Shouting Into The Void

Fuuuuu......

2012-01-25T21:14:00.003+13:00

That is a substantial eating machine right there. Holy crapsticks.

Here comes D&D 5e!!!!

2012-01-18T11:06:00.002+13:00

I don't care.

OK, I do care a little bit, but only to this extent: WoTC have the clout to affect the whole roleplaying world. I want 5e to succeed because I want the population of roleplayers to grow. However, I've been too turned off by the bloated number-cruncher that 3e turned into, and the pseudo-MMORPG that 4e proved to be, to be all that bothered about WoTC's products for my own use.

In other words, I've been too badly hurt, and I'm afraid to love again. Sob.

Desert Mat

2012-01-05T17:16:00.000+13:00

The mat - about 1500mm square

My productivity for the day is the creation of this terrain mat for desert wargaming. It's canvas, about 1500mm square, and painted with standard acrylic house-paint.

The paint does leave the canvas a little stiff, but that's no great problem since it's really only there to provide a textural background to other terrain pieces — and the wargaming models, of course.

Close-up

15mm models on the mat

I always wondered how they did this

2012-01-03T12:49:00.000+13:00

Fun For All The Family... With Tables!

2011-12-31T09:29:00.001+13:00

Demon-slaying is a fun and profitable pass-time that everyone can enjoy. But demons aren't your everyday monster; they shouldn't just fall over and expire when you slay them. So, when you land that killing blow, rattle your d20 and...

What Happens When A Demon Dies?
d20	Result
1	The killing wound bursts into flame which spreads rapidly through the demon's body, incinerating it from the inside out and leaving nothing but greasy ashes and thick, stinking smoke.
2	The demon collapses into a pile of squirming, slimy worms, which rapidly disperse, leaving behind a foetid slime-patch where the demon fell.
3	The demon deflates as thousands of small black beetles pour from the killing wound and scurry away.
4	The demon petrifies instantly into solid granite. A weapon that inflicted the killing blow is momentarily trapped; make an easy STR save to free it (the attempt takes one attack).
5	The demon petrifies instantly into very soft, friable stone that will crumble to the touch.
6	The demon instantly freezes solid, falls over and shatters into a million shards. A weapon that inflicted the killing blow is momentarily trapped; make an easy STR save to keep hold of it as the slain demon falls.
7	The demon transforms into a cloud of tiny, vicious birds that immediately turn on each other, pecking and slashing until the flock disperses in 1-3 rounds.
8	The demon swells up like a bullfrog, tearing open from the point of the killing wound and spilling its bones and entrails out across the surrounding area. Anyone within 20' must make a CON save to avoid throwing up in their mouth.
9	The demon disappears with a blinding flash and a deafening crack, leaving behind nothing but a small cloud of stinking smoke. Save or be dazzled and deafened for 1d3-1 rounds.
10	The demon implodes, its hide crushing its bones and entrails, until all that is left is a small, leathery, wrinkled ball (about 6" in diameter) smelling strongly of putrescence.
11	The demon explodes, showering everything within 20' in stinking mince.
12	Translucent, ethereal tentacles spring up from the ground and drag the demon down to the abyss, leaving nothing behind but a shadow that slowly dissipates.
13	The demon collapses into a pile of worn terracotta blocks, a couple of inches on a side. If someone wanted to take the time and effort, and had access to mortar and brickworking skills, they could be reassembled into a brick statue of the demon.
14	Thick, stinking, tarry ooze gushes from all of the corpse's orifices. It sticks like treacle (and tastes absolutely disgusting).
15	The demon and everything within 20' is covered with (harmless) electrical arcs for 1-3 rounds, after which it disappears with a flash and a smell of ozone.
16	The demon disappears, leaving behind only an irridescent green pearl about half an inch in diameter. It is subtly unpleasant to look upon or to touch, and leaves a viewer with the distinct impression that it's watching them.
17	The demon putresces and mummifies incredibly rapidly, as if a hundred years of decomposition takes place in a moment, and then falls to the floor, shattering into scraps of hide, bone and dust.
18	The demon's skin sloughs off, then its muscles and entrails fall away, leaving its skeleton standing in the posture it was in at the point of death. If touched, the bones will collapse into dust.
19	The demon, and everything around, it appears to suddenly stretch out to a hundred times its length and then snap back like a rubber band, disappearing with a noise like a bag of custard hitting the footpath, having been dropped from the top of a high tower. Make a WIS save or be severely disoriented for 1d3 rounds.
20	The demon is petrified into a statue of sand; a wind arises and blows it back to the Abyss in 1d3 rounds. Make a DEX save to close your eyes or be temporarily blinded by wind-blown demon-grit.

Android Ahoy!

2011-12-30T15:22:00.000+13:00

I recently got a B&N Nook Color from a friend, which has been rooted and turned into an Android tablet. I'm pretty happy with it so far, and I've just loaded it up with a bunch of gaming PDFs.

I'm using RepliGo for PDF reading at the moment, and it works pretty well and reliably, but it does have one major fault (for my purposes), which is that it will only keep one file open at a time. I believe that something called GoodReader for iOS uses a tabbed interface to switch between open files, but I haven't been able to find anything comparable for Android. Does anybody out there know of such a thing?

Being unable to switch easily and seamlessly between files makes tablet-based reference reading much, much less useful or easy than it should be. I really hope they'll be addressing this soon.

Sweeeeeeeeeet!

2011-12-27T11:57:00.001+13:00

Xmas goodies for FREE! Go here, where you can find your way to this spectacularly well produced hundred-and-a-bit pages of adventures, locations, tables and what-not, all produced from the fecund brain-meats of people just like you and me and offered up FREE (did I mention that it's free?) to people just like you and me.

I'm impressed. Also grateful. Thanks, people-less-lazy-than-me! Thanks a bunch!

Tombworld

2011-12-24T16:10:00.000+13:00

I originally saw this this illustration by Les Edwards in Omni magazine (I think), and then again in a collection of illustration that I bought in about '83 (I think).

I found it immensely evocative then, and still do. It would make an excellent setting for a megadungeon-based campaign.

Dang!

