It’s March 4th again, GM’s day. A day to celebrate everything about being a Game Master. To reward those who run our games, putting in hours of hard work beforehand or improvising on the fly to give us really great play experiences. GM’s day is also traditionally a day to put gaming supplies on sale, and that is something we’d normally do, but we’ve got something different for you this GM’s day. Let me start by telling you a little story.

A few months back, I was running a one shot of an adventure that I was writing a review of for Gnome Stew. My printer was busted, and I wanted to print some of the maps out in color anyways. I swung into a print shop, handed them my thumb drive and asked them to print 4 pages. “I’m sorry sir, due to corporate policy, we can’t print this. It is copyrighted material and you need written permission.”  The company that made it neglected to put a print disclaimer on the pages for the printouts. Even though they were marked as printouts in big bold letters, and even though I could have called up the author and gotten the guy permission over the phone, the corporate policy required it in writing. That got me thinking. It’s easy to forget to include a print disclaimer on the pages that you should. There are also a lot of times when you might need to print out a section of the rules for quick reference. If you don’t have a printer, then you  might get stuck on the wrong end of a corporate policy. Since Silvervine is a small company, and understands what GMs go through, we got with our legal rep and worked up something nice.

Yup, in as plain English legalese as we could print it, we’ve got a blanket print disclaimer that covers our products.  Basically, it gives you the right to print one full backup copy of an electronic product from Silvervine games and you can print limited sections if we forgot to put a print disclaimer on the individual page. If you get stuck at a print shop trying to print something, just point them to this page. We’re going to make our print disclaimer live perpetually at http://www.silvervinegames.com/printdisclaimer.

If you think this is a nifty idea, and that more companies should try to provide common sense solutions like this, spread the word. Talk about it on Facebook, Spread it on Twitter, send the link to your favorite bloggers.

We hope this small step helps smooth out any situations you might have. While we’ve currently only got the one product that we sell (there are a bunch of free downloads at our Drive Thru RPG store), we’ve just started work on our first published adventure, so this might come in handy for you in the future.

Good Gaming and Happy GM’s day.

It is no secret that I’m a huge fan of running a game with some background music. Some of the other Gnomies from Gnome Stew and I share the love of  music, and you should check out these articles on music in games.

• Creating Deep and Simple Playlists
• What Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog Can Teach You About GMing

That isn’t what this post is about though. This post is about a really great resource to use to make great ever-changing music playlists. That resource is Pandora. I’ve been loving it at work, so much so that I paid the $38 upgrade fee to get the Pandora One desktop player. I made a station based off of Yoko Kanno’s music and realized how great Pandora can be for making a playlist.

All you have to do is setup a Pandora station based off of a soundtrack that you really like. Go to the Station setup and add in a few similar songs from other soundtracks or classical music that has the right feel and Pandora does the rest. You don’t worry about playing the right song at the right time, Pandora just shuffles between music that is similar to your seed music. Set up a few stations with general moods that you want to imbue. Drop in baroque classical and more refined soundtracks for good "Dealing with Nobles" music.  Seed a station with some deep Cantus music, stuff from the fountain soundtrack, or FF7’s Sephiroth theme song – one winged angel – for that epic Big Bad Evil Guy feel. Pull some Louis Armstrong, Ink Spots, Roy Brown, Miles Davis, and various other Jazz for a great noir game soundtrack.

One important thing to note is that the best music for background game music is mostly instrumental. Words often distract from the mood you are trying to set.  Give it a try and see how you like it.

(Image of Pandora one used for illustrative purposes)