John Cooper
Explorer
GM GEMS: A COLLECTION OF GAME MASTER INSPIRATION
By project manager Stephen S. Greer
Goodman Games product number GMG4371
66-page PDF, $15.99
GM Gems is a self-described "system-neutral collection of tips, tables, and inspirational articles" intended to make a Game Master's life a bit easier. I'd argue that the "system-neutral" description is only partially true, as a glance through the PDF shows that the d20 system, and D&D 3.5 in particular, is the primary focus of the work.
The cover is a full-color piece by William O'Connor, depicting an armored female human wielding a greatsword. Her armor is definitely in the "fantasy" mold, as it is constructed of heavy plates designed to stop enemy weapon blows while still managing to show off her figure; only in a fantasy world are cleavage and bare midriffs as equally a viable concern in plate armor as, say, thickness and durability. Still, it's a nice painting, with an intricate "winged-lion" motif on the swordswoman's armor, some nice shading, and good body proportions. Rather than being a full painting, however, it's "cropped" into an odd shape and superimposed upon a blue marble background. I'm not sure why this was done (I'm curious to see what the background looked like: was there something offensive being cropped out?), but the outcome is still effective.
Interior artwork consists of 27 black-and-white drawings by William McAusland, although several of the individual drawings are used multiple times (for example, the exact same sword shows up on both pages 16 and 17). The drawings are for the most part nicely done, but their placement is somewhat screwy; most of them are just "generic" drawings of a sword, or a dagger, or a skull, that have nothing to do with the subject matter at hand (and are pretty much just used as filler to eat up what would otherwise be a big chunk of white space), but the drawings that seem to have been specifically commissioned for this piece are usually nowhere where they need to be. As an example, there's a drawing on page 2 of a wagon being hauled by two animated skeletons that belongs over on page 34, as it's "Muagh's Karnal Kart," as described on that page. Likewise, page 19 has a description of the Eve of Burning Devils, a festival of sorts that involves carrying barrels of flaming tar out of the village and dumping them into a nearby lake. Why, then, does the corresponding illustration show up on page 41 of all places? Naturally, I can't fault the artist for where his illustrations are being placed, but it is a bit odd.
GM Gems is broken up into three chapters of loosely-related concepts. The first chapter, "The Urban Experience," covers such subjects as alchemical mishaps, dockside events, folklore, memorable NPCs, rites of passage, specialty shops, taverns and inns, unusual holidays, and pocket contents. Chapter two, "Getting There is Half the Fun," deals with caravans, campsites, roadside ruins, traveling merchants, marching soldiers, and odd weather. The last chapter, "The Dungeon," deals with the rod of wonder, empty rooms, new monsters, masterless familiars, light sources, smells, noxious substances, short encounters, and treasures.
Some of these entries are no more than a d100 table, where you roll percentile dice, consult the table, and get your randomly-determined item or event. These were my least favorite items in the whole PDF: not only is there not a whole lot of "meat" on the entries, but they're often just poorly constructed. For one thing, most of the editing gaffes appear in the tables, where random "paragraph return" keys force an entry to jump to a new line for no apparent reason. (This happens quite a lot in GM Gems, to the point where it's difficult to believe that editor Aeryn "Blackdirge" Rudel went back and looked at the finished product after making his changes and deciding that everything looked fine.) In addition, many of the entries are useless: looking at the first table, "Alchemical Mishaps," many of the entries are keyed to specific alchemical items, vastly decreasing the usefulness of the entire table. Let's assume I'm GMing a game and one of my players is having his character craft a sunrod, for the sake of argument. He rolls poorly on his Craft (alchemy) check, and I decide this is the perfect time to use the tools in GM Gems to spice up my campaign. So I get out my percentile dice, roll a "26," consult the table, and see that "an overpowered thunderstone produces a gust of wind spell." Well, that won't work with my player's PC's sunrod, will it? I guess I'll just roll again: a "98" results in "an unstable tanglefoot bag has a 50% chance of randomly detonating." Hmm, maybe a "34" will apply better to the sunrod crafter? Nope, "potion causes hair to fall out" - the PC isn't making a potion. Okay, I guess I'll just have to ignore the random die roll and read through the list to find something appropriate to the situation. Many of the random tables in GM Gems suffer from similar problems, or are too constrained by the "d100 table" format. For example, the "Memorable Inns" section has two d100 tables, one containing 50 adjectives and the other containing 50 nouns. The concept here is to roll twice, once on each table, in order to generate the name of an inn on the spur of the moment. Well, that's fine if all inns in your world are of the format "The [Adjective] [Noun]," but that seems highly unlikely. I can recall a Dragon article from several years back that handled this in a much better fashion, where first you randomly determined the name's format, and then rolled on the appropriate random tables to gather the specifics. You'll never get an inn name like "The Anchor and Mermaid" or the "Serpent's Coils" from the tables in GM Gems, as the format just doesn't support such styles.
