I might be in the minority, but I find artwork important to my gaming experience. I like to use art to "punch up" my gaming projects, to show to my players as examples, and even as inspiration for sessions/games/adventures/etc.
A while ago I was on a huge Dutch Golden Age kick......I didn't know it was the Dutch Golden Age, I just knew I got a lot out of artists such as Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Actually Bruegel the Elder was Flemish and not part of the Dutch Golden Age, but bear with me as this is part of my point......
WikiArt.org is a wonderful website where you can view the works of so many artists. Do a search for a subject, artist, genre...whatever. Take a look at the results and then....start link hoping.
Example of links (in blue)
For me....that's it. I can hop through a bunch of different art and inevitably find something cool I can use.
What you do with the art once you've gotten here.....well, that's up to you. All I suggest is that you document/attribute your art appropriately.
So I was planning on bailing on this week's Free GM Resource....well, not bailing per se, but pushing back at least a few days. On my way home from work today I got my annual Flu shot and now I feel like I'm coming down with the flu. I've had this happen before, but not so quickly and not so strong. It's been only 3 hours now.....
Ugh....
This weekend I was looking to see if anyone had an OSR spellbook generator. I'm looking for something that actually prints out the spell info and the closest I found was something for Old School Essentials that randomly made a spellbook, but basically just listed name, level,, and where I can look up the info. Thing is....I don't want to look up the info. I want to just be able to see the spells I currently have in my spellbook and call it good.
Exactly like this Spellbook Generator for 5th Edition, which I thought I should share for those of you that might play that game. I like how you can select spells and then print off just your selection.
This is pretty good and I hope that one of my 12 13 regular readers can get some use out of it.
I'm just coming off quarantine after my business trip, and also resting up after a back injury, so I've had waaaaaaaay too much time to myself....and "lost" too much of it to YouTube.
I know I said I wasn't going to do too many YouTube channels....I think my goal was no more than one a month, but I did one last week so I should be good until October, BUT I found an awesome terrain building channel and I'm not waiting a month..
Modellismo Fantasy does some pretty cool stuff at a level of detail that I found pretty aweseomtastic (yes, I made up a word for this channel). I stumbled across one video and thought that this might be a bit overkill for some table-top RPG use and more appropriate for diorama, but if you want to make something drool-worthy for your players............
It's in Italian so you might want to make sure that you have the close captions on......
A conversation on Facebook yesterday made me think of a particular establishment I created in one of my campaigns to serve as a potential base of operations for a new fledgling party.
I couldn't get the idea out of my head, partially because I barely tapped into the potential I had planned for the place, but the campaign didn't last....as these things happen. The next best think I could do is try to get they crap, er stuff in my head down on paper in some fashioned and set if off into the world where maybe some other enterprising GM can makes some tweaks to it and call it their own.
I had never tried doing one of my "Tweak & Toss" supplements on this particular laptop and I was having some issues with the PDF printing I'll have to iron out, but since I started late and it was after 3 AM when I finished......well I just made it a full page landscape print you'll have to duplex and then fold yourself instead of a simple "booklet print". This exchanges the ability to print the inside fold page which is the map for the ability to easily navigate it as an electronic document.
Of course this isn't an exact copy of what I used in my campaign, and I had to leave some details out, but the base shell is there and I think there is enough "meat on the bones" for a GM to work with, which is my general point with these things.
It's PWYW and believe me you are not insulting me by downloading it for free. Getting this idea out of my head and out into the world is plenty good for now. Like usual, click on either graphic in this post to go to the appropriate DTRPG page, or use this link.
I'm not sure if I mentioned here, or over at Tenkar's Tavern, that recently I've been going through my literally thousands of minis that I have that are unpainted and needing some attention.*
I'm trying to get thing set up to start making them table ready and so I've been investigating the possibilities of airbrushing them instead of hand-painting, which has been my go-to....when I can get around to it, which was maybe a few years ago. Part of my problem is that it's just a daunting task.
