Frugal GM Review: D30 Sandbox Companion

Thanks to a few folks buying up some of my offerings at DriveThruRPG I had enough in my publisher account to pony up the whopping $6 for the D30 Sandbox Companion from New Big Dragon Games Unlimited(affiliate links provided). I've been waiting for a while to get my hands on this title and I'm glad the wait is now over.

I'm going to skip ahead to a TLDR overview: Everything good you've heard about this supplement is correct and you should get yourself a copy ASAP. Get yourself a d30 if you don't already have one*.

Granted I'm a sucker for tables and this tome of 56 pages is mostly tables, but I'm quite impressed. In general it isn't all that difficult to put down some random tables, but putting together good random tables is an art-form all onto itself. Couple some great, dare I say awesome, GM aides with great tables and you have yourself a winner. I'd love to be able to say, "I can do that", which technically might be correct, but I doubt I'd be able to pull off anything nearly as good.

On my initial read-through I noticed that the general layout and even font selection really made it easy to read and follow along. Unfortunately this only went so far because some of the tables are just downright confusing. Silly me, I skipped over the intro pages to get right to the tables and game aides. Pages 3 to 5 are solely dedicated to explaining just how to get the most out of this book. There are tables that are essentially two tables in one and a few other aides that really need some introduction. Some tables/aides have additional instructions unique for that item right on the page.

Courtesy of Wikipedia

While the random tables drew me in, it is the game aids that really sold me on the D30 Sandbox Companion. Some great aides for mapping out an area, town, and making it easy to track/flesh out NPCs. My favorite is the Off Course Determination on page 14. I think it just made me remember something about course deviation regarding mils from my early Air Force land navigation training (don't try to make sense of this). I found it easy to use and just made sense to me.

Now with regard to the tables.....awesome tables. What I noticed were tables that really filled in some holes as far as common GM needs and those tables that I might have had different versions of elsewhere.....well I'm going with these d30 tables.

To date I've only found one typo....nothing major at that. Even if it was upped to one typo per page I'd be willing to gloss it over for the simple fact that the folks at New Big Dragon Games Unlimited bothered to bookmark this product. THANK YOU!!! One of my biggest pet peeves is when a PDF isn't bookmarked. I'm also glad that NBDGU didn't password-protect the PDF to the point of absurdity. More than once I've come across a PDF that couldn't be used to its fullest effect because it was overly protected. The only "real" issue I have with this PDF is that the majority of the pages are landscape oriented while some are portrait. This made it fun to play with on my tablet, but wouldn't be an issue otherwise.

Since I've already given the TLDR overview all I can say is that I thought this was a good purchase and it makes me want to check out the rest of the New Big Dragon Games Unlimited line. I wasn't sure I'd be happy spending $6 on some new (to me) producer's product, but I think I'm going to get more than 6x the usage out of this one item than I'd have gotten out of a smaller $1 table book from someone else (I've seen those $1 tables.....no thanks).




*You don't have a d30?! I'm not sure if we can be friends anymore. Just kidding, but seriously though....get a d30 (and this book).

Free Map 020: A Complex Cave System

I'm still busy making cave maps.

If you don't like cave maps....sorry? Part of the reason for these maps is to play around (have some fun) while learning new skills and strengthening those I might already have.

Like last week when I did a mental shift on how to approach a natural maze, this week I wanted to try my hand changing things up with a multi-layered cave map. In previous attempts I'd just draw everything out and scan it it. It was pretty painless once I figured out (thanks again Matt) how to use Adobe Illustrator to cut it down to a quick task.

This time I started with a series of individual caves/odds shapes and worked with them as individual pieces or layers. The map I'm presented here is not finished, but I'll get into that later. Since I didn't have an idea on how I wanted the pieces to fit I needed a way to show which levels were underneath each other without drawing the little dashed lines like I'd do when drawing it all out at once.

I toyed with the idea of assembling the layers, selecting the appropriate walls, and then just using a white paintbrush to essentially remove small bits of wall. I tested that quickly and did not like the end result. A couple weeks ago a different Matt started sharing some maps where he colored in the lower levels. To be fair he may have been doing this for years, but I only noticed a bit ago. Since I was going more than two levels deep this isn't an option, but it got me thinking of "simply" using a lighter grey color to designate wall sections underneath a layer above it. Since I didn't have any individual wall section two deep, I thought it was worth a go.

I liked the results, but it was a bit of a PITA. The steps themselves were simple, but I end up having so many layers on this map that it was hard to keep track of things. I was reducing the file and saving my progress in steps to put together another how-to post, possible later this week.

This map isn't finished in the sense that I have a few things I want to play around with still and I deliberately have not connected the various levels.....yet. In my mind's eye each level is anything but level and if I dare to try a 3D or side view I'll be able to show this off. As-is though, the map is almost good-to-go, you just need to put in connections between the different sections.

I've got a couple hours easy into this, believe it or not, and I'm sure I'll have a few more before I think it is finished.