2011-11-30T17:45:00.001+13:00

Dang! Looks like Hero Games is pretty screwed. They're cutting their full-time staff down to a total of ONE, which isn't a good sign. I really hope they can come around again, they've managed to return from the dead before, but I wouldn't bet my life on it.

Creepy Critter

2011-11-26T06:48:00.001+13:00

All I know about this thing is that it's a bat of some kind, and that it creeps me out. Enlarge it to human-size, and you have a creature of nightmares.

And here's another: a leaf-tail gecko:

Hirelings from Planet Algol

2011-11-18T22:15:00.001+13:00

Read this.

It's the first time I've seen anything written from the point of view of the hirelings. It's great.

The Very Excellent Screen of Fitz

2011-11-15T13:46:00.001+13:00

I've made several DM screens in my time, as I've moved through various rule-sets and their various editions.

The first one I ever made was made of very heavy card (Whakatane board, for those who know what that is), lovingly illustrated on the players' side by me in pen and ink and coloured pencil, and like all of them until the Age of Computers, the DM's side assembled from photocopied tables from the PHB and DMG. It took me many, many hours of loving work.

That one was eaten by a dog. I was not happy.

This one consists of four sheets, 210mm square, in a concertina fold, the whole lot held together with white (off-white, really) cloth tape. Previously I've mounted the printed sheets on heavy card; this time I just laminated them back-to-back and taped them together, and it seems to be quite sturdy enough for use, and will fold a lot flatter.

It's designed for my ultra-houseruled version of Swords & Wizardry. There's really not a lot in S&W that the DM has to have constant reference to; there's so little to the rules that they're pretty easy to remember, so I've had to pad out these four sheets to get enough stuff on there to fill them up.

The outside — the players' side — has been decorated with an assemblage of Dyson's excellent dungeomorphs, slapped together with the aid of the also excellent Dave's Mapper.

In praise of the Dice of Fudge

2011-10-26T19:40:00.001+13:00

Minus one. Slight bummer.

Once upon a time, a chap called Steffan O'Sullivan instigated a process that ended up with the creation of a generic roleplaying game system which he called FUDGE.
I really like FUDGE conceptually, but it requires a lot of work from the GM to build a campaign. There's a reasonable amount of stuff available for it, already built by people like us with an unreasonable obsession with playing make-believe games — for example, there was a pretty complete port of AD&D to FUDGE built by a guy called Peter Mikelsons some years ago (it, and he, appears to have dropped entirely off the internet). But if you want to build something from the ground up, expect to put in some pretty hard slog.
Anyway. About the dice.
FUDGE's core resolution dynamic rests on rolling a number — often, but not always, three or four — of d3 marked with a plus sign, a minus sign, and blank face (there are two of each on a d6, like those in the picture). You can buy dedicated FUDGE dice like those shown here, or you can just use ordinary six-siders, counting 1-2 as a minus, 3-4 as blank, and 5-6 as a plus. The pluses and minuses are tallied against each other, with blanks being neutral, so scores from -4 to +4 are possible on 4dF (though there's only a 1:1,296 chance of getting either of those results on any given throw). The higher your plus result, the better the outcome. The lower the minus result, the worse things turn out.
What I like about them is that the results conform statistically to a bell-curve, where things are most likely to be only averagely good or bad, but with the (small) possibility of astounding wonderfulness or horrifying horribleness. You can easily modify the degree of potential wonderfulness/horribleness by adjusting the number of dice thrown. I like to use them as Luck Dice, in situations when things could go either way and the outcome rests in the laps of the gods. They fulfil a similar role to a d20 saving throw, but without the linear result curve, and without any level-based modification.
Of course there's no reason why I couldn't just use regular six-siders. But as may have become apparent, I really do like special dice.

Falling

2011-10-14T17:20:00.001+13:00

Falling damage is something I've been wrestling with for many years. On the one hand, one doesn't want to make it as deadly as it is in real life, as that would tend to make for a level of character mortality that would delight only the most sadistic DM (or masochistic player). On the other hand, if it's not serious enough you end up with the situation where a massively muscled but brainless fighter with many, many hit-points* will simply hurl himself off a hundred-foot-high cliff as a means of getting into a fight faster. That may be heroic, but it's a bit too anime-ridiculous for me these days.

What I'm thinking is this:

Falling characters take 1d6 damage per 10' per 10' fallen — i.e. 1d6 for the first 10', plus 2d6 for the second 10', plus 3d6 for the third, and so on — up to a maximum of 20d6 (terminal velocity).
Falling (or fallen) characters are concussed for one Turn per point of damage over their level. They will be seeing double, will probably puke if they attempt any vigorous activity (or even no activity), and all their die rolls will be at minus 1 per Turn of concussion remaining. For example, a level 5 character who takes 10 points of falling damage will be concussed for 5 Turns, and will be at -5 to everything the first Turn, at -4 the second, -3 the next, and so on.
A character who takes more falling damage than their level plus CON score is knocked out; the duration of unconsciousness is up to the DM, but when they wake up they will be concussed (as above) for at least a day.

Hopefully this will make falling dangerous enough to make players wary of suffering it, but not so dangerous the campaign will be littered with more broken and splattered corpses than is fun.

I'm tempted to allow a saving throw to halve falling damage, just because I think almost anything should allow some chance at mitigation. If so, I'd probably make the save at -1 per die of damage taken after the first, or something like that. Or maybe you get to knock off one die of damage for every point you make the save by... that might be better than a flat halving.

*His name was Smirnoff. He was one of my very first D&D characters, and had practically no skills except taking damage and dishing it out in vast amounts.

The Damage Done

2011-10-11T11:57:00.000+13:00

Back in those ancient days of yore when giants walked the earth and D&D was O, every weapon and every monster did 1d6 damage with a successful attack. The rationale was, I believe, that because a dagger was capable of killing a person with a single blow, and a two-handed sword was equally capable of inflicting a mere scratch, that having different damage ranges for different weapons would be functionally pointless, though I believe (I'm not really sure here) that weapons like greatswords got to roll two dice and took the best score. Maybe not. Anyway, the system is still used by people playing with the original D&D Little Brown Books, and with S&W White Box. Somebody on the Swords & Wizardry forums suggested using it for S&W Core Rules as well, but using a d8 instead of a d6.