Anyway, I have been picking up the supplies I need to start the task and I've been reviewing YouTube videos for equipment/supply reviews and also some introductory "How To's". One great video I found with some tips I hadn't seen elsewhere is the Vallejo Surface Primers from Scale War Machines.
Now this guy paints on a scale (literally) that I'm not going to be, but there is still some great carry-over to what I'm going to be doing.
*My mini collection has been a couple decades in the making and I have maybe 10 minis that I have HUNDREDS of dupes of because I bought them in bulk for less than the cost of the base metal because a game company just wanted them gone. Even without those I have a lot though....
Frugal GM Note: I'm technically on quarantine for the next two weeks due to work, and moving slow due to a recent injury so I'm slow-rolling it for a few weeks. I'm supposed to both rest and not sit around on my ass or back at the same time, so go figure.
This week's Free GM Resource is another odd one.....I like pointing out some of these odd resources that the average GM might not even have considered. If you happen to be one of the writing/publishing-type GMs ideas for new encounters/monsters might not....."flow" as easily as you'd like. Finding art to back up you idea might be a bazillion times harder.
Kind of a twofer here, a Free GM Resource and a GM Prep-Tip: work backwards. Find some cool art and then write to it. I don't do this too often, but I have done it...specifically working on Creature Catalog Vol 1. I'm not going to link it as it's one of my few products I put up for couple bucks on DTRPG. The cover was the after-thought, but the genesis of that product was that I found a book of weirdly drawn creatures and thought I'd turn them into monsters.
A veritable treasure-trove of cool, public domain art that can be mined for sweet ideas (maybe more for certain genres, but still...) are Golden Age Comics.
The Digital Comics Museum is a cool website where you can download old Golden Age comics that have been researched and verified to be public domain. You'll need an account to download the comics, but that's it.
Browse to your heart's content.....oh and just because I'm approaching this from an art to ideas format.....it doesn't mean you cannot also/instead look at it from a story-line perspective.
I was working on a project the other day and realized that I had "lost" some of the fonts I wanted for the project. Well, "lost" might be a bit strong because I'm not 100% sure I had the font to begin with, but I was looking for a "rune-light" font that looked like a rune, but you could probably read it anyway.
My 1st step was to go through my Table of Contents here to see if I could find it, figuring I had to have posted about it before....but nope, not there.
Well I just ended up going to my go-to font depository which is Font Space, and I thought I'd go ahead and share this as a Free GM Resource.
One caveat though.....if there is a chance you might end up using any of these in a commercial design I'd make sure you keep track so of which fonts are free to use and which are "personal use only". That's a headache best avoided....
One thing I really like about Font Space is that you can type in some sample text and it'll show all the fonts with that text. If you then do a search or do some navigating that sample text will carry-over to the new results.
This week's Free GM Resource is a YouTube channel that I was definitely NOT looking for and almost completely missed.
I sometimes travel for work and a couple weeks ago I was on a trip. My employer's employer decided that I have to undergo a two-week quarantine upon my return, so for the last two weeks I've been pretty much sitting in front of my TV all day sitting at a small folding table banging away on my laptop instead of going in to work and banging away at a laptop there. I do more than that, but indulge me in a little hand-waving.
During said "work" I usually have the TV going, playing something interesting, but not too interesting. Something that doesn't matter too much to me 'cause I cannot give it my my real attention. So movies are generally right out, but YouTube videos usually do just fine. I've really liked Adam Savage's Tested Channel, but that's not my focus here...not really a Twofer.
Anyway I'm plugging along, not really watching TV, lost in what I was working on and next thing I know I'm no longer hearing people talking, which is pretty much my background "music". I look up and it doesn't seem like a video is playing, but technically it is. What had happened is that I had stumbled upon a background music/sound channel called The Guild of Ambience.
So The Guild of Ambience isn't a large channel, but the videos they have....are rather long, HUGE even. As of the time of writing this post there are 21 videos that total a little over 46 hours! Wow...that's a lot of background sounds.
For example...here's a 9 HourThe Guild of Ambience video of Rain on Roof Sound....9 Hours!