To get the hi-res (300dpi png) map, click on the header graphic or feel free to use this link.

Free GM Resource: Masks

In many ways I'm a lazy GM. There are a lot of things I love to do as a GM and I tend to spend more of my time working on those things and not so much on the stuff I don't like to do.

One thing I generally don't like to do is come up with NPCs. Often I'll just have a list of generated names written down and I'll come up with my NPC's persona and background on the fly, taking down notes as I go. This keeps me from having to do too much work ahead of time. If the PCs never visit the bakery, my time creating the Baker is just a waste.

Now this week Free GM Resource isn't a complete product, but a 17 page preview of a GM aide put together by the folks over at Engine Publishing. I'm linking to the page that contains the free preview download and not the download itself because....actually should I have to explain common courtesy?

I like the fact that this product gets it's main idea from an early Dragon article, one that I'd highly recommend if you wanted to write up a bunch of NPCs ahead of time. This product doesn't follow that Dragon article exactly, but it does seem to hold true to the main gist of the article, which was to make simple (and short) NPCs.

There are a (relatively) small number of NPCs given as examples and a hint of the real strength of this product which is the indexes. If you need a particular type of NPC you can quickly filter out the NPCs you don't want and easily look through those that meet your specification. I like this idea.

It is obvious that this is designed as a print product first and a PDF copy is secondary. For only 17 pages this file is over 11 MB in size. I'd like to see a PDF optimized version, preferably with some specific PDF tweaks made. The online store says it is bookmarked and linked, but to what extent....I don't know.

Overall though the strength in this free product is two-fold. 1st is the obvious preview to see if you might be interested in buy the whole aide. The second is a selection of some free NPCs. At $17 for a PDF it is out of my comfort zone, but the ideas it generates in regards to creating and organizing my own NPC bank.....

.....now to dig up my Dragon Magazine archive.

Free Map 019: A Natural Maze

Work kind of got away from me this week and I had to spend almost all of my free time trying to catch up and I am trying to play some catch-up.

This week when I had some unexpected free time during training at my day job I was pretty much forced to sit quietly at my desk while my colleagues took an exam. I'd long since finished the additional self-paced CBT (computer based training) modules so I broke out my notepad and markers to try my hand at something different.

I've been kicking around an idea for a natural maze that has had some constructs (extra walls and doors) built into it. I'm having problems getting my head wrapped around it so I just started drawing some rough shapes. Before I knew it I was drawing a maze-ish series of outcroppings. Normally when I'm drawing in this organic cave fashion I'm drawing the tunnels and caverns, but this time I was drawing the reverse. Basically instead of drawing inside walls I was drawing outside walls.

I actually drew parts of this map on four separate sheets of small notebook paper. On piece was intended to cover up the edge walls of another piece that I didn't like and by the time I got done scanning and stitching it all together, it was apparent my drawings didn't flow very well. Some walls seemed too thick and some outcroppings just seemed "off". I had scaled portions of my drawing out some, changing the otherwise steady dimensions of my pen lines. I had hoped that a trip through Adobe Illustrator would help, but it seemed to exacerbate the problem.

Lucky for me a solution dawned on me quickly. After re-opening my saved AI file in Photoshop I filled in one little hole in the wall (an actual spot that had a gap) and filled the open space with white. Then I deleted all my single-color black walls. With my uneven walls gone I was left with a white canvas with a bunch of clear holes in it. One quick stroke layer later and I now had nice and evenly thick walls.

I hope to remember this trick as a way of quickly and easily standardizing what might be some unevenness.

This map would be easy to tweak for your own use. Add some grid lines for scale and simply erase any outcroppings to make larger chambers. This could be an outdoor area or it could be the grouping of stalagmites & stalactites of a cave system. To make it into more of a maze, draw a line around connecting the individual pieces, making sure to leave some pathways clear.

To get the map, click on the intro graphic to this post or use this link. I left the picture alone so if you click on it you'll get a closer low-res look.

Free GM Resource: John's Digital Wasteland

I bet you might be wondering, "Gee Chris, don't you ever get tired of random table generators?"

For the record.....no, no I do not. I lurve me some random tables, probably always have and always will. To me a good random table is the epitome of Frugal GMing. Instead of coming up with an idea once you jot your info down and turn it into a good way to to quickly re-use the data again and again.

A well designed table is a thing of beauty.

Now I've made a few random tables before and while it seems like an easy job, there is a lot more than just coming up with a list of related things. Hopefully the list is designed such to be able to work well with other lists in a synergistic fashion.

A huge bonus is if you can make it easy to access and share.

John Evans has managed to do this with John's Digital Wasteland. The site is a bit sparse and looks like it hasn't been updated in a while (or at least his blog hasn't) and you might have to peck around a bit before finding the tables.....or you could just click on the lead-in graphic (or this link).

