Free GM Resource: Basic & Expert Dungeon Master Tools

This week's Free GM Resource is a bit of random generation love for the Basic & Expert D&D rules from the aptly named Basic & Expert Dungeon Master Tools website.

There are a few tools available here:
* Dungeon Turn Tracker
* Die Roller
* PC Generator
* Wandering Monster Encounter Generator
* Dungeon Stocker

The results are about as random as random gets, so you probably will need to make some tweaks on the fly. For example, the 1st room in a 1st level dungeon I generated had a single Dwarf in it and something like 16,000 gold pieces as treasure.

The website has been around since a year ago last July and I for one liked looking at the change log to see what has been teased out of the site since it went live. All these tools were coded by Tony Bravo, but since I don't see an email or G+ link, I'm not certain who Tony is so I could offer a link for folks to extend their thanks.

Undoubtedly one of my 12 regular readers knows and can point us in the right direction.

Frugal GM Review: Hill Cantons Compendium II

Ever since my trip to North Texas RPG earlier this summer I've been wanting to pick up something from Hydra Cooperative to review, not knowing I had already reviewed one of their adventures.

A week or two ago I noticed the Hill Cantons Compendium II was not only PWYW, but also had a softcover B&W book available. While the PDF is PWYW I do believe there is a minimum price to get the softcover.....the printing and shipping doesn't pay for itself!

This review will kind of cover both items. They are far more similar than they are different, as one would expect. This supplement seems to be geared more for old-school Basic D&D, but really it is filled with tweaks that can be further tweaked for any OSR game.

Free GM Resource: A Plethora of Free Icons

This week's Free GM Resource, like all the others, may not be for everyone.

You've heard the old adage, "A picture is worth a thousand words." right? Well when reading the adventure that was Saturday's Frugal GM Review I noticed that a few icons were regularly used to show the GM entries for monsters, treasure, and traps.

I thought the idea was brilliant and luckily there was an attribution for the icons to game-icons.net. Holy crap there are a lot of icons there...2279 when I first checked it out. All these icons are licensed with a Creative Commons BY license.

Now downloading the whole lot might be a bit much, especially since it'd be harder to appropriately attribute who created which icon, but I think overall this is a great little resource that many GMs could use when writing adventures, making maps, etc.

The download graphic used in the header was created by Delapouite.

Late Night Edit: Evidently I messed up the link to the actual fricken icons by adding a "s" where it didn't belong. Today was a long day at work so I couldn't just fix this as easily as I'd have liked. Thanks to Alfredo Sendín for the head's-up.

Frugal GM Review: The Cursed Fountain

This week I let DTRPG guide me by the hand to select an adventure to review as this week's Frugal GM Review. Sometimes I get a bit of a kick out of seeing the "Personalized Suggestions", especially when they suggest items I've written.

Meh, it happens.

This week, though I found a little gem of an adventure for Swords & Wizardry called "The Cursed Fountain". This short, 13 page PDF is part of the "Dungeons of Dazegoneby" line from Creation's Edge Games and intended for 4-6 PCs of 1st through 3rd level. The PDF is locked down as one would expect, but I don't see that being an issue for this product as it doesn't impede usage. It also isn't bookmarked, but this PDF is really one of those items you print up for use.  If you wanted to print this up I'd suggest just printing pages 2-12 of the PDF, ignoring the cover and the obligatory Open Game License.

Free GM Resource: 2016 Gongfarmer's Almanac Compilation

Last year I shared a cool Free GM Resource that was the Gongfarmers Almanac. I'm kind of double-dipping here, but this week's resource is not just one almanac hosted on some Google Drive, but a whole year of almanac available over at DTRPG.

The 2016 Gongfarmer's Almanac is a compilation of eight issues all rolled up into one file filled with 468 pages of goodness. Designed as a 1/2 US Letter page, I'm thinking of printing the whole thing out as a giant booklet.

The bookmarking is a bit half-assed because it jumps from Volume 1 to Volume 7, but it is free and has a bunch of cool articles.

Free GM Resource: The Randomizer

This week's Free GM Resource is a random table generator made for the Windows platform (sorry iOS and Linux folks). I haven't spent much time "under the hood", so I'm not familiar with the nuances of creating new tables, but The Randomizer comes with about a bazillion tables already established.

The download links are for the current version (as of September 5th, 2016), but news about updates, along with a link to the download site, can be located in this Reddit thread.

From that thread: "The Randomizer is an always free and open source Windows application designed with role-playing games and story tellers in mind. It is a customizable random thing generator able to generate nearly limitless things including and certainly not limited to names, plot hooks, and maps."

The download is small and installation was extremely quick.

Frugal GM Review: Strange Trails

Originally I was going to review this one PWYW item, but after looking at the preview I decided to not only get the PDF, but a soft-cover printing as well. It'll probably be a couple weeks before I can review that item.

Lately I've been on a bit of a kick in actively looking for "stuff" to review that I probably wouldn't use myself. This week it was Strange Trails, a freebie preview of previously "published" blog articles for a new pulp fantasy RPG called Weird Adventures. I've just about given up on reviewing complete RPGs because I'm not getting the extra table-time I think needed to do a RPG review justice. An article sampling for a new RPG, different thing altogether.

Had Some Unexpected Website Admin to Take Care of....

This morning I had to do some unexpected maintenance on this blog so that the Table of Contents page would work properly. This was instead of finishing up my Frugal GM Review this week.

After a couple of hours looking, and testing, new code I ended up simply finding out that google had moved the javascript required to make the TOC page work. It took about five minutes to find the new location and update the appropriate URL.

Reminder to self: examine your code before looking for alternatives...

I'll have to finish up the review sometime tomorrow (late afternoon) once I get off work.