Merry Christmas Gift to Y'all : Creature Catalogue Vol. 1

I wanted to wish everybody a Merry Christmas and decided that I should take one of the few Frugal GM titles that has a cost and make it free....well, technically Pay-What-You-Want, but please.....please put in $0.00 for the purchase price 110% guilt-free. I just know, from personal experience, that some people (ok, me) kind of need to pay for stuff in some fashion to mentally hold any value, so if that's you put in like $0.67 (my lucky number is 67 1/2......long story) or even $0.02, and call it good.

Creature Catalog Vol 1.

Free GM Resource: HexLands Web App

I haven't done a Free GM Resource in a while, and I almost missed this one (despite several emails on the subject) where Joe Wetzel of Inkwell Ideas put up a free hexmap creator/editor for people to use, presumably to promote his recently finished Kickstarter for his hexmaps (printed and digital).

Now I've been wanting to get some physical hexmap resources for myself and I have a very specific idea in mind for doing so, which means that the Kickstarter was on my radar and completely of no use to me so why bother checking it out? 

I'm taking a moment to weed through my backlog of emails (filtering by the word "unsubscribe" is a periodic requirement for me) and I have one from Joe that I hadn't noticed. It wasn't to me, but to his previous Kickstarter backers and I saw "But the good news is now we've updated the free HexLands web app", so now I have to check it out, but definitely will not be using it, nor checking out the Kickstarter....

...oh wait, this is kind of cool. I like the addition of overlays.

It couldn't hurt to check out the Kickstarter....oh wait, it ended last Thursday....but you can still make a late pledge, and I'll be damned, the overlays are part of the project.

Well it still isn't compatible with what I have in mind, but for s***s & giggles let's see what he's wanting for the various reward levels. Of course he has it sliced and diced every which way.....and he has just the hex tiles and .PNGs only for a price I cannot turn down. This will save me HOURS of work for what I'm wanting to do.....

.....got me again Joe. Good on ya!

For everybody else, check out not only the HexLands web app, but all the other freebie generators (this new freebie is listed with the other yet) he has at InkWell Ideas. A bit more of a twofer for you.

.....and again, here is the better-late-than-never Kickstarter.

2025 Convention Report: Alaska RPG Con

A couple of weeks ago I cashed in some air miles and hauled my ass.... self to Wasilla, AK to run five games at the inaugural Alaska RPG Con. An associate/buddy/friend of mine, the pretty cool RPG Artist JE Shields told me a couple of years ago his "dream" was to run a local game convention in his hometown of Wasilla, which is a 45' drive (or so) North of Anchorage. 

Of course I told him that if he gets this convention set-up, I will come up from Oklahoma to help do whatever he needs. Run games, work a desk, be a general con-bitch.....whatever.

Now before any of you go and try to think I'm some sort of "good guy", please know I'm coming from a totally selfish place. One of the fun lessons I learned "as an adult" is that doing cool shit is hard. All those hopes & dreams? Wicked hard (imagine a Boston accent here..)! You know what isn't so hard, and much more rewarding than it should be? Helping someone else achieve their cool shit goals. Getting to strengthen a friendship, possibly make more friends, and get in some gaming?!

Kind of a no-brainer for me. Because I travel so much for work as it is, hopping on a plane & flying 1/8th around the world for a gaming weekend isn't much of a stretch.

I got in on Thursday night and promptly screwed myself over by allowing the car rental place to upgrade my ride to a nice F150. Holy hell, that was a HUGE truck. Yeah, you know how driving a new car feels weird because you don't have a feel for the size of the new ride, or how it responds? So I missed the exit from the parking garage and pretty much got stuck on a way too-tight spiral ramp. The door at the bottom of the ramp wasn't properly in-line with the ramp and I had to do what felt like a 27 point turn to try and exit through the detailing room. I ended up scraping the rear quarter panel a bit, which I thought was far worse than it was, so mentally I was a bit messed up. Probably going to cost me the whole $500 deductible to fix....

