Free GM Resource: Game Music Radio

This week's Free GM Resource isn't for everybody.....but I could say that for just about anything I post here.

Game Music Radio (or more appropriately Video Game Music Radio) is an interesting web-based music player featuring video game music.

The player is skinnable.....the Metal Gear skin is what I used for the graphic to the left, and the whole thing works a little different than a lot of web-based streaming sites. The site also uses a 100 song playlist to reduce song fatigue. Also there are no commercial and limited station identification breaks.

Again, not for everybody, but I could see Game Music Radio working for some table-top RPGs and maybe even to play as a replacement for some of my own video game sessions.

Free GM Resource: 2nd Edition AD&D Character Generator

Here's a pretty cool Excel-based 2nd Edition (AD&D) Character Generator, courtesy of the Reddit  r/Dnd forum. This Chargen works with LibreOffice but the real selling point is that it incorporates far more resources than you'd normally see from this sort of thing.

In addition to the PHB and DMG, this Chargen includes info from (maybe all?) the Complete series of 2nd Edition books and the Player's Options Skills & Powers book.

The current release is version 4.1 and can be located here.

No Free GM Reference This Week....Yet

I know my...."participation" here as the Frugal GM has been a bit more sporadic than I have anticipated. Between training up at the new job and more stupid health problems (mostly stupid things like an emergency root canal and fallout from that....like pain meds) too much has been up in the air and I was really hoping that this week's Free GM Resource would be the beginning of a great restart.....because it was an awesome resource...

.....a too good to be true resource....

...which it is, or so I think it is. I found a link to an interesting collection of old RPG material and when I was doing the pre-requisite poking around I found what most definitely WAS NOT new material, stuff I had just paid for a month ago and even more stuff I know is still for sale and should be for sale instead of some type of of huge info dump.

So I cannot in good faith recommend a site that is sharing stuff for free that shouldn't be free.....so I'll have to find something else later in the week to share.

Free GM Resource: Landvaettr's Lair

I was doing my normal thing, link-hopping, checking out YouTube and I came across another YouTube channel that I think is worth mentioning.

Landvaettr's Lair "only" has seventeen crafting videos, but they are good videos and the end results? Awesome!

To be fair it looks like those end results entail a lot of work, but with those kinds of results, I'd be willing to put in the work.....and hopefully will.

Here are the title screens for four of the videos.....see for yourself if this level of quality is worth checking out (the pics are :

Free GM Resource: GM Friend

This week's Free GM Resource is a simple online hex-mapping tool called GM Friend.

It isn't a huge, feature-rich hex map maker, but it is quick and easy enough to use. I particularly like the random map maker. Truth be told this is a bit of a twofer because there is also a dungeon maker, but it's more of a note manager for a dungeon map.....truth be told I barely checked it out because I was playing with the map maker.

GM Friend is worth checking out.....especially if your do hex crawls.

Free GM Resource: Wizardawn

This week's Free GM Resource is something I almost decided to save until Christmas time, but then I remembered Fall just started, so screw making folks wait a few months.

Wizardawn is a pretty cool site from the folks over at & Magazine and it features a metric crap-ton of freebies spread out all over the place.

I could waste many paragraphs highlighting the available resources, but really you should just head over, bookmark it, and check it out for yourself. Seriously....go check Wizardawn out now!

Free GM Resource: VGMaps

I like it when I find a Free GM Resource that is a little off of the beaten path, like this little gem.

VGMAPS.com is essentially a collection of screen shot maps of various games. On a cursory glance there doesn't seem to be a lot of value in these maps, but if you squint your eyes and tilt your head just right you might see what I see.

Depending on the game you choose you might have the makings of a simple map layout for an adventure. I think that's a bit of a long shot, but I have used game maps before to good effect.

This time around I was thinking more along the lines of taking a decent map for use with a Virtual Table Top (VTT) game. The usual thing to do is to simply show a top-down view, but with some of these maps you could go isometric or even just a side view. One quick example I grabbed was from a Castlevania. Tweak a bit in Photoshop and there you go, one side-view castle map. This pic is a down scaled/sampled view:


You might want to poke around VGMAPS.com and see if anything piques your interest...

Just a Little Info on the State of The Blog (and General Frugal GM "Stuff")

Just wanted to let my 12 readers know what's been going on and where I'm at now with regards to several RPG efforts, including this blog.....thankfully it's good news.

I wasn't shy about posting that I was leaving Boise, ID for a position in Oklahoma. A good, I'd dare to say great, job opportunity came up and I had less than a month to move out, sell the house, and move me, two cats, and a dog the 1400 miles and change. I'd lived in Boise...in one house, since 2002, so I had a lot of crap...er belongings to go through, deal with, whatever.

Anyway, I get down here, move into a house and show up for my 1st day on the job only to be told I don't have a job to go to. There was an issue with the government contract the job was for, namely that a different company had been awarded the contract! I held fast here for a couple weeks before I was actually allowed to start work, but things were really tenuous and most everything just seemed on hold for a couple of months until the contract was hammered out. Basically a lot of drama well above my paygrade and probably par for the course, but what the hell do I know? The company taking over the contract extended me a worthwhile offer and I'm signed on and it should be a relatively seamless transition, at least for me. I fully expected last month to be squared away with the whole work thing, but this only came together last week.

That's great, but why should you care?

Since May I've been operating off of a laptop and a backup drive while pretty much living out of my suitcase and a few opened boxes. Now that I know I have a job when the "other guys" take over I can actually set up my new office and get back to this blog and a handful of other gaming projects that had to be sidelined. The joys of being able to use a real keyboard, my scanners, and even a proper desk!

Good times ahead if I have anything to say about it!
-Christopher