing): 3D Printable Fantasy Dwarven Mine RPG Dungeon Tiles

This morning I decided I had to back a new Kickstarter for some Dwarven Mine Tiles for 3D printing from Tomb Guardians Miniatures.

Maybe an hour or so later I got a message from the Tomb Guardian guys thanking me for backing the Kickstarter and asking me to share the news of their campaign.

1st off, the message is simply brilliant. Why wouldn't you want to thank an investor/buyer/backer/customer for their purchase/funding? Obviously I thought their campaign was worth me spending $66, so who better to let others know?

2nd...and this is more an important disclosure....I actually stand to benefit if one of my 13 regular readers (or an online read-by) participates in this particular Kickstarter Campaign. Like most campaigns, the more funds they raise, the more bonus goals that get unlocked. The more bonus goals that get unlocked, the more free files I get.

All that being said, I think this Dwarven Mine looks awesome and is something I want to be able to add to my growing collection of .stl files.

Of course the Kickstarter has a bunch of pictures and some videos, which you should check out. The 3D Printable Fantasy Dwarven Mine RPG Dungeon Tiles should be worth at east a quick look.....

Free GM Resource: Nameberry

There wasn't a Free GM Resource last week due to a death in the family, but this week a resource normally used for a birth in the family is something I'd like to re-purpose for the game table.

At 1st glance Nameberry seems to be a rather sparse website with a few lists of baby names available to peruse, presumably to name NPCs.

The thing is there is actually a lot more names available, with lists buried as sub-pages & lists from other pages/lists. Allegedly there are over 50,000 names on the site.

Now I'm a fan of the historical names listed, but what I really enjoyed was the "Name Hunter" where you can put in up to 8 names you like as "themes" and the generator will spit out somehow magically-aligned names that go with your liked names.

Unless you're like me an have been cultivating numerous lists of names for your own name generator, you can probably get a lot of use out of Nameberry.

Free GM Resource: Character Generator

This week's Free GM Resource is a limited-feature character portrait generator appropriately called "The Character Creator". I have to say "feature limited" because there aren't nearly as many option say as.....other options I'm having trouble locating right at this moment.

I poked around a bit and had some issues getting things to work right, like selecting a nose, but whenever this online resource seemed like it was glitching a quick page refresh not only loaded the page, but went ahead and reloaded the most recently selected options as well. My poor no-nose demo dude was good-to-go after a refresh.

Look MA! No Eyes!

Since there aren't so many fantasy options for clothes and whatnot I doubt I'll get as much use out of this as I'd like, but The Character Creator can be a good source for simple portraits, or at least for the beginning of said portraits. My demo guy saved with a simple click and opened in Adobe Illustrator almost fine....his eyes were gone. I can fix that.....I didn't, but I could.

Now you might wonder why I'd bother with an arguably incomplete portrait generator that seems a bit buggy in the 1st place. For me the BIG reason for using this particular online program is the fact that you can easily have a bunch of emotional expression swaps pretty much on the fly. Demo dude not looking quite the way you want.....then make him Angry, or Sad. Rage that guy up some and see how he switches his look up.

It's far from perfect, but The Character Creator has at least one cool feature that is really worth checking out.

Free GM Resource: Town & City Assets from Two Minute Tabetop

I've been pretty much busting at the seams to be able to share this cool new Free GM Resource, which is a collection of Hand-drawn Tow & City Assets from Two Minute Tabletop.

I've known about these as an early release since last month, but they weren't made public until this weekend. There are a couple of reasons I love these graphic assets:
     1) I suck at drawing top-down view of buildings, which has actually hindered some of my efforts in the past.
     2) Like everything else from Two Minute Tabletop, this stuff rocks.


Did I already mention how I suck at doing top-down buildings?

Seriously though I've been a big fan of Two Minute Tabletop since I first discovered him on Patreon. I'm to the point now where I have every map he's done and now that $1 monthly coupon code is wasted on me.....and I'm ok with that.

Keep making cool things like this and I can be ok with a lot of stuff.......please just take my money.

These graphics assets have been released under a Creative CommonsCC BY-NC 4.0 license, which means I won't be using them on any maps I want to make commercially, but thankfully that's a small amount of maps.......

Please, check out Two Minute Tabletop's Town & City Assets.... you owe it to yourself.

New PWYW d30 Table is up at DTRPG: Random Cavern Table Generator

It feels like it has been forever since I put out a new d30 table and damned if I didn't miss doing this. If you're one of my regular 13 (it was 12, until a new reader tracked me down and corrected me!) readers you know that the last couple years have been problematic for me. Some serious real-world crap that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy (well, maybe I would...screw that guy) followed up by some major upheaval that is moving out of my home of 20 years and moving cross-country to a new job in a new career.

That whole moving saga is coming to an end....soon I hope, and then I can get back to not living out of suitcases and boxes.......

......anyway, back to the real topic at hand which is a new d30 table!