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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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!

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.

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

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.

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.

SM6 and SNA6 finished.

126 summonable monsters added and counting :)

Good point on GMs and Summon Evil, Targus.

I do intend to go all the way through SM9 and SNA9, and to add Summon Evil as well. Just it'll take a while. I'm getting through them reasonably quickly now as I've invested the time in making it fairly easy to add creatures, but I'm time limited.

I'll get there :)

If you have a few favourite summons then let me know and I'll skip ahead and add them in early.

SM5 and SNA5 completed.

I think I'll try and fill out some more of the lower level summon good and summon neutral next. I'm trying to do things in order of how much they'll actually get used - so I think the really high level summons and anything added by Summon Evil are fairly unusual.

The site now has cool mobile phone icons (thanks to a forum member - http://lorcblog.blogspot.com/ ) , so you can now add the PFSS to your mobile devices home-page/desktop and it'll look pretty.

Which is cool :)

Devilkiller, some minor things like what components of armour are due to shields, AC, natural etc. The main thing is the special abilities - it takes a lot more time to add the special ability descriptions - making sure that they dynamically change DCs, dmg (using correct of 1x Str mod, 1.5x str mod, 0.5x str mod), etc correctly for augment summons.

Adding a beat-stick with no special abilities only takes me 5 minutes, it's the more complicated ones that take time.

That said, I've got 101 of them added now :) Almost got SM5 and SNA5 finished - just need the elementals.

Thanks for the link, Devilkiller - that DB is pretty impressive. My sympathy to whoever had to type all that in!

Unfortunately it doesn't have all the information I need, still it's an impressive job by whoever did that :)

I've got most of Summon Monster 5 done. Just missing the elementals, Wooly Rhinocerous and the Xill.

SM5

I'll hopefully fill those in Tuesday.

The Fiendish template has worked since the start, as far as I know anyway. Did you miss it or did you find a bug?

[edit]Thanks for mentioning that - I just double checked and realised that I broke the Fiendish template support 8 hours ago when I was doing some more development. It's working again now.[/edit]

thanks Tacticslion, I apprecicate that.

Summon Good level 4 monsters added and here's a handy link to a list of
Summon Good 4 & Summon Monster 4

SM4+SG4

Summon Good feat level 3 options now added and I've added a handy list that combines Summon Monster 3 & Summon Good 3 http://gregfarrell.org/pfs/list/code/SM3SG/

there's already one for SM2 + SG2 at http://gregfarrell.org/pfs/list/code/SM2SG/

Thanks Tacticslion. Like you said it can't be a secondary attack as it has the same to-hit as the primary attack. So something is wrong, either in the to-hit or the damage calc

Summon Monster and Summon Nature's Ally 1 through 4 now finished.

That should cover about 90% of actual Pathfinder play! My head is melted from adding them and GM'ing tonight so no more getting added for a day or two.

I've done some more work on the printing output support.

If you now set the font slider to the minimum and the number of columns to the max (5), you can fit all 57 (as of right now) creatures on 7 pages. With no splitting of any stat blocks across pages.

I doubt many people will use it that small but if you want to carry as many creatures as possible on as few pages as possible, it's an option. And layouts with larger font and more columns are nicer :)

I've added a font-slider on the list view. So you can shrink/grow the size of the outputed creature stat blocks.

Lets you fit a lot of them per page if your eye-sight is up to it.

Also added some more creatures to SM3.

I've added the Summon Good monsters for SM 2.

As an aside, SNA 2 and SM2 are now complete except that they're missing a couple of the variant elementals. I'll add those, maybe this evening if a baby sleeps instead of crying :)

I do intend to cover those as I use Summon Good myself, but it's pretty much a data-entry exercise now. That'll take a little while to do. Less time than it took to write the code in the first place but it's way, way less interesting so harder to do hours of it at a time!

As a keen Summoner of Monsters, I wanted a handy way to reliably produce print-outs of the monsters that I most commonly summon, or even of all of them. Without wondering if the stats are accurate. The online ones that I've seen aren't, and can be messy showing multiple sets of stats to cover augment/un-augmented for the same creature.

I've built a tool at http://gregfarrell.org/pfs 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).

There are example groups already on there containing SNA 1, SM1(Celestial), SM1 (Augment+Celestial).

I've started work on adding SM2 and SNA2. Most of the development is already done to support the differing monsters. So it's largely a data-entry exercise now.

The PFSS Calculates:

HP based on creature type, HD, toughness feat
AC based on size, dex, natural AC, armour AC and dodge AC. Shows touch, flat-footed components also.
Saves based on stats.
Initiative.
BAB based on creature type & HD
Melee to hit based on size, BAB, weapon finesse.
Melee damage, including 1.5x dmg for 2-handed weapons or for natural attacks where the creature only has 1 attack.
CMB: Using dex or str depending on creature size.
CMD: Includes option of bonus to CMD against specific attack types (eg trip)

Augment Summons - modifications when applied to a creature
Modifies creature Dex/Str
and thus modifies:
skills
melee to-hit (unless Weapon Finesse with Dex is better)
HP
Damage based on Str
special ability DCs or Damage
CMB/CMD

Summoning Templates (Celestial, Fiendish, Entropic, Resolute)
Energy resistances by HD
DR by HD
Changes to creature senses
SR by CR

The point of calculating all these items rather than just typing them in is that it makes dynamically applying templates/feats to them possible, as well as meaning that the maths is done for me and should be reliable across all monsters. Assuming I've implemented the maths properly, which I'm sure people will tell me if there's any problems.

There are probably more things that it calculates but these are the ones that I remember now.

I'm hoping that it'll be a handy tool for any class that wants to summon monsters. I know that I like to have print-outs of anything that I'm summoning, and with the correct templates applied.