I find the idea attractive for one major reason: it makes a character's choice of weapon largely aesthetic; there's no weapon-damage min-maxing to be done. If a scimitar suits a character conception better than a greatsword, the player won't be tempted to go for an inappropriate weapon for mechanical reasons. Also, there's nothing for the DM to remember when it comes to what damage a monster does with its fangs or claws or tail-bash or whatever.

It does have its aesthetic down-side though. In a game in which encumbrance is actually important, everyone is going to be using daggers exclusively — and why not? They're lighter, smaller, you can throw them, and they do just as much damage as anything else.

The most important reason not to adopt Ye Olde Damyge Systeme though is this: it reduces still further the use of all those excellent funny-shaped dice. And the poor d12 already gets the short end of the stick there.

I think I'll stick with the many-dice model.

Dear oh dear oh dear

2011-09-30T08:51:00.001+13:00

After a false start last week, I re-started my S&W campaign last night. Oh deary deary me.

I totally sucked. The suckage was immense. I stand in awe at my own suckitude.

I was really not on my game at all; I forgot to take all my maps and other prep stuff for a start — we were playing at Andrew's place, not mine, so instead of just going to another room to get the stuff I'd forgotten I had to go home again. Then, once we got going I found that I was really just not feeling the vibe, and my descriptive powers were bland and lacklustre to say the least. I managed to kill one of the party more or less accidentally in the set-up to the campaign start, and then killed half the party with trolls later on due to woolly-headed thinking about the nature of the battlefield* (it was on board a small ship). I may have to go back to using miniatures and tabletop battle-maps so that people can make meaningful tactical decisions without having to rely on my worthless brain-meats to keep track of everything.

Now, I don't actually mind too much killing characters, but I really do prefer it if it's their fault (or at least, the fault of an uncaring universe via random probability variations) and not mine. Annette really takes it personally, but then she seems to think that the GM should actually be benevolently on the side of the characters, poor naïve trusting soul that she is. I don't think that, but I don't think the GM's incompetence should have to be one of the challenges the characters have to work against.

D. Must try harder. See me after class.

* In my own defence, nobody except Andrew actually asked any questions about the battlefield or attempted any sort of tactical action, so the combat just boiled down to a dice-rolling competition — three 5th-level characters against five critters, each roughly the combat-equivalent of a 9th-level fighter. I'd say they got off lightly, really.

More creativity from somebody else

2011-09-28T20:46:00.002+13:00

Zak, from over at Playing D&D With Porn Stars, came up with this excellent rationalization of a D&D-style multiplanar milieu. I do believe I may steal it in its entirety and run off sniggering into the night, with a muah-ha-ha-haaaa and a twirling of my dastardly moustachios.

Monsters and Manuals: Yes I Just Collated Loads Of Stuff From Other Blog Entries

2011-09-27T08:09:00.002+13:00

Monsters and Manuals: Yes I Just Collated Loads Of Stuff From Other Blog Entries

Oh, the irony. Sort of. Of just publishing a link to a collation. I don't necessarily agree with 100% of what noisms has to say, but he does often stir up my brain-meats.

Talking Animals

2011-09-21T20:32:00.000+12:00

I was reading through some AD&D spell descriptions yesterday, and noted that the druid and magic-user versions of Reincarnation differ quite dramatically in the range of critters a dead character can come back as. The druid spell will probably bring you back as an animal of some kind, while the magic-user version will always result in some humanoid type or other.

Dark Sword anthropomorphic mouse fighter,
nice miniatures, if you like that sort of thing

In my Swords & Wizardry campaigns, I've conflated the magic-user and cleric spell lists, so there's just the one version of reincarnation, and there's no set list of resulting creature types. It occurs to me that the spell would be an ideal explanation for the existence of talking anthropomorphic animals with opposable thumbs and a bad attitude....

It's an outcome that would have to be employed with some care. Not every player is a secret (or not-so-secret) furry, not every player is going to enjoy waking up as a talking badger. But for those who swing that way, it could be fun, until the novelty wears off.

I've never really seen the point of the druidic reincarnation spell; it always seemed to me that it was mostly a pointless waste of time and an annoying "gotcha!" — your character dies, boo-hoo, but not to worry, you can be reincarnated! And you come back to life, but as a muskrat or something, and scurry off to burrow through the leaf-litter eating bugs (or whatever muskrats do). Not a lot of scope for adventuring there.

Hirelings

2011-09-20T12:01:00.001+12:00

Looking back over some old — sometimes very old — campaign journals, I note that hirelings are most notable by their absence. It seems to be taken for granted in all the old-school rulebooks that PCs will hire flunkies to do their heavy carrying and what-not, but we almost never did as far as I can find.

Maybe it's because we were always too cheap to pay wages, but I think it's more likely because we were a bunch of softies who felt guilty at the inevitable demise of such fragile creatures, for whom we felt a responsibility of care. It's bad enough having to constantly replace horses, especially if (by some miracle) they'd lasted a couple of adventures without being gutted and eaten by some hideous abomination.

It's a pity really; the addition of a miscellaneous group of sometimes questionable reliability or loyalty, largely reliant on the PCs for their very survival, can add an interesting social element to running a party. It actually makes Charisma useful, instead of becoming the inevitable dump-stat. And if, as we were, the players are basically decent types who played basically decent types, the very vulnerability of the hirelings to a ridiculously dangerous environment can provide the DM with a host of side-quest ideas.

NOTE: The picture to the right, of Bearer No.4, was one of the very first things I coloured in Photoshop 2, but I can't for the life of me find the coloured version, so this will just have to do. The one to the left is a recent thing that I doodled in Painter VIII.

Adder-wyrm

2011-09-18T16:14:00.001+12:00

Adder-wyrm

HD: 1-3 hp
AC: 5 [14]
Attack: Bite 1-2 pts, claws 1-3 pts
Move: 12"
Save: 18
Special: Venomous bite, climbing, camouflage

These shy, diminutive creatures are hunters and scavengers, about the size of a chihuahua, preying on any insect, reptile or mammal up to about the size of a rat, or feeding on the remains of any larger animals they may find. They are not particularly aggressive unless cornered, and will (if possible) flee from anything larger or more dangerous than their prey; if they attack a larger creature, it will be solely so that they can escape, and they will not persist if an escape route presents itself.