I know I mentioned I travel a lot for work, and because of this I am an unabashed Marriott guy. I wasn't too thrilled that I was staying in a Best Western, but I was pleasantly surprised by the hotel. It felt more like a private hotel with some corporate signage. I had upgraded to a suite in case the convention needed more gaming space (Originally they thought they might need some more private space for "adult" RPGs). The room was nice, with a kitchenette and door separating the two rooms. It would have been easy to keep my personal space if there were gamers playing in the other room.

The hotel was decorated for Halloween, even the Polar Bear above the vending machines was in costume. The con was being held in the meeting rooms downstairs, with the main room holding the majority of the con and two smaller rooms with gaming tables as well. When I showed up one of JE Shield's kids (I honestly do not remember which one) was drawing up the convention logo on a welcome sign. Clearly artistic talent runs in the family. I don't think I couldn't have even traced it as well! The registration desk wasn't quite setup yet so I would have to come back in the morning, which was fine because I needed to go to bed since my body was still on Oklahoma time.

Stolen Pic from Will Kemp

I was running an adventure I wrote, and re-wrote I don't know how many times, each morning. This go-around I wrote for Old School Essentials (OSE). On Friday & Saturday night I ran some old HackMaster (4th Edition) adventures that I pretty much converted on the fly. Since I was running games in the 1st and 3rd gaming blocks of the day I had the 2nd 6-hour gaming block to get food and prep for my next game. I also had to make up the pre-gens because I had completely forgotten to print them before I left the house. Instead I was able to get some blank PC sheets printed at work and I had to create pre-gens for each game.

My very 1st game I ran using THAC0 and while the game went well, it just felt clumsy as all get-out. I switched to Ascending Armor Class (AAC) and it just flowed so much easier. I thought that the change from HackMaster to OSE might be too hard, especially since I was running 4 player groups instead of the 6 player groups I was planning for. Each game I had a potential TPK and my Saturday morning game only avoided it because the players wisely caught a mistake I made. The BBG had a slow weapon and had to attack last in each round. I had him attacking first since he had initiative and he was going to kill the last PC fighter, which would have resulted in a TPK. When I was reminded about that weapon being slow, well that on-his-last-hit-point-fighter got in a blow first and downed the BBG.

I tried a mix of old & new stuff (for me) in these games. I bought a bunch of minis this last summer when I was in Upstate New York, and didn't use a single one. Instead I kind of pulled an audible and bought a bunch of cardstock minis (review forthcoming) and used a bunch of tokens as well, most notably some plastic chips to represent dead bodies. I brought my smallest map mat and used it as a backdrop for plastic overlays. I discovered a long time ago it is relatively easy to pre-draw my "rooms" on vinyl and just slap them down as needed. This way I have my drawn rooms, and the players do not have to wait for me to try and draw an accurate room.

This con did a few things that just felt....right. They had tables set aside for open gaming and more tables set aside just for eating & socializing. Each table had wooden "table tents", more like weighted poles, showing the table's number and had a place holder for a little laminated card stating if there were open seats available. The games were all listed on the back wall, but they were loosely organized by day only, and if your game was full, the sheet for that game was pulled.

I liked how this convention was a local con, in almost every sense of the word. There were a handful of vendors and all of the Guests of Honor were Alaskans. I suspect I was the only non-local at the con, but not sure about that. I did hear at least one participant grumble that the convention was in Wasilla and not Anchorage,
and I did talk to James about that. While I'm sure Wasilla is largely for convenience, as 100% of the convention staff was from Wasilla, one of the things he said to me just drove a real point home: he said he wanted the con to "feel like Alaska". Now I've been to Anchorage a half-dozen times for work and the city kind of feels like Alaska-Light. Sure you have the view of the mountains, but with the density and way too many homeless, Anchorage feels more like a shopping mall with a nice backdrop.

Meanwhile, the view from a few feet outside the convention space:

Overall, I enjoyed the con and hope I can attend next year, which will be October 9th-11th, 2026. If you want a good destination small con, Alaska RPG Con might just be up your alley!

