Fat Dragon Games Sale Sunday, October 16th

I've mentioned before that Tom Tullis of Fat Dragon is a pretty good guy. I know I've mentioned & reviewed a few of Fat Dragon's products (great stuff) over the years and even promoted the recent Dragonlock 2 Kickstarter, which ended only a couple of days ago. My 12 regular readers might be a bit weary of yet another Fat Dragon post, but I'm going to risk it anyway....

This Sunday Fat Dragon Games is having a sale to benefit a cancer charity. I do not know the complete details, but when I do I'll edit this post.

From Facebook: "On October 4th, the FDG crew lost a long time friend to cancer. Sherilyn Daugherty was a wonderful friend and supporter, and we miss her dearly. Sherry fought her cancer with a grace and strength that will continue to be an inspiration to us all for the rest of our lives. On this Sunday, Oct. 16th, FDG will be running a sale and donating all the net proceeds to her favorite cancer charity, Steps for Sarcoma, in her memory. If there's a terrain set you've been wanting, consider grabbing it this Sunday, get a discount on it, and help a wonderful charity, too"

New Big Dragon Games Unlimited Sale

While going through my morning reading (online), I discovered that New Big Dragon Games Unlimited is having a HUGE sale on OneBookshelf.

Get the five biggest titles available for $1 each!

Some of these items I've reviewed:
     CC1 Creature Compendium (review) (purchase)
     AX2 D30 Sandbox Companion (review) (purchase)
     AX1 D30 DM Companion (review) (purchase)
     PX1 Basic Psionics Handbook (review) (purchase)
     VA1 Valley of the Five Fires (purchase)

The links above are affiliate links that don't cost either the publisher or the purchaser, but if you purchase one of these titles (you should pick up all five) I might get a nickle. I don't care so much for the nickle, but I do care about these awesome titles.....

....sale ends tonight at midnight!

Free GM Resource Twofer: A Cool Adventure and A "New" RPG

Today's Free GM Resource is an adventure created for the RISUS (The Anything RPG) game system.....which I know jack squat about, but it is free, which makes today another bit of a twofer. Toast of the Town is a great 42 page PDF detailing an adventure in the town of Trostig.

Now I only skimmed through the adventure and it felt like there would need to be a fair amount of prep needed to run the thing, but I could easily see tossing the adventure to the side and using Trostig as a cool town in just about any FRPG campaign. There were a lot of cool little details that really made Trostig "pop". Even if, for some reason, you didn't want to run RISUS....didn't want to use Trostig as an in-game locale, I still recommend picking this freebie up for several reasons. First would be those little details you could strip-mine like there's no tomorrow. Lastly would be just to look at the sections of the download to see how the author put things together....I see some great organizational ideas I'd love to steal for my own locale-building.

Toast of the Town is available as a Google Drive download, but I have not added direct links to this post. Instead they go to a holding page on the Cumberland Games & Diversions website which does have those links. I'm not a fan of direct-linking and cutting out the middle-man that made this freebie available in the 1st place.

Frugal GM Review: Simple Caverns from Inked Adventures

This week's Frugal GM Review really makes me feel like I'm just "phoning it in" since I could've guessed this would be a 5 star review just by looking at the intro-graphic over at DriveThruRPG.

Inked Adventures is on our +12 Links of Helpfulness for a reason, which is they/he (Billiam Babble) always does a good job. As soon as I saw the Inked Adventures logo I was sold....providing Simple Caverns as a PWYW made this a total no-brainer, must-get product.

The cover photo really spells this product out..."Hand Drawn Cavern Floor Cut-Up Sheets" .....I couldn't come up with a simpler explanation than that. The whole idea is that you can select a floor you want, print out as many as you need, and then cut them out to serve as your cavern floor. You could easily tile multiple pages to make a larger battlemat and these sheets can easily work with any 2.5 system like those from DM Scotty.

Free GM Resource: Dungeon Builder Demo

I'm a little late posting this week's Free GM Resource because I slept in and because I was too busy playing with the resource itself. We can just pretend it was "product testing".

Dungeon Builder is an isometric map maker for just about every desktop platform. It is currently on Kickstarter for funding, but for now the duo of Aage Jørgensen & Kim Markfoged have put up a feature-limited demo of the program.

The links above go straight to the Kickstarter and any links below go to the demo download page.

While it is only a demo, you can still build some pretty usable dungeons, especially if you are just trying to make the rooms themselves. I built the bulk of the couple rooms below in a minute or two and then spent a while just screwing around to see how the editing went.

You can't save anything you create with the Dungeon Builder Demo, but you can easily take screen shots.

The Kickstarter is already funded and it'll cost about $45 to get the program through Kickstarter. That seems like a lot to me, but since I cannot draw isometric maps and wish I could, that price isn't terrible....

Obviously your mileage might vary, but for the price of free, I think the demo is well worth downloading.

Frugal GM Review: Motley Jerks

Today's Frugal GM Review is on a freebie product from my "personalized suggestions" list over at DriveThruRPG. I have to admit that the title of Motley Jerks drew me in, but what cinched it for me was what this product actually was: a collection of 1st Edition/OSR pre-gens.

When I was a HackMaster 4th Edition GM I ran quite a few convention tournament games, either as a table GM or a Head GM. The biggest/hardest part of the job was writing/editing adventures for tournament play, but the second biggest (and least fun) was making pre-gen characters. Pre-gens took a lot of time, there were tons of details to keep up on and even if it was a pre-gen only tournament, a lot of your work went unused.

Even though I don't really run many convention games, Motley Jerks still hit me as something I want "just in case".

October's d30 Table is Up: FGM037l d30 Natural Potions & Poisons Generator

Since today is the 1st of the month I'm going to slip this week's Frugal GM Review until tomorrow and instead post up this month's Free/PWYW d30 table.

FGM037l is a d30 Natural Potions and Poisons Generator. I was looking at a modern version of some ancient book on medicinal plants and noted just how many of these "helpful" plants also did double-duty as deadly poisons. Sometimes it was just a matter of dosage, but often the poisons were just variant usages for different parts of the plant.

When reading this "updated" version of this one book I also noted that a lot of these plants weren't necessarily identified. Some entries had some "best guesses" as to what the currently-available plant was, and some plants had multiple beneficial uses. The sourcebook, in many ways, was a bit of a mess, which works out well for the purposes here.

This d30 Natural Potions and Poisons Generator generates the Greek-Sounding name of the mystery plant, what it treats, the method of application and required plant parts. On the flip side are tables for poison type, plant parts used (and how), along with mortality (how quickly the poison kills) and just how the victim will perish.

While all the poisons are fatal, the GM is encouraged to tweak things, like a Save vs. Death or maybe just painful debilitation.......

Click on either graphic to go to the DTRPG page, or use the links above.

If you like these d30 tables but don't want to wait for a monthly release, check out my Patreon page. Patrons get the tables as they are produced, along with all my other RPG Aids and a few Patreon-only versions of maps.

Free Map068: A Big-Assed Cave

I know.....I know....it has been quite a while since I tossed up a free map. You know how it goes, you make all these plans and then life gets in the way, sometimes big-time.

Trying to get back on the proverbial horse by playing around and trying to figure out how to do something I shouldn't be able to do with the current constraints of my computer system. I don't have a wimpy system at all, just I tried asking far too much of it.

Needless to say I was able to figure out how to work around these limitations and make a large A1 sized map. My Patrons get a couple versions of that huge map, but everyone else gets this still-large Ledger sized map.

I hope you are able to get some good use out of it. Like usual, click on either graphic to get to the map, or use this link.