Their needle-like fangs can inflict deep puncture wounds, and the bite is venomous: a paralysing and necrotizing poison that numbs and eats away at the surrounding tissue, leaving it dead and gangrenous. A bite to a hand or foot will, over the course of a few Turns, will leave it numb, useless and stinking. A bite to the head or neck can easily kill the victim.

The adder-wyrm has gecko-like pads on its spatulate toes, allowing it to run up sheer surfaces and even across ceilings. Like a chameleon, it has an extensible tongue that it can use to attack flying insects and the like, and it can also change its colour to match its background — when motionless, an adder-wyrm can be quite difficult to detect.

The retiring nature of the adder-wyrm means that it usually presents no great threat to adventurers, but they will sometimes creep into a bag or pack in search of food, and may sometimes be surprised during the search of a chamber.

Adder-wyrms live in all sorts of environments short of arctic cold, and in the tropics they can become something of a pest, as they breed more successfully the warmer and more humid the climate. They are often found underground when food is plentiful.

Adder-wyrms make very poor pets, but might possibly serve as a wizard's familiar.

Byzantium

2011-09-12T11:18:00.000+12:00

I'm not sure where this excellent map of Old Constantinople came from, but it's great. It wouldn't be as easy to use in a game as a boring old plan view of the city, and it's certainly not accurate to scale, but it's a wonderfully evocative image.

This is a modern image, but it's very reminiscent of 15th-16th century woodcut city maps I've seen from Northern Europe, especially Germany.

Treasure Map

2011-09-09T20:35:00.000+12:00

I like to have physical props for my players to fiddle with, and one of the ones I've created over the years was this treasure map which I made to go with the opening of a low-level campaign I ran once.

All the characters started out as zero-level farm brats, the McMurdoch siblings, forced off the farm upon the death of their father. This map was found amongst his effects, along with his old sword and chain shirt.

That campaign was at its most fun when the characters were all hopelessly incompetent, but as they gained experience it became a lot more run-of-the-mill — I don't mean it wasn't fun then too, but it wasn't really much different to any other campaign. In the beginning, decisions like what farm equipment to take with them really mattered (they decided to take the anvil, for some reason). Later on, that sort of stuff disappeared. Ah well.

Anyway, I drew the map with coloured ink on heavy rag paper, and then baked it until it became quite fragile so that the players (just like their characters) had to be quite careful about how they handled it.

Wizard

2011-09-09T19:40:00.001+12:00

Another old picture. A creepy bald wizard this time; you just know he means no good.

Sandman

2011-09-09T19:29:00.000+12:00

I have shown this image before, but not here, so here it is.

This is a critter I drew for my AD&D campaign some considerable time ago. Apart from some camouflage ability, there was nothing particularly special about them; they were pretty much just generic orc-replacements for a desert adventure.

However, that's not to say they couldn't be made a lot more interesting if one were so inclined.

The image can be inflated merely by clicking on it. What a marvellous age this is in which we live!

NOTE: The image is skewed because that's how I drew it. I don't remember why I did that.

Siegfried Slays the Dragon Fafnir

2011-09-05T00:43:00.002+12:00

I was looking through some old sketch books and found this — I drew it some time in 1985, when I was "working" at the Lyttelton Library on some student job scheme or other. I was hired to produce a history of Lyttelton for the Harbour Board, but when they found out how much it would cost to print they dumped that idea and shuffled me off into a back room at the library, out of sight and out of mind. I spent my time there reading through their science-fiction and fantasy collection, and scribbling in my sketchbooks.

Even older than that is this one, from 1983. It was drawn from a photograph of a Tibetan rhododendron forest, and I just added the little dude on the rock. It's drawn with a Rotring rapidograph, probably a 0.18mm nib since that's what I favoured at the time. I quite like it really.

I shall call him... Mini-Me

2011-09-03T14:34:00.001+12:00

A couple of days ago, another purchase arrived in my mailbox. Observe, if you will, the beauty and glory that is the A5 size imprint of the OSRIC AD&D retroclone, from Usherwood Publishing. I show it here with the large-format hardcover and softcover versions of the same content.

It's a Lulu print-on-demand book, and costs $US 13.50 (plus postage to NZ of about $7). With the exchange rate as it is at the moment, it ended up costing me about $NZ 26-ish all-up, which is not too bad at all.

It's terrific, and I can see it being my default version in use. I'm a great fan of smaller book sizes than the traditional US Letter format; they take up less room on the table, they're easier to shelve, and they're much lighter and more convenient to carry around.

A tool in search of a task

2011-09-03T13:58:00.002+12:00

Today was the official grand re-opening of Comics Compulsion, the pusher of all my comic-based junk, who had been forced to move owing to earthquakes knocking down most of our central business district. They also stock wargaming and roleplaying stuff, though naturally they go for the more commercially viable brands (Warhammer, Flames of War, D&D4e etc.) rather than the weirdo crap I prefer.

I wandered along there to take a look at the new premises and to pick up a stash of 2000AD and Judge Dredd comics, and while standing at the counter I saw THIS ⇒⇒⇒⇒⇒

A d30. A thirty-sided die. A die for generating random numbers from one to thirty.

Now, at present I have absolutely no use for a d30, except maybe to generate random days of the month (which I could do with a d3 and a d10 anyway). However, if there's one thing I've learned over the years it is that not having an immediate use for a Cool Thing is no reason not to own one, so without hesitation I laid down the princely sum of four bucks to get a d30 of my very own.

So, now I have one. All I need now is some reason to use it. Time to start hunting out all the d30-based random generation tables people with too much time on their hands have been obsessively compiling for just such an occasion.

I am alive!

2011-08-22T10:17:00.000+12:00

It's been a while since I posted anything here, and I think that's because I'm not GMing at all these days.