Much better were the entries that describe a handful of related items or events in significant detail. My all-time favorite in the PDF is "Familiar Creatures with Unfamiliar Faces," by B. Matthew Conklin III and Elizabeth Courts, where they take a monster from the Monster Manual (despite this being a "system-neutral" accessory), make a few tweaks, and end up with a completely different creature that you can throw at your players' PCs without them knowing just what it is they're facing. (I'm particularly fond of such an approach, especially since the youngest player in my home campaign saved up his allowance and bought himself a Monster Manual of his own to peruse, and now all of a sudden his illiterate, low-metal-stats-across-the-board barbarian PC is a font of knowledge when it comes to every creature they encounter!) As an example, take a manta ray, change its type to "Elemental (Extraplanar, Fire)," and give it the "heat" and "burn" special attacks of a thoqqua, and you've now got a magati from the Elemental Plane of Fire that swims through magma flows.
Hal Maclean's "Left Behind" was another cool article, describing five familiars who lost their masters and yet retained their familiar abilities (and sometimes a few oddball abilities besides). Each has a short history, a goal, and enough backstory to provide plenty of plot hooks. (My favorite is Loredrip, a toad familiar who absorbed the contents of his former master's now-torched library; handling the toad causes a PC to hallucinate, during which time some of the contents of the library are imparted to the tripping individual.
There are a few problems with GM Gems that I can't figure out. For example:
By project manager Stephen S. Greer
Goodman Games product number GMG4371
66-page PDF, $15.99
GM Gems is a self-described "system-neutral collection of tips, tables, and inspirational articles" intended to make a Game Master's life a bit easier. I'd argue that the "system-neutral" description is only partially true, as a glance through the PDF shows that the d20 system, and D&D 3.5 in particular, is the primary focus of the work.
The cover is a full-color piece by William O'Connor, depicting an armored female human wielding a greatsword. Her armor is definitely in the "fantasy" mold, as it is constructed of heavy plates designed to stop enemy weapon blows while still managing to show off her figure; only in a fantasy world are cleavage and bare midriffs as equally a viable concern in plate armor as, say, thickness and durability. Still, it's a nice painting, with an intricate "winged-lion" motif on the swordswoman's armor, some nice shading, and good body proportions. Rather than being a full painting, however, it's "cropped" into an odd shape and superimposed upon a blue marble background. I'm not sure why this was done (I'm curious to see what the background looked like: was there something offensive being cropped out?), but the outcome is still effective.
Interior artwork consists of 27 black-and-white drawings by William McAusland, although several of the individual drawings are used multiple times (for example, the exact same sword shows up on both pages 16 and 17). The drawings are for the most part nicely done, but their placement is somewhat screwy; most of them are just "generic" drawings of a sword, or a dagger, or a skull, that have nothing to do with the subject matter at hand (and are pretty much just used as filler to eat up what would otherwise be a big chunk of white space), but the drawings that seem to have been specifically commissioned for this piece are usually nowhere where they need to be. As an example, there's a drawing on page 2 of a wagon being hauled by two animated skeletons that belongs over on page 34, as it's "Muagh's Karnal Kart," as described on that page. Likewise, page 19 has a description of the Eve of Burning Devils, a festival of sorts that involves carrying barrels of flaming tar out of the village and dumping them into a nearby lake. Why, then, does the corresponding illustration show up on page 41 of all places? Naturally, I can't fault the artist for where his illustrations are being placed, but it is a bit odd.
GM Gems is broken up into three chapters of loosely-related concepts. The first chapter, "The Urban Experience," covers such subjects as alchemical mishaps, dockside events, folklore, memorable NPCs, rites of passage, specialty shops, taverns and inns, unusual holidays, and pocket contents. Chapter two, "Getting There is Half the Fun," deals with caravans, campsites, roadside ruins, traveling merchants, marching soldiers, and odd weather. The last chapter, "The Dungeon," deals with the rod of wonder, empty rooms, new monsters, masterless familiars, light sources, smells, noxious substances, short encounters, and treasures.
