Qu0zl's page

Here's a couple of web tools that I created to support Bard's Gate. They're things that I wanted as a GM - my players have been in Bard's Gate since a couple of days after the PDF released. Maybe 2 months or so now?

An online rumour generator. It currently has 191 rumours. A few are BG adventure plot hook pointers, some point to minor encounter/adventure areas in the city and some are just general information and Bard's Gate athmosphere.
Rumour generator

Complete implementation of the 20+ pages of random encounters (with permission from the Frogs). NB: this currently only displays the Swords & Wizardry stats and page numbers, as that's the version that I have. If anyone wants to volunteer (for quite a few hours of data-entry) then adding Pathfinder support is only a matter of replacing the S&W data already in there. If you ignore the stats, then the text will still work for PF, and I give the section headings as well as the page number.

Random encounter generator

Last 12 hours of the kickstarter. It's less than 1k away from the 2nd stretch goal.

It's funded now and 3 days left for stretch goals :)

16 hours until the 3 day reminder emails go out. That's always my favourite bit of a Frog God kick-starter - it's exciting to see which stretch goals we can reach during the final rush :)

I'm also really keen to see The Blight come out. I intend to use The Between, and the weird way that the Blight extends tendrils of its physical self into distance locations as an interesting way to allow fast movement around the Lost Lands, as well as its own adventuring location of course.

Kind of like a creepier mono-planar version of Sigil.

That's great news that the Bard's Gate PDFs may be ready by the end of the Summer. My players' stated intention - which sometimes does predict their real actions, and other times bears no resemblance - is to travel to Bard's Gate via FreeGate now that they've left Endholme.

They are currently distracted by being deep under-ground struggling their way out of Demonspore and The Pod Caverns of the Sinister shroom naked and unarmed. So with some real luck they may be delayed long enough for the PDFs to arrive :)

Particularly as I'm pretty sure that where they struggle their way out to won't be an easy trip back to civilization :)

Is there much information on Free Gate in the Bard's Gate book?

I'd also like more updates. I know the Frogs try to avoid any appearance of spamming about their kick-starters, but I enjoy reading about them and would always like more info :)

I've still backed it, and I also have something around 180$ in their Blight KS. Combined it's a lot of money to have with one company, but it's not just one person - the Blight is Richard Pett (mostly) and Bard's Gate is more Skeeter Green, et al., I think. There are common elements like Chuck on layout, Greg Vaughn on canon and Bill like an evil toad lurking in the background, but in my experience they've not been generally reliable in the past - they've been completely reliable and I love their stuff.

That I would definitely buy!

. I was just as excited to officially see confirmation that Slumbering Tsar is on the way in Swords and Wizardry. :).

Where did you see that Steve? That would be brilliant.

They have a mailing list that you can subscribe to via their website. You'll hear about any kickstarters of theirs and you also get the occassional 25 or 30% off 1 day sale voucher. Which is cool :) Plus deal-of-the-day offerings, which occur much more sporadically than of-the-day ;)

[edit]Actually on Black Friday they even did 40% off if I recall correctly. I got a lot of stuff that day![/edit]

All mine arrived on Tuesday, except for Rogues of Remballo which arrived on Wednesday in its own shipment.

I feel sorry for the Frogs having to pay for the extra shipping on any Rogues of Remballos that got accidentally left out of main boxes. I hadn't even heard about it until Silverhair mentioned the reason behind it above and had assumed it was just my shipment.

They just sorted it at their own cost without a word.

They're a great combination of fantastic material, very good customer service and thin profit margins! Which makes me a bit nervous for them because it must be tough to run a side-business like that for so many years.

Here's hoping they keep going for a very long time to come.

It's an artifact of a deliberate move away from the rules complexity of 3.5 and somewhat back towards the earlier editions of the game.

You might think that not having as many mechanics specified as part of your character would reduce your options but in my experience it increases them.

There's a lot less of "you can't do that because you don't have the relevant feat or skill" and more GM rulings.