When I'm GMing, I think about roleplaying a lot (especially about how to torture an innocent rule system into some sort of freakish, twisted, mutant form of itself), but when I'm not actually running a game I find that I don't really think about the nuts and bolts of gaming at all. I play, I enjoy myself a lot, and then I go away and think about other things until it's time to play again. It's quite laid back really, which is good for a while.

As for modelling stuff — well, it's winter here and it's bloody cold in my workroom. It's much nicer to sit by our nice new wood-burner, all toasty and warm than to huddle in my man-cave with my nose running and teeth chattering. I've been tinkering with a design for a portable modelling-station-in-a-box with built-in lights and what-not, but haven't progressed very far with it as yet, not least because to build it I would have to spend time shivering in the refrigerator that is my workshop. It's kind of a Catch-22 thing, since when my workshop becomes bearable I won't have to worry about needing a portable workstation, and it will therefore fly from my mind.

Misty Temple Scenery

2011-08-02T03:00:00.000+12:00

I'm not sure where this is, or what those conical structures are, but it has a south-east Asian look to me. I could be completely wrong though.

Mist and fog are great for atmospherics, but they work more easily in film (or real life) than in DMing. You really have to work your descriptive muscles to accentuate the claustrophobic creepiness, and stretch your players' paranoia levels until their nerves are really twanging, and then...... maybe nothing happens. What a let-down. Pffft. Then, BOO! The running, and the screaming...

Mister Potato-head Goblin

2011-07-24T18:20:00.000+12:00

This is just a little doodle I did this evening and finished off with texture and tone in Painter XIII.

GHQ vs. H&R

2011-07-18T12:21:00.001+12:00

Clickify to embiggenate

Here's a comparison between GHQ infantry (on the left) and Heroics & Ros infantry (on the right). They're both Vickers machine-gun teams; the GHQ figures in desert uniform and the H&R figures in ETO battledress.

GHQ cost $US 9.95 for 50-60 figures. H&R cost £2.50 for about 50; at current exchange rates, that's about $NZ 11.50 and $NZ 5.00 respectively. Postage rates are more expensive for H&R; they charge an additional 40% for shipping from the UK to New Zealand, but that's still not nearly enough to make them as costly as GHQ figures.

GHQ figures cost more than twice as much as H&R, but then they're undeniably better sculpted. However, though they're cruder, H&R figures are still easily identifiable as to weapon load, troop type and so forth, and so serve perfectly well as wargaming units. At arm's length, on the tabletop, GHQ's finer modelling really doesn't make itself obvious, so from a functional point of view, H&R would be the obvious choice — after all, why pay all that extra for detail you're mostly not going to see?

I do like a nicely-detailed model, but that alone wouldn't be enough to make me pay a premium for GHQ. What does push me over into buying from GHQ is the fact that I can do all my purchasing automatically, direct from their website, and their stuff arrives here in New Zealand within seven to ten days. When dealing with H&R, on the other hand, I have to make my choices, send them an email order, wait for them to send me a PayPal invoice, pay them, and then wait for the figures to arrive. That extra inconvenience is enough to get me to pay extra just to avoid it.

Castle in the Mist

2011-07-14T17:01:00.001+12:00

More gamish scenery. The hand-rails and lamp-post might be a bit out of place, but apart from that...

(Image nicked from imgur)

The Genius of Zak Makes Me Weak at the Knees

2011-07-13T20:53:00.002+12:00

Zak, of Playing D&D With PornStars and Vornheim fame, suggested this initiative sysytem:

Each side rolls initiative (one die for all the PCs, one die for the GM).
The winning side has one character go (if it's the PCs, they just choose among themselves who'll go first)
Then the losing side has one character go
Then the winning side has one character go...
etc. etc. the side with more characters has the leftovers all go at the end.

This is an idea of sublime genius, and I want to try it IMMEDIATELY.

New toys make me happy

2011-07-12T15:44:00.001+12:00

I just received an order of GHQ 1:285 infantry in the post, and I'm more excited by it than a grown gentleman of a Certain Age should be. They are ridiculously detailed, though they're also rather large for what are supposed to be 6mm figures (they're more like 8mm). Personally I don't really mind that they're a trifle gigantic; there tends to be differences in scale between terrain features and vehicles anyway, ground scale vs. model scale is way out of whack, and as long as they don't look too out of place the infantry can all be 8-foot heroes as far as I'm concerned. And they are great little figures.

The trouble with very highly-detailed figures is that one is tempted to spend more time than is really warranted for wargames figures in painting them; even so, they're still a lot quicker and easier to paint than 15mm stuff.

Realistically, once they're based and on the table being pushed around to the sound of mouth-sound-effects and the rattle of dice, there's not really any functional difference between these guys and Heroics & Ros infantry, which are smaller (much closer to nominal 6mm scale), much less detailed (though still perfectly identifiable) and much, much cheaper.

Crusader Mk.I (15mm)

2011-07-11T15:16:00.002+12:00

This is my latest 15mm (1:100 scale) AFV model — a Crusader Mk.I, from Battlefront. The Crusader, in any of its incarnations, is one of my favourite British tanks of WWII; from an aesthetic point of view I find it a great pity that the Sherman was so much more useful, and so displaced it.

Lock-picking for all!

2011-07-10T11:51:00.002+12:00

I'm not in favour of absolute exclusivity between the classes in my D&D campaigns. Anyone can try pretty much anything, as long as the players can reasonably justify it somehow. The benefit you get by choosing one class over another is that, whatever your class schtick might be, you can do it better than any of the other classes. At first level the difference might not be extreme, but it will become so as you rise in level.

In this spirit, I present my house-rules for handling lock-picking.

Picking Locks

Anyone, with access to a set of lock-picks and a little bit of training*, can attempt to pick a lock. An attempt takes one Turn (ten minutes) and succeeds if a 1 is rolled on 1d6.

* When I say "a little bit of training" I really do mean a little bit. Basic lock-picking is easy; a couple of hours instruction is enough to get anyone of reasonable intelligence into action.
If you buy a set of lock-picks as part of your starting equipment, it can be assumed that you've had that basic training as part of your character's background. If not, (i.e. after character creation) you'd have to seek out such training in-game.