Most of the tables seem to be D&D 3.5 related, but the tables towards the top are pretty generic. I'm a big fan of the "Harmless Traps" table. The cool thing is that you can download this tools to use on your own webserver. Of course not everyone will want to do this, but you could if you wanted to.

On a side note.....I think I'm out of random tables unless I start putting up my own!

Free Map(s) 018: Stippled Out Cave

During my 1st week at my new job I had a little bit too much free time during training so I doodled some maps. I posted one last week and while there are a couple of things I wanted to try out on this map, I figured I'd instead play with the stippling I was working on a couple weeks ago.

I was pleased with the results and hope to come back to the raw map and try out those other ideas I had for it.

I went ahead and filled in the basic white with a dirt floor and again with a stone floor. I thought about changing it up some so the texture wasn't seamless between levels, but that was just a bit too much work.

I was pretty happy with the stippling results. For the record though, I used some more stippling dot sizes than those I put on the earlier post.

Instead of zipping these three pictures together I've got them listed up separately. Normally you can click on the lead-in graphic to get the file. Since there are three files I'll have to use three separate links:

• Map 18a (White)
• Map 18b (Dirt)
• Map 18c (Stone)

Free GM Resources: Random Tables from Wizardawn

If I've said it once, I've probably said it a hundred times.....on this blog, I'm a sucker for random tables.

With the problems I've been having with my domain, I needed something fun to post today. "Fun" means going through my list of Free GM Resources and pulling out a good set of random tables.

Wizardawn is a publisher with a rather plain site that is chock-full of useful tools for just about any RPG. "Chock-full" might be just a bit of an understatement. When I first went to the site I was wondering why I had it in my file....

....until I saw this long list of random tables:

•  Adventuring Gear 
•  Alchemy Recipes  
•  Alchemy Shelf  
•  Apocalypse  
•  Dungeon Door  
•  Encounter Creation  
•  Dungeon Maps  
•  Ruined City Maps  
•  SciFi Maps  
•  Settlements Maps  
•  Sewer Maps  
•  Suburb Maps  
•  World Maps  
•  Monster Listings  
•  Fantasy Names  
•  Fantasy Settlements  
•  Mutant Settlements  
•  Piles of Coins  
•  Potion Appearances  
•  Random Books & Tomes  
•  Random Treasure  
•  Random Treasure Maps  
•  Scavenging Lists  
•  SciFi Enemies  
•  Ultimate Dungeon Creator  
•  Ultimate Dungeon Delve  
•  Ultimate Future Maze  
•  Ultimate Locale Creator  
•  Ultimate Mutant Adventure  
•  Ultimate World Adventure  
•  Wandering Enemies  
•  Zombie Hordes  
• OSRIC™   Adventurers Guild  
• OSRIC™   Spell Books  
• T&T™   Combat Dice Sheets

2x2 Random Village

I spent too much time looking at the left menu and almost missed the awesomeness that were these tables.

There are some great gems in this list. While I chose the village generator for an example, there were some that just blew me away. The Zombie Horde generator is something I hadn't seen before:

Criselda Tavarez
Criselda is a female, child zombie that has long, red hair.    She has light-green skin that is bloody in appearance.  CLOTHING [ripped, black hard hat / light blue sleeveless shirt / rugged, dull tan yoga pants / yellow socks / bloody, vibrant purple work boots].

Cristina Mendel
Cristina is a female zombie that has long, white hair.    She is also missing her right arm.  She has sickly skin that is bloody in appearance.  She is totally void of any type of clothing.

Herb Kapp
Herb is a male zombie that is bald with no facial hair at all.    He is also missing his right arm.  He has gray skin that is gruesome in appearance.  CLOTHING [shredded, purple denim jacket / scraggy, black cargo pants / shabby, light white socks / shabby, dull yellow shoes].  HOLDING [bracelet / tissue / scissors / ear plugs / backpack / surgical mask / knife / map, road].

I Fumbled!

Pretty much since day one I've had a custom domain for this Blogger (www.frugalgm.com) blog, with my domain hosting coming from my "normal" web hosting account.

Last Friday I took advantage of a special discount my web host had to open up a second account, and I moved the FrugalGM domain over to this new account.

Of course all the various domain settings didn't transition over. This shouldn't have been a big deal, but when I tried to manually update the settings.....nothing worked. Ok, sometimes these things take some time, so I waited a full 36 hours....

.....and nada. Some time spent with the tech support for my web host, a frustrating experience I'm not used to, and the best they could do was offer to use a simple domain re-direct. Instead of hosting on www.frugalgm.com, you'd get directed to the blogger sub-domain (www.frugalgm.blogspot.com).

Ugh.

This isn't the norm for my webhost, who I would normally be quick to recommend to anyone.

Hopefully I'll be able to get it squared away by Monday.....I hope I get it resolved ASAP, but until then I've shut off the custom domain for the blog and I've put up a real-simple page with a link to the blogspot domain.

On the flip-side, once this gets fixed I'll have a virtual place I can use for a lot of stuff.......