Happy New Year Everyone!

I hope everyone had a safe and sound holiday, preferably with some gaming!

While I am a big HackMaster & OSR fan my next game will probably be D&D 5th edition because a friend's teenage daughter wants to play and her parents are not only encouraging it, but willing to make it a family game.

I had some less-than-stellar D&D experiences with 3.5, but I'm more than willing to give DMing 5th edition for my buddy's daughter. I so remember wanting to play in middle & high school and for the most part I just couldn't. I don't think there was a game store within 100 miles, not that I had much transportation until my Junior year anyway. I'm so going to run a game or fifty for them...

I've picked up the PHB, DMG, Monster Manual, and the DM Screen so far (and enough dice that each player gets a set.....they aren't using my Gamescience dice!) I'm still in the reading/learning phase, but I'll get there.

Since I figured we start with a character creation session I've been looking for DM aides and came across this on reddit and thought I should share:

Click to embiggen

Free GM Resource: OSR PC Sheets over at En World

This week's Free GM Resource is a collection of OSR PC Sheets from (hosted by) En World.

I've featured PC sheets before...a couple of times actually:
      Hand-Drawn OSR Sheets
      Mad Irishman's Sheets
      Some Sheet I Made (link to the DTRPG site)

There is a post about my HackMaster Sheet, but the post is specifically about a paid version, so I linked the free/PWYW version.

I still see some awesome sheets here and there, but they are almost always one-offs, which is why I'm linking to this collection over at En World.

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!