If a 6 is rolled, the lock is unopenable — the pick breaks off in it, the mechanism is jammed, or something else similar occurs — and will require attention from somebody with real skill (i.e. a Thief or a locksmith) to clear it before another attempt can be made.

A Thief works in fundamentally the same way, but has advantages:

A Thief takes a Round (one minute) per attempt, not a Turn.
A Thief succeeds on a 1 or 2, but still jams the lock on a 6.
A Thief can use a successful picklock roll to clear a jammed lock. (Note that a 6 rolled on a clearing attempt makes the situation worse: each additional 6 doubles the number of successes required to clear the lock).
At every three levels, a Thief gets an additional die to roll per attempt; a 1 or 2 rolled on any of them indicates a success, and a success on one die can be used to cancel out a jamming result (a 6) on another (a success used to cancel a jamming result doesn't count against the successes required to open the lock).

Note that a successful picklock roll won't neccessarily open a lock; more difficult locks might require two, three or more successes to get them open. Particularly fiendish locks might even require multiple simultaneous successes, and would thus only be openable by Thieves of elevated rank. Or by a key.

Certain Death

2011-07-09T15:14:00.000+12:00

Why "certain death"?

Because if you get rid of that modern-looking cable car, then getting into this place will probably involve a party swimming and/or climbing.

Both of those activities have a much higher mortality rate, in every game I've played in, than even the most terrifyingly armoured, venomous, fire-breathing, fanged and clawed monster.

This can only be in Japan, and there's no way I'd live there — a decent earthquake would be likely to snap those puny supports and send the whole kit and kaboodle into the sea.

Magical Landscape

2011-07-08T14:29:00.000+12:00

Just because I haven't done a scenery piece for a while, here's this magical landscape. It's somewhere on the borderland between Germany and the Czech republic.

Last night

2011-07-08T11:02:00.001+12:00

We finally managed to get another session of Joff's Travelleroid game played last night, after a bit of a hiatus due to various real-world irritations, and it was a HOOT!

To cut a long story to its absolute essentials: we successfully nicked a spaceship and some other stuff from a bunch of mercenaries without actually getting any of us killed (but only just).

More detailed session log here.

Our gaming group appears to have an uncanny ability to roll dice at either end of the curve without ever visiting the middle, which means strings of either abject, humiliating, farcical failure, or crushing triumph, with nothing much in between. The GM, no matter who might actually be taking that role, somehow manages to regularly roll higher than is statistically likely.

We're using a d20 mechanic, which means that the curve is actually a line. I'm not a fan of that for simulationist gaming; I think a multi-dice bell curve is better in that respect, as it reduces the effect of luck and emphasizes adjustments for character skill. However, I do like linear probability for more cinematic gaming because extreme results are more common, and extreme results are more amusing... as long as you're not taking things too seriously. It can get a bit depressing when the extreme results consist of nothing but pathetic fumbles, one after the other, but que sera sera.

Anyway, we can enjoy our ill-gotten spaceship for a while before its inevitable theft from us in turn, almost certainly stranding us all on some awful shit-hole of a planet, because one of us once again manages to throw a 1 at a crucial juncture.

Boring old magic weapons

2011-06-23T10:08:00.000+12:00

I hate those stupid anime/GW oversized weapons.

I have an idea for defining how the pluses (e.g. +1, +2 etc.) could work for magic weapons.

A +1 weapon, instead of just adding +1 point of damage, the player would roll +1 damage die, and choose which of the two results to use. A +2 weapon would add two dice, and so forth. A character wielding a +2 longsword would get to roll 3d8 instead of 1d8, and could choose the result showing on any of them. A +1 dagger would roll 2d4 instead of 1d4, and so forth.

Just to clear up any misconceptions: you DON'T add all the dice to get a damage result, you CHOOSE ONE of them.

I should note that I have done absolutely no statistical analysis to determine how this might affect damage infliction rates. At this point, it's just a brain-fart.

I guess it should work well enough for cursed weapons as well, except that the player would lose the element of choice and would always have to take the worst result, normally the lowest.... but if, for example, attacking a friend while charmed, it might be the higher.

Battlefront 15mm A9 Cruisers

2011-06-21T14:19:00.001+12:00

These 15mm (1:100 scale) models of the A9 Cruiser Mk.1 are Battlefront's old casts; they've since been remastered, but I haven't seen any of the new ones in the wild so I don't know how they compare. These ones were given to me by my friend Steve.

I've painted them in BEF livery, circa 1940. It's taken me an age to get them finished.

Great Geomorphic Genesis, Batman!

2011-06-15T12:36:00.001+12:00

THIS IS FANTASTIC!

(The link goes to Stonewerks blog). I'd just like to second the plea for an automated geomorphic mapper to pump out pseudo-3d maps like this.

It would not only make me happy, it would also align the stars and bring peace and happiness on earth.

(NOTE: I am not a programmer, so I have absolutely no clue how difficult such a thing would be to create.)

FUUUUUUUUUU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2011-06-13T18:13:00.001+12:00

Today, two major earthquakes within a couple of hours once again laid waste to my workroom. The shelf module holding the plastic storage drawer thingummies that I keep all my figures in, painted and unpainted, tore itself loose from its brackets and dumped everything on to the floor, simultaneously blocking the door so that it will be very, very tricky getting in there to clear it all up (again).

There's bound to be other chaos in there too, but that's all I could see through the tiny gap I could force in the doorway.

I'm really over all this earthwobbling crap. Enough is enough.

"Plastic Soldier" and Battlefront 15mm Pz IV comparison

2011-06-06T14:15:00.003+12:00

The sprue - obverse and reverse

The Plastic Soldier Company makes, well duh, plastic toy soldiers for wargamers, in 15mm (1:100) and 25mm (1:72). They also make a limited, but expanding, range of vehicles and guns in those scales.

Proving that I have absolutely no impulse control, I just bought a box of their 15mm Panzer IV models in spite of the fact that I'm (supposedly) getting out of 15mm WWII gaming. There are 5 models to the box for $45 NZ; not too dear, but they could certainly be cheaper, since they retail for £16.50 (about $NZ 35.00) direct from their website.

