Free GM Resource: Thundar the Barbarian Gaming Supplement

I found this one interesting, if not kind of messed-up and hilarious, post in my Facebook feed regarding somebody trying to get $250 for a printing of a freebie 110 page gaming supplement that was available, again for free, by the original author.

Now I haven't made a 110 page gaming supplement myself, but I'd be both amused and pissed if someone was trying to sell something I'd written to be given away for free.

So this Thundar the Barbarian RPG supplement is available on The Savage AfterWorld blog. Scroll down the page and you'll see the cover graphic shown used as the lead-in for this post. Clicking on that will get you direct to the GoogleDocs file for this supplement.

Obviously I think you should click on the link and if you feel like it, have it printed up at your local copy shop. Do not print it up and try to swindle someone out of $250 and....it should go without saying...pay $250 for a printed copy off of eBay!

Free GM Resource: Mystara World Guide for D&D 5e

 

This week's Free GM Resource is most likely a limited-time thing so I do not feel at all guilty of piggy-backing (or just outright stealing) this post idea from today's post over at Tenkar's Tavern.

The RPGmp3 blog has a labor of love posted that is the Mystara Guide for D&D 5th Edition. 

"5 years. 224 pages. Countless hours of playtesting. All original art. The Mystara Player’s Handbook is a labor of love to bring the Known World, the greatest Dungeons & Dragons setting of all time as determined by science, into the 5th edition.

Inside you will find everything you need for your players to get started adventuring in a setting rich with culture and history. Five new races, over two dozen new subclasses, countless new spells, new forms of magic in the secret crafts, runes, and the incredibly powerful but dangerous Radiance. Featuring maps by Thorfinn Tait, a list of Immortals by Marco Delmonte, art by Rubus, Mischa Cel Frumos, and many more, is everything you wanted for a new setting."

Yeah......while I don't see Ha$bro ever putting out their own Mystara guide I can see them quickly doing a Cease & Desist on this project, so please, grab it while you can!

Free GM Resource (Freebie): Old School Essentials Newsletter

I found out about this too late to add to last week's Free GM Resource, to make it a twofer.

Evidently Necrotic Gnome is putting together a newsletter where you can find "The latest Old-School Essentials news, including product announcements, highlighted third party products, free resources, and much more!"

All you need to do is head over to the Necrotic Gnome webpage and scroll all the way down to the bottom (right) and enter your email.

Now I/we don't have a clue how good this newsletter will be, but it's OSE so it shouldn't suck and why not get in on the ground floor for what should be some good stuff.

Free GM Resource: Old School Essentials Generators

This weekend I stumbled across a set of OSE Generators that I found useful and figured would be a great Free GM Resource.

There's four main categories:

• Treasure
• Encounter
• Spells
• Magic Items
• NPCs

Free GM Resource: Reddit

 

During my way-too-long bout of unemployment for the 1st half of 2021 I spent waaaaaaay too much watching YouTube. Eventually I fell into the rabbit-hole which is a number of channels that feature the highlights of several specific stories from Reddit.

Now I'm not much of a Redditor, but eventually I figured I should kind of skip the middle-man and just start reading the original stories there instead of having them read to me on YouTube.

So I'm definitely a newb there, but basically Reddit seems to be a wild-wild-West bastard sibling to the forums of old. They have all kind of thread and groups there.....

...including this OSR subgroup and another (that I shared a long time ago) for D&D Maps. 

Now I'm certain there are more cool RPG/gaming sub-reddits, but again.....I'm a Reddit newb, so I know didly-squat as to what's out there.....

Please, if you know of some, shoot me a comment and I'll update them to this post.

r/osr

r/dndmaps

r/OSRNewArt

r/AskGameMasters

r/rpg

r/d100

r/DMAcademy

Free Quick-Start Rules and Adventure for Call of Cthulu

 

I'm officially back to work this week, which is waaaaaaay overdue, but also a source of some nervousness as I have to hit the ground running and pretend I'm not six-and-a-half months rusty doing something rather detail oriented for money.

I'm kind of triple-dipping on a subject this week, having blogged in general about Call of Cthulu over at Tenkar's Tavern and guest-hosting a podcast with this free adventure review as part of it.

Now, I have to admit that I am so not a fan of the free Quick-Start rules for 7th Edition Call of Cthulhu and the accompanying adventure The Haunting.

Obstinately this Quick-Rules and adventure is designed for new Keepers (GM's) and players who have never played a RPG before, and I will say that I think it utterly fails in this regard. There are clearly references to rules not included, too many throw-away bits of information that don't matter, and in several ways I felt dumber as a person reading this than I did before I started.

Now if you pick this up with the starter set or full-blown rules a lot of problems might make sense, but I looked at this as a stand-alone thing. I really think that there should have not only been a lot more editing, but they needed to get some people that have never played CoC (or possibly even any RPGs) involved.

Things is, even with the numerous flaws, I think there is some value to this freebie and if you wanted to introduce your gaming group to CoC you could use this if you put some serious time and effort to work out the kinks. Honestly I think the best use of this is as a guide to writing your own adventure and not what to do.

Personally I think that this is just a missed opportunity from Chaosium and I hope that they make some good tweaks in the next edition/printing to entice some players into the game.

Free GM Resource: Revisiting Basic Fantasy Role-Playing Game (You Should Re-Visit...)

I know, I know.....recycling old Free GM Resources two weeks in a row....kind of not cool. 

Thing is this is not my intention....I mean I didn't intend to do recycle...I was actually thinking of skipping this week or at least putting off until later in the week. I'm going back to work next week for my old employer and then switching over to a new employer next month and both of these companies have me doing a bunch of on-boarding to do, tons of read & signs.

Then I'm also trying to finish up some open personal projects before my way-too-much-free-time goes away.....

......anyway I was taking a break and I saw what looked like a PC Sheet booklet in this one YouTube ad (for a completely different gaming "thing"), so I wanted to see if I could find it online. I'd like to make a generic OSR PC Character Booklet and while it's for my own use I figured if there is something out there already, maybe "close enough" would save me a lot of effort.

So I start searching for one thing and after a series of link hopping I land on the Basic Fantasy Role-Playing Game Downloads page. What I'm after is definitely not on this page, but holy cow....there's some awesome stuff here. Now I had shared this download page as a resource back in ....2016! A lot has been added in the last 5 1/2 years, and even if you remember back that far, there's more than enough to warrant a second look.

Of course newer updates to the game and more adventures are going to be the main draw, but what I really geeked out over were the ancillary downloads. New classes, spells, rules, and of course character sheets galore. Yeah, those are pretty cool, my interest was a bit deeper, towards the ass-end of the download list. You know, those odds and ends that often get overlooked. Things like the Adventure Sheet and Adventure Log.

Yeah I geek out over the stuff most groups would probably never use.....

I didn't want to link to the individual items that I'm mentioning 'cause that's not cool and besides, you need to check out the whole page of downloads.

Free GM Resource Recycle and Contribution Opportunity....

This week's Free GM Resource is most definitely a recycle AND very much not a "freebie", kind of a messed up Twofer.

I know I've shared the One Page Dungeon before, but this isn't a one-off, but a yearly contest, so coming back periodically is not a bad idea......

What is also not a bad idea is to spend some of your resources (namely time and ideas), I know kind of the opposite of the normal purpose of these posts, to contribute to this year's One Page Dungeon Contest.

The rules are pretty simple, but in short you get one shot and it has to be one page. You've got the rest of this month.