Update (edit):

I totally forgot to show off my (limited) convention haul! In no particular order:

I thought I picked up a couple of convention stickers, and felt a little greedy taking two, but I like to have a metric but-load (that's an actual unit of measure, granted wrong type) of stickers on my Pelican case luggage so I grabbed more than one and later discovered that they are thin as can be and I had actually taken four! So the two I "needed" went onto my luggage and an extra went onto my little Pelican case I picked up for my dice. Usually I use an even smaller Pelican box, but I had just picked up a larger one that gave me room for pencils.

This book is what I chose from when I won a GM drawing. I had a couple of cookbooks to choose from, a fake pocket watch that actually held some tiny dice (I was tempted, but the dice snob in me said "no"), and a kind of cool dry erase plexiglass PC sheet.

I also picked up this small adventure. It'd basically a one-page dungeon that decided to not screw us over with small print, add another bit of art (or two), and wrap it all up in a decent cardstock cover. I'm a sucker for these kinds of things, so even if I'm not going to use it, I'm likely to buy it.

Minis.....for not having a lot of room to bring stuff back I picked up more minis than I was expecting, which is hilarious to me since I had actually bought Kobold and Goblin minis twice specifically for this trip. What drew me to these minis is that there were different factions packaged so I could have like 18 Kobolds with different thematic sculpts. I am 110% cognizant all I'm doing is adding to my grey pile of shame, but I have to buy some stuff from the convention merchants.

Of course, along with the plastic minis I do not need, I found some cool metal minis I just wanted. A vendor had these groups of Sleestaks that were so cool I had to have two sets. I do have an idea on how to use them, but like the unpainted minis it'll most likely be an adventure that goes unwritten.

I bid on this DCC Box set, which had bunch of packaged add-ons that aren't in the still-shrink wrapped box. I have no idea if I got this as a good deal or not, but that isn't too big of a concern.

NOT PICTURED: I pre-ordered a convention T-Shirt and bought another one (for my mom). I think I was supposed to get a free shirt, or partial refund on my badge, or something, for running 5 games, but since I signed up before that was a thing, I didn't feel like I was owed anything and that's one less expense for the con.

ALSO NOT PICTURED AND TECHNICALLY NOT A CONVENTION HAUL: I had to head back to Anchorage a bit earlier than I wanted, because I assumed the truck scrape would eat up some time (not really), so I had time to stop in at Bosco's. They had donated to the convention so I made it a point to recognize that with a quick thanks and I managed to find like 8 issues of a hard-to-find Silver Age(ish) comic.

Free GM Resource: Freep!k Icon Generator

Last week I mentioned a secret project and while I'm not going to divulge the project yet, I am bringing you a possible Free GM Resource I used towards said project. I didn't need a region map for the thing, but I wanted to include one anyway. Now I'm using a USGS map that was printed out as PDF layers, lined up, then heavily edited. It didn't quite come out as I wanted, but that was more a limitation of time and the realization that what I was trying to do just wouldn't come out the way I had hoped. Basically spending the extra time to tweak it would have been just a wasted effort, but I did try....

Since this was an overview map of sorts I thought I should put on some icons and I think it's been established that I generally suck at a lot of art. If you didn't know that, it's ok because I do.....

I did some searched for map icons and most of the ones I found were for specific programs, which I'm not using. There were some cool art/.png files out there, but not with everything I wanted. I even bought some Photoshop brushes off of an artist on Etsy and that was just a waste of time & money. There was no legends showing which brush was which and trying to cycle through them was beyond frustrating. In the end I think I wasted about three hours on this futility.

I was really about to give up when I came across this free AI Icon Generator from Freep!k. Now I don't think I did a great job with the icons, but it was quick and easy to say what I wanted and then sift through the results. In retrospect I think I should have stuck with maybe some black & white icons, but I'm not totally disappointed.....

I did end up manipulating some of the icons in Photoshop to get them slightly more standardized, but that healer's hut still sticks out like a sore thumb to me. Overall though the process was quick, easy, and quite frankly a relief after my earlier attempts.

I realize this is a really specific resource, but honestly....if it saves another GM some frustration, worth it. I'd still like to get some cool hand-drawn icons, but I'm not sure they're worth it for this particular style of map.