Parts are supplied to build Ausf. F1, F2, G or H models of the Panzer IV, though some compromises have had to be made — for example, the muzzle brake on the long 75mm gun barrel is more or less right for the G or H, but not for the F2. However, the fundamental form of the Panzer IV never really changed, and unless you're feeling really anal about it the errors in detail really don't matter that much on the wargames table, and if you are feeling anal about it, plastic is a lot easier to modify than resin and/or metal.

Shown here on the left is Battlefront's model of the Panzer IV D (which I use as a stand-in for the Pz.IV A of 1939-40).
To the right is the offering from Plastic Soldier, built as the F1.
The two are pretty close in size and proportion, and would mix and match well enough on the table.

Each kit comes on a single sprue in a dark yellow plastic that is a reasonable match for the German Dunkelgelb base colour. They go together very smoothly. There are a couple of things to be wary of though, when building the track assemblies:

The drive sprockets are not interchangeable left and right; make sure you have the right one for the appropriate track assembly.
The tracks come in two sections, an upper and a lower run, and will only fit properly one way. Test-fit before charging ahead with your glue.

A few stowage extras (spare road wheels, jerrycans, a length of track) are provided on the sprue, and there is also a set of schurzen for those who want to build the Ausf.H. Unfortunately the sheet showing an exploded view of the model presents only the Ausf.F1 build, so if you want to do any of the later models you'll have to nut it out yourself.

No transfers are provided, so markings will have to be painted on, or transfers in the correct scale obtained elsewhere (Battlefront sell them).

In the example shown here, I've just sprayed it with Vallejo ModelAir German Grey, given it a wash of Devlan Mud, and then a quick dry-brush in VMC Stone Grey to highlight the detail. Properly weathered, and with the commander and markings decently painted, it would look just as good as the more expensive resin model I think.

Compared with Battlefront's resin and white-metal model, the injection-moulded Plastic Soldier model's detail is generally crisper, more delicate and more regular. On the other hand, surface details like the tools on the fenders are more deeply modelled on the Battlefront model, and have more dimension to them. The Battlefront model is heavier, and feels more satisfying in the hand, but it's an easy matter to add weight to the plastic model by glueing a couple of lead weights into the hull during assembly.

In the end, where the Plastic Soldier model really comes out ahead is in price. On a model by model basis, you pay less than half what you'd have to fork out for Battlefront models (and resin/metal models are only going to get dearer). If you're on a budget, the choice is clear — build the bulk of your armies in plastic, and only spend the big bucks where you absolutely have to, for specialty items.

Tunnel-crawler

2011-06-02T17:41:00.001+12:00

Clickerate to embigginify

Apart from the outlines, which were drawn in black fountain-pen, this is all done digitally — the tones and textures are all drawn in Photoshop.

Swampy Ruiny Goodness

2011-06-01T08:44:00.000+12:00

Combining my two great DMing loves: swamps and ruins. The possibilities are endless (and slimy).

Cataracts

2011-05-25T13:16:00.000+12:00

Click on the picture to enlargenatify

I have no idea where this is, only that it looks cool. You don't want to be paddling your canoe into this shit, you bet.

I'd use it lke this:

Give the party information that the entrance to some underground cave complex or tomb or something, containing something they want, is behind a waterfall on the River of Certain Painful Death (or whichever river you prefer).
Provide them with landmarks to look for so that they'll know when they're in more or less the right place.
Allow them to struggle up-river through dense jungle for three or four weeks.
Eventually, when you're getting bored with their suffering, tell them that they've spotted the landmarks they're looking for and have them start casting about for the waterfall.
Show them the picture.
Have a digital camera handy to capture their expressions.

But then, I'm kind of a bastard.

Chaos-wrack

2011-05-25T02:28:00.002+12:00

Black ball-point pen on cartridge paper

For some reason, when I think of Chaos (in the Moorcockian sense) I alway think of tentacles. Tentacles and eyeballs.

I got really bored with this before it was half-way finished.

Build Your Own Cult For Fun And Profit

2011-05-20T12:31:00.002+12:00

Click to bloat

I was flailing around last night, trying to put together a credible cult for use in an upcoming episode of my D&D campaign, and my poor old brain was overheating a bit with the work, trying to come up with a multitude of interelated personalities and agendas.

Then I had an epiphany — it occurred to me that I had a ready-made Evil Cult right at hand in the Nazis. It fulfilled all of the requirements, having just the sort of organisation, personalities and inner rivalries that I wanted to represent.

The best part is that it was already made up; all I have to do is to assign new names to the various personalities, maybe give a few of them some powers (the "Hitler", for example, would get some clerical and mind-control powers), and Bob's yer uncle. Instant Evil Cult! It should work for cults of any size, from a couple of hundred, lurking in the shadows, to massive cults oppressing whole populations.

Now to crank up the Everchanging Book of Names and get to work. Now let's see, who's going to be the "Göbbels"......?

The Caunter Scheme for the A9 Cruiser Mk.I

2011-05-19T12:00:00.000+12:00

This "dazzle" scheme was named after its inventor, and was used by British forces in the Middle East and North Africa 1940-41.

Mike Starmer has written an excellent reference about it — there's a review of it by Peter Brown on the PMMS site. I'd really like to get my hands on a copy, but I've never seen on in the flesh.

There seems to have been a different implementation of the scheme developed for each individual vehicle type. The one shown here is specifically for the A9 Cruiser Mk.I

I've been painting all my WWII wargames stuff for the 1940 French campaign, but I'm tempted to start doing some stuff for the desert war, if only because wargaming that theatre of operations would require a lot less in the way of tabletop terrain models. On the other hand, the Caunter scheme is kind of a pain in the arse to paint... though it does look pretty.

Click on the image to bloat it to gigantic size.

Multi-Dual-Omni-Classing

2011-05-11T16:22:00.002+12:00

I've been taking the opportunity, during my break from GMing, to think about multi-classing. Or dual-classing, or whatever.

