Frugal GM Review: The Item Hack

This week's Frugal GM Review is on The Item Hack from Tricky Troll Games. The Item Hack is a collection of magic items for use with the Black Hack.

Actually, the magic items can easily be used with just about any Fantasy RPG. There are a few rules-bits here and there, but nothing really important enough to get in the way of tweaking things.

This watermarked PDF is 9 pages and comes in at a hefty 5.08 MB, which seems awful heavy for an A4 sized fully black & white document with roughly one small piece if art per page. It looks like most of the artwork is greyscale and the document was actually distilled as a full-color document, which explains the size and the look of some of the art. The contents of The PDF is secured and doesn't have any bookmarks, which I think is needed for a collection of 80+ magic items.

Right off the bat I liked the content of this download, but the design and layout choices make this a bit more difficult to use than I'd like. First is the size, which I already mentioned, but the font choice for this document works for normal text, but doesn't work for the three tables or the magic item titles. There are two main tables, one for Uncommon Items and one for Rare Items. Each of these tables takes up on full column of space and then the document goes into an alphabetical sorting of the magic items. This makes perfect sense, but there is no space between paragraphs on the magic item listings and the name of each item is a barely-larger font than the item descriptions. This makes the majority of the document visually difficult to read, which further compounds the need for some bookmarking. The layout of the tables is also a bit visually..."off". I think using an additional font or changing to a bold for item names and adding a blank line between items would have made a huge difference.

Personally I wouldn't have minded an extra page or two to account for this space and a full title page wouldn't have hurt either. The cover, shown in the intro-graphic above is white on a black text which looks good on screen, but isn't something I'd want to print out. Some basic tweaks could have made this download something I could use electronically or have printed out.

Still, the magic items are pretty cool. There are a few I'd tweak, but that is to be expected. For the price of a buck I still think that The Item Hack is a worthwhile download.

A Long, but Worthwhile, Interview from the Dorks of Yore

I thought that some of my 12 regular readers might get a kick out of the Dorks of Yore YouTube Channel, specifically the rather long 2 hour interview with Tim Kask.

You can see the interview here.....or watch the video below.

Last summer I lucked out and got to play in one of Tim Kask's games at NorthTexas RPG. I managed to survive the game and got my PC Sheet signed with an "I survived" by the man himself. It was an enjoyable game peppered with some talk of the olden days.

 Growing up I had trouble trying to game and getting to hear stories from those days of the games/systems/companies I wished to play with.....

Free GM Resource: Abulafia Wiki (RPG Generators)

I don't know quite what happened to yesterday's scheduled post, but here is this week's Free GM Resource....

Abulafia is an...interesting random table generator in that everything is set up as a special Wiki page. You can navigate to the tables you want and just refresh the page to reset the tables and get new results.

While I find it a bit clunkier than dedicated table generators, the fact that it is basically a web page means you can use any browser to get some results. The wiki's built-in search feature is quite helpful as well.

Take Abulafia for a spin for yourself.

Frugal GM Review: Hexbox

After reviewing the Hexed Places: Crescent Lake a couple weeks ago, DriveThruRPG evidently thinks I need to see more hexcrawl "stuff" and suggested Hexbox.

At first I was a little "meh" on even looking at Hexbox, mostly because there was little to no useful information in the product's previews......but the PDF was free, so why not?

Hexbox is a little over 1 MB in size and consists of 59 unsecured pages that are 6" x 9" in size. The PDF is also bookmarked, which is a must for a product like this.

While Hexbox is clearly written for D&D 5th Edition, I could easily see modding this to work with other systems without too much difficulty. There are a couple of worksheets included and there is a helpful link to downloading separate log sheets from the writer's website.

Hex crawls are relatively new to me and Hexbox did a lot to educate me on possibly running a hex crawl campaign, not that I'm planning to, but with this guidance I think I could. The only real problem I had with this product was some sort of nagging in the back of my mind that this could easily have been written system-neutral, which would allow the writer to shave off three pages of Open Game License.

Of course, I could be quite wrong on this front...wouldn't be the 1st time.

There are only two color pages in this PDF, the front cover and a small hex map on page 40. I think I'd rather have seen the page 40 map in black & white to match the rest of the book and at 59 pages I think a nice back cover could have been included, bringing up the page count to an even (and US Letter booklet printing appropriate) 60 pages.

Because this material is not only new, but a bit foreign (5th Edition) to me, I suspect I'm going to have to re-read this a few more times and figure out how to include some of my other hex crawl resources. After, or if, I get to mark up my copy of Hexbox to make it work for generic OSR games I may have to come back and revise my rating...

Free GM Resource: Low Fantasy Gaming

This week's Free GM Resource is a rules light Fantasy Role Playing Game self-described as a "hybrid of old school and modern game design".

Low Fantasy Gaming is a 184 page PDF from Stephen J. Grodzicki's website lowfantasygaming.com (you can get the PDF's page by clicking on the graphic or by using this link).

I'm not doing a review, but a quick glance through makes a lot of Low Fantasy Gaming look like other OSR clones, but there are some creative differences here & there. Ru it as-is, or incorporate some of the "new stuff" into your other games.....

Frugal GM Review: The Ytroth Larvae of the Scarsea Cliffs

This week I was compelled to pull an item off of my "Personalized Suggestions" list over at DTRPG as this week's Frugal GM Review.

A quick peek at the product's page made me think that The Ytroth Larvae of the Scarsea Cliffs, would be similar to my Tweak & Toss adventure seeds. Two pages, not tied to a specific system, and only $1....close enough.

OK, I'll freely admit that I was drawn in by the cover image, shown left.

November's d30 Table is a Plant Generator

This month's free d30 table is a companion piece to last month's d30 table that generated natural potions & poisons.

The d30 Plant Generator isn't a sexy-sounding table at all, but if you want to throw some random plants at your players, this will help out.

I was inspired to create this table not only from a perceived need after making the last one, but also because I remember time when I've been surprised a bit by plants in different parts of the world. One of my neighbors has a Catalpa tree and the only other time I've ever seen one, well actually it was a whole grove, was while deer hunting some 2,000 miles (or so) from where I live now. I could envision sending the PCs to find the fruit of the Catalpa as an ingredient for something.....

Now instead of trying to fit in a real-world analog into your campaign's flora, just throw some d30s into the mix and come up with something "unique" to your game world....

Free GM Resource: Natural Crit's Homebrewery

Today's Free GM Resource is a pretty cool site that exists to help GMs create official-looking home-brew rule pages for D&D 5th Edition.

Homebrewery is a pretty cool site and just because it is designed for one edition it doesn't mean you couldn't use it as a tool to create pages for your own preferred system.

Homebrewery allows you to share the created pages, either as read-only, or even to allow multiple collaborators.