Free GM Resource: Dragondex (Dragon Magazine Index)

I know a lot of us gamer types tend to collect RPG books, magazines, and well....stuff. One of the crown jewels of my collection is the Dragon Magazine Archive. Two hundred & Fifty Dragon magazines in PDF form.

Now many of might have the PDFs because they've been pirated, shared, and otherwise "out there" for some time. A few years back I was able to pick up the actual physical product for my collection*.

This week's Free GM Resource is an invaluable tool for those of us who have the Archive: Dragondex. The Dragondex covers a lot more than the 1st 250 issues, actually up to issue 359 as well as some extra materials. With this site (personally I just downloaded the individual web pages so I could not be using up the creator's bandwidth more than necessary) a Dragon reader could figure out where a specific article was located.

If you have any amount of Dragon magazines in your collection you need to check out Dragondex.
Seriously.....check it out.





*My favorite RPG, HackMaster (well at least the original OSR "4th Edition") was borne from the boondoggle that was the Dragon Magazine Archive and part of the reason you probably have to settle for bootleg/pirated copies of this product because they (WotC/Ha$bro) didn't have the rights to reprint/republish some of the material in Dragon, like some of the Knights of the Dinner Table strips. This is why I wanted a physical copy so bad....and found one.

Free GM Resource: Questing Beast YouTube Channel

This week's Free GM Resource is another YouTube channel. These days it seems like I watch more YouTube than I do Netflix, probably because I can learn more from watching one than I do the other.

One thing I'd like to do is get better at drawing maps. That's where Questing Beast comes in, particularly the Fantasy Map Making Tutorials for DnD section.

Now I don't want to copy this exact style, but then again if I was good at copying then I would probably have the skills to draw what I want in the 1st place. Kind of interesting how that works out...

Free GM Resource: Drinking Quest Side Quest Saloon of Horrors

Today's Free GM Resource is a "side quest" for a game I don't own....yet. Drinking Quest has been on my radar as part of my "wish list" for couple of years now.

Saloon of Horrors is a "parody dungeon" for Drinking Quest that actually has the blessing of DQ's creator, at least according to the Side Quest's creator.

One aspect I just love about our hobby is that a lot of folks, especially in the OSR movement (yes, I get that DQ isn't an OSR game), is that we take our love of a cherished game and channel it into creating stuff not only for that cherished game, but for other's to enjoy as well.

While I could just link to the Saloon of Horrors depository, the links here go to the creator's blog post on The Savage AfterWorld. Feel free to go over there, download and play the game, and leave some encouraging feedback. As of the timing of this post there aren't any comments and I can speak from experience knowing that someone else is sharing the love of a certain game really helps out.....

Just a Quick Admin Note

Just a quick admin note that I've gone ahead and edited the site to remove page "ads" for Patreon as well as the Patreon page where I listed my Patrons.

I have NOT deleted my actual Patreon campaign...yet, and I might not do so since Patreon was hosting some of the free map files, and all of the Patron maps I've made so far.

I'm still up in the air on what to do, but for now it is far easier to keep the inactive Patreon Campaign up so access to those files is not lost.

I will most likely migrate everything over to DTRPG and then start the laborious task of editing all of those Frugal GM posts to include the new links. Seeing as there are at least 73 maps......this could take a while.

Free GM Resource: Fantasy Name Generator

I'm pretty sure this week's Free GM Resource is related to last week's resource, but it needed it's own callout.

The Fantasy Name Generator is pretty straight-forward, generating.....fantasy names. What I really liked about this particular generator is that there are three categories of names (Serious, Fun, and Specialized) and a lot.....I mean a lot of individual generators.

The generator doesn't just make a name, but a whole block of names, so you can have a bunch to choose from or just use. There are several specific generators I've never seen before, like a Pokemon name generator and a Hawaiian name generator.

I'm sure some of my regular readers might think they'll never need some of the generators, but if you think about it.......a Pokemon generator would be a great way to rename/reskin some classic monsters in your campaign. Sure, the players may have run into hundreds of Ogres before, but when in a new land they hear about these massive creatures called Ardymons.....

Thanks to Samuel Stoddard for version 1.5 of the Fantasy Name Generator!

Free GM Resource: OSR PC Generator

I know I didn't post a Free GM Resource last week, mostly because of some personal stuff I was preoccupied with.

This week though we have a pretty cool OSR Random PC Generator from Ramanan Sivaranjan. The generator is a quick, down & dirty online tool that can generate Basic D&D PCs, 1974 D&D PCs, Holmes D&D PCs, and even Lamentations of the Flame Princess (LotFP) PCs.

You don't really get any options, aside from setting, and if you want to generate a different PC, just refresh the page. I guess one other option is to generate the PC in plain text. If you want a specific race/class.....well standby with the F5 key.

Here is an example Basic PC:

Free GM Resource: Identifont

If you spend some time going through older posts (the Table of Contents is good for this) you'll see that I do like to find some not-so-obvious "things" to feature as a Free GM Resource.

This week is another not-so-obvious resource: Identifont.

Identifont has proven itself useful to me over and over again because it has enabled me to try and emulate a specific look from something I'd like to tweak and add to my game table. Instead of simply going to some free font websites and searching high and low for the perfect font for my project, which is kind of working backwards and not an effective use of time, I could start with an unknown font and work forward through the Identifont interface.

For example....here I tried to figure out what font was used for the title of TSR's Wilderness Survival Guide. I won't step through all the steps, but I simply typed "WILDERNESS SURVIVAL GUIDE" in the "Fonts by Appearance" tab and limited the results to fonts created before 1987 (The copyright for the book is 1986). I answered specific questions regarding the available letters and here was my 1st result: ITC Korinna.

Now ITC Korinna is damned close, but not perfect. The "W" doesn't match up quite right, but is close. Cycling through the other possibilities I found that ITC Korinna Bold is perfect.

Now I can go and look for that specific font for my project. This was just an example and NOT an actual project need.

I've found Identifont to be quite useful and I think some of my 12 regular readers will as well.

Free GM Resource: Spellburn Podcast

I've made it clear a few times that my favorite OSR game has always been HackMaster, even though the argument could easily be made that the current edition isn't OSR, but the previous edition was definitely the 1st OSR game that wasn't a specific edition of D&D/AD&D.

I have managed to play in a couple of games of Dungeon Crawl Classics at conventions and I really did enjoy the game(s). Even though it isn't a home-game for me, I do listen to the Spellburn Podcast and really recommend it as a Free GM Resource.

Without having a great grasp of the rules, just listening to the Judges J can give a ton of great ideas for the creative GM/DM/Judge. If nothing else I think it is worthwhile tuning into the podcast while you are doing other gaming tasks, like painting minis, building terrain, game prep, etc.

As a little bit of a twofer, the Spellburn Podcast's website has some bonus material in the form of "Dungeon Denizens" you might enjoy reading/borrowing.

The Spellburn Podcast is available via iTunes and RSS.