I really like it.

Yep, you always get the PDF free from Frog God if you buy the printed version. It's very handy for quickly checking something in work ;-)

Sorry Richard, Bill and all but unfortunately, after having to spend 400 quid on a fridge freezer as apparently ice cream is more important than Dungeons and dragons, I'm going to have to sit this Kickstarter out.

Have you considered the chilling power of Richard's writing?

She's slowly creeping her way into the light and she looks certain to fund, which is great news.

If we get a final few days bounce like there often seems to be then who knows, 100K might be do-able.

It must be stressful watching the kick-starter for your baby!

Yeah, the Frogs always give the PDF free if you buy the physical book. I much prefer books but it's handy to have the PDF too :-)

I'll go with the five 3rd party products option :)

1/ (The Slumbering Tsar Saga ) by Frog God Games. As well as being an amazing work of evil genius, it was my gateway into 3PP and specifically Frog God Games. I owe every purchase below to this book leading me into a world much more like the way I want to play games.

2/ Swords and Wizardry Complete. A retro clone of the original version of D&D plus the first few expansions. I bought the hardback but you can get the PDF free from Frog God Games. I love it so much! I'm 5 games into running a campaign, there have been 5 PC deaths and the players are loving it.

3/ Cyclopean Deeps. by Matt Finch of Frog God Games It's a bizarre subterranean sandbox. It's not Drow or the other typical stuff - it's where the Drow fear to tread and it is awesome. Pathfinder or Swords and Wizardry. The only problem is that it's for level 12s, which is high level in Swords and WIzardry so I don't know if I'll have a campaign make it that far. If you're playing Pathfinder then I'd strongly recommend checking it out. The world is really interesting.

4/ Shadowbrook Manor by Goblinoid Games . Such a fun, creepy mansion module. I'm running two groups through it currently and it has given some beautiful moments. Such as 3 of the party of 7 being temporarily magically psychotic, the remaining 4 players having to drag the three tied up PCs along the marble floors to the Mansions doors, opening the doors and being greeted by bow-shot from the darkness. The fear in the players was fantastic but it's not a mean module - if the players are sensible (and not unlucky) they'll survive. To my shock nobody actually died in that nightmare situation I described above, but they certainly had a tense half an hour (real time) hiding and waiting for their comrades to snap out of it.

5/ The Lost City of Barakas by Frog God Games. A sandbox campaign setting for levels 2 to 6 (or higher). Pathfinder or Swords and Wizardry. There's a good town setting, and a nice deep and nasty dungeon, plus surrounding wilderness encounters. This is where I intend to continue my current S&W campaign - the players have of course got side-tracked by various other stuff first.

My major publisher purchase of the year is D&D 5e. The three core books. I think I've burnt out a bit on Pathfinder's crunchiness after playing through the entire Rise of the Runelords AP this year (which was very fun, to be clear!). 5e is a nice middle ground which I'm really enjoying.

I know the above is a ridiculously Frog God Games-centric. They really make the kind of material that I love and they were my intro to 3PP via Slumbering Tsar. That said, I've got some Lamentation of the Flame Princess modules en-route, the Carcosa campaign setting (dark! maybe I'll only read it, but if I really like it then maybe my S&W campaign may find a portal to go to a place even more dark and dangerous than the Lost Lands). I've also bought quite a few modules from other companies too, many of which were good, but apart from Shadowbrook Manor none of them make my top 5 for the year.

And one final great (free) product for 2015! The webpage that I made to make it much easier for Pathfinder monster summoners to get creature statistics, with or without augment summon or the summoning templates - http://gregfarrell.org/pfs/ . Monitoring the thread I posted about that earlier this year in this forum is what led me to learning about Slumbering Tsar and the wonderful world of 3PP :)

I'll go check out Legendary Games now too :)

It looks fantastic, Richard. The very best of luck to you on it. One of the many awesome things about Frog God Games is how they appear to help save these gigantic and unique creative works from fading away out of publication.