Free GM Resource: Flowsage

I have a secret project I've been spending way too much time on, but it's wrapped up now and kind of off to the printers. It's my third iteration of said project, in a couple of ways so maybe actually my 6th go (?) but in several iterations I thought it might be beneficial to chart things out to make it easier for the GM, because while life and the so-called simulated life we call a TTRPG aren't usually linear, or as linear as we'd want them to be, certain aspects are (like aging in life and trying to read an adventure, for example). I'm so not a flow chart guy, but I thought, more than once, that having some sort of flowchart might prove useful.

Now I am not going to whip out the old drafting tools or hunch over a table to get a flow-chart hammered out, which is how I stumbled upon Flowsage. I had actually checked out a couple of "free" flowcharting solutions and some looked great, but low-key kind of sucked balls. Spending a lot of time charting stuff out, making it look nice.....because face it, if I don't care how it looks pen and paper beats anything else available....but not being able to export the finished product?

Flowsage has some limited AI flowcharting chat support that might have been useful, but I didn't go there, so I cannot speak to its effectiveness. I was able to get what I needed done, spit out as a PNG file, and then I finished up in Photoshop. The freebie account, which was just a quick Google login for me, lets you have up to 5 projects, and 5 AI credits, but that was about 4 more than I needed since I can always delete a project when done.

Just saying it you think you could use a free flowchart, well here you go.

Up Your Game with Rubber Stamps

This isn't a Free GM Resource, but a product, well company really, that I think is a useful resource for the prepared GM, and relatively frugal to boot.

Rubberstamps.net is a company based out of my home state (Iowa) where you can get custom rubber stamps made inexpensively.

I know....you might be all "rubber stamps....really?", but here me out. Using a rubber stamp is a good way of literally putting your mark on stuff. The first application that comes to mind is when dealing with pre-gens at a convention tournament. I realize this is a dated thing, but I've had issues with players trying to slip pre-gens into a tournament pretending they were their home PC. Or maybe you need to mark a PC sheet as deceased. Simply stamp the sheet that is a pre-gen and done. PC dies, *stamp* there you go.

For one tournament I was *that* dick GM that when a PC died I took the character sheet and ran it through a handheld portable shredder. That was more fun than it should be, and it was fun at someone else's expense. I've seen DCC PC sheets getting stamped and thought it'd be cool to do that.

I picked up some custom rubber stamps twice now and just made a third order. I'm getting a 1.5" x 2" stamp for an event, shipped, for under $20. Ok, I just re-checked and I forgot about tax, so it's under $21.

Five, maybe six bucks for a stamp pad and a couple bucks for ink and you are set! A lot cheaper than having stickers made and as long as you don't mind a single color result....rubberstamps.net

I'm seriously considering getting a small set of stamps made for my GM Kill Stickers. I could get by with like 5 individual stamps that I hand color in for under $50 total.

Free GM Resource: Previous Edition Downloads (Courtesy of the Wayback Machine)

This one surprised me a bit, but it shouldn't. The internet has a long, long memory and websites that are no longer directly available can still be fond if your poke about in the right place. In this case the website is from Wizards of the Coast and the right place is the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, specifically a capture from 07Jan10.

Trust me.....there is a lot to see here. Full on products to include some source books, adventures, character sheets, errata, some articles, and even some (only a few) stand-alone maps.

Free GM Resource: Some Good Old-Fashioned Map Porn

I've been a little obsessed with Kingdom Come Deliverance (KCD) this last couple of weeks. No, not the new game (Kingdom Come Deliverance II) that just came out, but the much older 1st game that I was able to pick up at the local Gamestop recently. I try to play only one game at a time and I had finished Generation Zero and found KCD at the store.....

Anyway....I clearly have a problem...add it to the list.

Now, if you haven't played the game I need to explain that the in-game maps are pretty cool as they're done up like old time medieval hand-drawn maps.

I don't think this particular map is the best example, but I swear it's the one I seem to look at the most. You really need to look at this up close, which you can because they've been made available in high resolution and ultra-high resolution.

These maps are just begging to be renamed and used at the gaming table. I think I'm going to do my next adventure map in this style, assuming I can get away with it....