Some of these entries are no more than a d100 table, where you roll percentile dice, consult the table, and get your randomly-determined item or event. These were my least favorite items in the whole PDF: not only is there not a whole lot of "meat" on the entries, but they're often just poorly constructed. For one thing, most of the editing gaffes appear in the tables, where random "paragraph return" keys force an entry to jump to a new line for no apparent reason. (This happens quite a lot in GM Gems, to the point where it's difficult to believe that editor Aeryn "Blackdirge" Rudel went back and looked at the finished product after making his changes and deciding that everything looked fine.) In addition, many of the entries are useless: looking at the first table, "Alchemical Mishaps," many of the entries are keyed to specific alchemical items, vastly decreasing the usefulness of the entire table. Let's assume I'm GMing a game and one of my players is having his character craft a sunrod, for the sake of argument. He rolls poorly on his Craft (alchemy) check, and I decide this is the perfect time to use the tools in GM Gems to spice up my campaign. So I get out my percentile dice, roll a "26," consult the table, and see that "an overpowered thunderstone produces a gust of wind spell." Well, that won't work with my player's PC's sunrod, will it? I guess I'll just roll again: a "98" results in "an unstable tanglefoot bag has a 50% chance of randomly detonating." Hmm, maybe a "34" will apply better to the sunrod crafter? Nope, "potion causes hair to fall out" - the PC isn't making a potion. Okay, I guess I'll just have to ignore the random die roll and read through the list to find something appropriate to the situation. Many of the random tables in GM Gems suffer from similar problems, or are too constrained by the "d100 table" format. For example, the "Memorable Inns" section has two d100 tables, one containing 50 adjectives and the other containing 50 nouns. The concept here is to roll twice, once on each table, in order to generate the name of an inn on the spur of the moment. Well, that's fine if all inns in your world are of the format "The [Adjective] [Noun]," but that seems highly unlikely. I can recall a Dragon article from several years back that handled this in a much better fashion, where first you randomly determined the name's format, and then rolled on the appropriate random tables to gather the specifics. You'll never get an inn name like "The Anchor and Mermaid" or the "Serpent's Coils" from the tables in GM Gems, as the format just doesn't support such styles.
Much better were the entries that describe a handful of related items or events in significant detail. My all-time favorite in the PDF is "Familiar Creatures with Unfamiliar Faces," by B. Matthew Conklin III and Elizabeth Courts, where they take a monster from the Monster Manual (despite this being a "system-neutral" accessory), make a few tweaks, and end up with a completely different creature that you can throw at your players' PCs without them knowing just what it is they're facing. (I'm particularly fond of such an approach, especially since the youngest player in my home campaign saved up his allowance and bought himself a Monster Manual of his own to peruse, and now all of a sudden his illiterate, low-metal-stats-across-the-board barbarian PC is a font of knowledge when it comes to every creature they encounter!) As an example, take a manta ray, change its type to "Elemental (Extraplanar, Fire)," and give it the "heat" and "burn" special attacks of a thoqqua, and you've now got a magati from the Elemental Plane of Fire that swims through magma flows.
Hal Maclean's "Left Behind" was another cool article, describing five familiars who lost their masters and yet retained their familiar abilities (and sometimes a few oddball abilities besides). Each has a short history, a goal, and enough backstory to provide plenty of plot hooks. (My favorite is Loredrip, a toad familiar who absorbed the contents of his former master's now-torched library; handling the toad causes a PC to hallucinate, during which time some of the contents of the library are imparted to the tripping individual.
There are a few problems with GM Gems that I can't figure out. For example:
- Why are there only page numbers on the odd-numbered pages? That seems an odd choice to make.
- How, on page 5, does having an intelligent hat suddenly appear on the alchemist's head fit as an "alchemical mishap" by any stretch of the term?
- Why are there so many instances throughout the PDF of there being no spaces at all between the end of one sentence and the beginning of the next? (The whole PDF is formatted with a single space between sentences, instead of the normal two that I prefer, but I can't really ding them on that as it's a valid stylistic choice. I'm afraid I have to insist on there being at least one space between sentences, though! This problem is most frequently encountered in the various d100 tables.)
- Why aren't spell names and magic items consistently italicized throughout the PDF, and why do spell names sometimes end up capitalized in the middle of a sentence?
- Isn'titbettertohavethelastwordinalinedropdowntothenextlineratherthanhaveallofthewordsinalinesquishedtogether? (See page 27 of the PDF for some excellent examples of this concept.)
- How is the adventure hook for the "Base Camp" on page 27 even remotely to be considered an adventure hook? It's a legend about how a mountain got so tall.
- Why does the "18" entry on the "Alternate 'Wonders' for the Rod of Wonder" table describe draining "three additional charges" from the rod of wonder when the rod of wonder - like most rods - does not have charges?
- How does the mournful roc's "mournful call" work, since there's no description of the call or its effects presented in the PDF?
- Why aren't the entries on the table on page 48 alphabetized, when the descriptions that follow are?
- Wouldn't monetary values for the "100 Unique Treasures" on the table on pages 62-63 have been a helpful addition?
- Does having "www.werecabbages.com" as the website to contact the authors justify planting so many references to cabbages throughout the pages of GM Gems? Is the work itself helped or hindered by such self-promotion?
- Does a claim of being "system-neutral" hold any water when such blatant D&Disms as sunrods, rust monsters, tanglefoot bags, ioun stones, sovereign glue, bags of tricks, the DMG, XP, sahuagin, spider-eaters, driders, pearls of power, beads of force, feather tokens, mariliths, aboleths, psions, rods of wonder, assassin vines, couatls, lillends, thoqquas, phase spiders, shocker lizards, magic missiles, fire mephits, otyughs, spirit nagas, and stirges are referenced throughout? And does claiming to be "system neutral" invalidate the standard requirement of posting the Open Game License as part of the PDF? I notice no such OGL in this product.
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