I'm focusing on 5e at the moment but I will definitely tell all my Pathfinder friends about the kickstarter when it kicks off.

I doubt it, Castilonium. There's a large amount of work gone into the project already and with family and work I don't have that much spare time.

If anyone wants to volunteer to do data entry for any of the creatures that I haven't yet added (the summoning rings, the new ones from summoning versatility, most of summon neutral monsters) then please PM me :)

Monsters take somewhere between 10 minutes to enter (for really straight-forward combat ones) and maybe 20 minutes for ones with lots of special abilities.

There might be the very rare remaining creature that will require code changes but I can make those. The site supports all the Summon Good monsters and those are a mass of special abilities, so it's got pretty good coverage for weird things by now.

I'd also like to see the Deific index expanded if the stretch goals go well.

I've played levels 1 to 15 so far in a Rise of the Runelord's campaign as a summoner, and it has been so much fun.

Last fight a creature was doing d10 stat damage a hit to our party's tank but I could summon a Monadic Deva (Summon Good 8) every turn and get it to use its 1/day heal. Curing all the stat damage along with 100 HP each turn.

A cleric would struggle to do that for 3 or 4 turns in a row :)

In a previous fight the boss buffed himself with 2 defensive spells in a single turn, so I summoned D3+1 Movanic Deva (SG7), got 3 of them and told them all to use their at-will dispel magic on him. Hello completely nerfed Necromancer boss :)

Summoner's are great fun.

Thanks for posting this thread. It made me realise that I hadn't left reviews for the third party products that I own. I've fixed that.

thank you Mark. All the more reason to hope the Borderland Provinces kick-starter does well for 5e!

Richard, it looks fantastic. Are you allowed say what systems it will be for yet? Is it pathfinder only?

I'm interested in the reply to that too, Herald Frog.

I've got Tsar & Stoneheart Valley for Pathfinder but I'd buy them again for 5th ed. Or Sword of Air.

You all do sandbox better than anything I've seen and I'd like the option of that in 5th ed too.

Backed :)

Summon Good 9 added, it is here So that's SM, SNA and SG 1 through 9.

There's a good chance that that's all that I'm going to add. That's 176 creatures and has taken a ridiculous amount of time :)

I hope this is of use to the OP.

Summon Good 9 added, it is here So that's SM, SNA and SG 1 through 9.

There's a good chance that that's all that I'm going to add. That's 176 creatures and has taken a ridiculous amount of time :)

It's a fairly niche web-site, so I don't know how many people will really use it. If I notice it becoming more popular then I may add things like Summon Neutral, Rod of Giant Monsters, or the extra creatures from the Extra Summons feat.

Enjoy!

Cavall, PFSS only offers celestial templates etc for those creatures that are allowed them.

Or at least that's how I designed it and I double checked just now that it seems to be working.

Are you sure it's not working? If so any chance of details on how you made it happen or a screen shot and I'll fix the issue.

Thanks.

Summon Good 8 added. It is here

Summon Good is an amazingly fun feat - it gives you lots of interesting creatures with cool abilities and useful spells. Which are a pain to add to the site :)

Summon Good Monster 7 added. You can get the combined Summon Monster 7 + Summon Good 7 list here

I finally reached a level in the RoTR campaign that I'm playing where I needed Summon Good 7 :) I'll need Summon Good 8 next level so that should motivate me to add those too very soon.

Thanks a lot everybody, that's really helpful

I'm a keen Summoner of creatures and I like to paint as many suitable miniatures as possible for them as I think it looks nicer on the table
table.

Now that I'm getting some higher level stuff I really don't want to paint D3+1 Aurochs or carry around huge creatures

Is there any nice tokens or images that people have made for summons?

Thanks for the guide, Some Other Guy. I'm a big fan of summoning.

I dunno if you've already seen it but I made a handy web app for viewing or printing the DM & SNA creatures, with or without augment summon or the summoning templates

It's here

It's got the Summon Good monsters too.

You might find it useful for seeing the creature stats or just for your own play.

Thanks LeesusFreak :-)

That reminds me - if anyone wants to say thanks for the tool then please just tell anyone else who you think might find it useful about it.

It's only worth the effort to make if people use it, and half of that is letting people know that it exists!

It's a bit late for the OP but I built a web site that lets you print out all the Summon Monster & Nature's Ally creatures, with or without Augment Summons or summoning templates. It's here

I built a free web based tool where you can pick from pre-populated lists of SM or SNA or create you own list for display/printing. Augment Summons can be applied if you wish, as can the SM summoning templates (Celestial, Fiendish, Entropic & Resolute).

http://gregfarrell.org/pfs/

The stats are dynamically modified if Augment Summon is applied.

I built it because I think creature Summoner's really need a better way to get print outs of the monsters they summon. The stat blocks that I'd seen online were either incomplete or incorrect.

If you check it out and like it, I'd be happy to have you link to it from your guide.

Summon Good 5 & 6 done.

I've added a new Group Category which contains lists of Summon Monster that include the Summon Good monsters for the relevant level.

Stat block displayed with Summon Good enabled will show 'SummonGood' in their types list if it is a creature that supports summon good, and will list the Diehard feat in their defenses. The point of that is to make it easy to see which creatures Summon Good applies to from a list of stat blocks.

Stat blocks now have a light yellow background when more than 1 of them is displayed, this makes it easier to see the separation between individual stat blocks.

They should still appear as white when printing so as not to waste ink.

I'm curious to know whether people think this is an improvement or not. I do but it is kind of ugly :) Ugly but effective.

Groups split into sub-categories, stun text added to anklyosaurus, and it now puts Celestial, Fiendish etc in the stat block after the creature's name.

I'll do something like putting them into sub categories (SM, SNA etc) to sort that out. Starting a new job today so will be a little while till I do the tweaks I've committed to above :-)

Agres, I'll add the stun explanation text.

Elterago, it already puts (Augment Summons) in brackets after the name of they're augmented. I should add celestial, fiendish etc too.

Qu0zl wrote:

You mean have the links to them on the main page as well as the drop-down? Sure, I can do that.

Was it awkward to find them under the drop-down?

Not awkward. The SNA 6,7,8,9 were not on the drop-down.

Interesting. They are appearing there for me. Perhaps the end of the groups list is getting chopped off by your browser and there's something I can do to make it work for you. What hardware & browser are you using? You're sure they're not appearing for you?

You mean have the links to them on the main page as well as the drop-down? Sure, I can do that.

Was it awkward to find them under the drop-down?

Endzeitgeist, I'm delighted you like it. I do like the idea of a custom tab for custom feats but it'd be too big a job for me to do, too many time commitments unfortunately.

Master4sword that's a good idea about varying the background color. I'll do that but I'll leave them all as white when printed as otherwise it'd be hard on printer ink. You were using them on an electronic device right, not print outs?

Thanks a lot for all the kind words everybody.

If anybody has feedback after using this, I'd be interested.

It seems intuitive and sensible to me but that's because I built it! So if there's anything really annoying, un-intuitive or stupid that I'm doing in it, please let me know :)

SM9 and SNA9 are done. Finally!

I'm a bit confused on SNA9 - it has Pixie (w/irresistible dance and sleep arrows). Is that just the basic CR 4 Pixie with irresistible dance added on?

If so, is it 1/day and DC 19? Why does it only mention Sleep arrows? Should it lose the Charm and Memory Loss arrows? I guess it should. It's strange because the Summon Good Pixie gets all 3 arrow types, and a CR 4 beast with a low DC casting of a single level 8 spell seems a bit weak for SNA9?

Can anyone confirm these?

I'll be very happy to have these finished. There's still the Summon Good, Neutral and Evil ones to go.

SM8 and SNA8 finished.

I'm happy to see that the summon lists get smaller at the very high levels - so there's less for my to add per list :)

SM7 and SNA7 finished.

142 monsters and counting.