At present I'm using a sub-class system, in which a bunch of abilities is tacked on to one of the basic classes and just adds about 15% to 33% to the experience points needed to rise in level, but I'm not entirely happy with that. I'm tempted to rebuild all the sub-classes as fully-fledged classes and move to a more open-ended multi-classing system, similar to the d20 system.

My design aims are these, more or less:

No species-based restrictions on multi-classing (because, phooey)
Fairly easy prerequisites for most classes, enabling at least 1 in 3 normal characters to multiclass if they so desire
Simplest possible prerequisite chains (without enabling ludicrous class combinations)
Simplest possible level advancement requirements (i.e. experience points)
Maintain compatibility, as far as possible, with by-the-book 3rd-party resources (e.g. adventure modules)
Maintain character-level HD cut-offs (i.e. no more HD after 10 levels, regardless of how those levels are composed)
Character levels are counted individually by class, not together (e.g. a L3 fighter, L5 thief is NOT an 8th level character)
Experience is always split between all a character's classes, even if for any reason they can no longer advance in a class

At present my thoughts are somewhat inchoate, and tending towards the general.

I'm thinking (so far) that multiclassed characters would be allowed the best saving throw and attack of any of their classes, with any weapon allowed to any of their classes, but be restricted to the lightest armour of any of them to be able to get the benefit of all class abilities. For example, a 5th-level fighter, 5th-level thief would attack as a 5th-level fighter, could use a two-handed sword, but could not wear any armour heavier than studded leather, nor could he employ a shield, while doing thief things. A magic-user-thief could carry and use a longsword, and attack as a thief, but can't cast spells in any sort of armour. And so forth.

I'm also thinking about the time and training that is assumed in the background of any of the basic classes. For example, a 1st level magic-user is generally assumed to have had a fairly lengthy magical apprenticeship even before beginning their adventuring career, and a 1st level fighter is assumed to have had considerable military training. It may be that some sort "apprenticeship" period should be required before adding one's first level of another class could be allowed: often enough, that would have little impact on the game, since it could be glossed over with a simple decree by the GM that "two years pass while you do your basic training..."

It would mean that it wouldn't really be feasible to start on a multiclassed career half way through an adventure, but that's not such a bad thing in my view. I never liked the way, in D&D3e, a player could just announce that they were going to spend their experience to get a level in some class just because they happened to need access to those skills right then and there.

I guess I also need to think about how energy draining attacks should be applied against characters with two (or three, or four) classes, but I'll get the bones of the system worked out first.

Mike McMahon's Sláine

2011-05-07T14:30:00.001+12:00

2000AD, for those unfortunate enough not to be aware of it, is a British weekly comic that has been in publication since 1977 (Wikipedia entry here). Its most famous character is probably Judge Dredd, but another is Sláine, a Cuchulainn-like barbarian warrior. He's been drawn by several different artists in very different styles, but one of my favourites was Mike McMahon, who drew the strip from progs 335 to 360.

These two images are from near the end of McMahon's run, and illustrate an encounter between mystically powered sky-ships.

I love McMahon's scratchy, angular style, and I also really like the fact that most of his warriors are wiry rather than hugely over-muscled. It's a style that really suits the milieu, I think.

Click on the images to see them larger.

Postapocalyptic!

2011-05-05T08:51:00.002+12:00

I'd love to know who the artist is.

OSRIC -- The Embiggening

2011-05-04T14:56:00.001+12:00

The good folks over at Black Blade have, as many of you will already know, done a massive and luxurious hardcover imprint of OSRIC. They added some art, replacing the old green divider pages with full-page black&white drawings, one of which was supplied by Your's Truly (page 307, for those who are interested). Since dealing with small sums internationally is a huge pain in the arse, I asked Jon Hershberger if he'd be willing to pay me in kind (that is, with lovely shiny RPG material) instead of in Yankeedollah, and he agreed.

Yesterday, the package arrived. It made quite a thump when the courier dumped it unceremoniously on my front porch and took off like an amphetamine-fuelled greyhound out of the starting-blocks.

The packaging was.... thorough. Yes, let's say thorough. Multiple layers of cardboard, bubble-wrap and water-resistant tyvek FedEx envelopes. The OSRIC book itself was encased in no less than FOUR FedEx envelopes! Fortunately I keep sharp knives to hand, or I'd be struggling still to penetrate to the inner layers. Anyway, I got through it and revealed the booty...

The new imprint of OSRIC is a pretty hefty tome. It's about as thick as the AD&D PHB and DMG together, though that's not bad considering that it also includes pretty much all of the 1e Monster Manual as well (minus the critters not covered by the OGL, and including a few others from the FF and MMII).

Here it is, sitting with Monsters of Myth, alongside my 1e and 2e manuals and the D&D Rules Cyclopædia (the other stuff are various of my workbooks and sketchbooks). I keep them on a shelf right by my computer; I don't really know why, as I seldom refer to them while I'm sitting here, but it makes me feel good to have them close to hand where I can gloat over them, my precioussss. Yessssss.

Now I'm really tempted to run an OSRIC/AD&D1e game. I suspect though, that what I'll actually do, is keep playing my hideous bastardized frankenstein S&W/D&D/RC/AD&D1e/2e campaign.

And why not?

Bilibin's Bugbear

2011-04-28T16:46:00.000+12:00

Ivan Bilibin (1876 - 1942) was Russian artist, prominent among the illustrators working on revolutionary magazines during the abortive 1905 revolution. Bilibin worked on a magazine called The Bugbear, and this is the mascot he drew for the publication.

Bilibin is one of my favourite illustrators.

Best wargaming terrain board ever?

2011-04-28T11:45:00.001+12:00

Over at his "Dressing The Lines" blog, Roly showcases a superb 19th century western/colonial skirmish board. It's amazing work; I've seen museum dioramas that weren't up to the standard of workmanship displayed here.

There are a bunch more photos on Roly's blog; get over there and check them out. I'm gobsmacked.

Subterranean Mysteries

2011-04-27T12:50:00.001+12:00

Never mind what these are or how the pictures are done (it's easy enough to figure out). Think instead — if your character encountered something like this while lurking about underground looking for something to kill and/or steal, what would be your immediate reaction?

I'm betting that for most people it would be profound paranoia.

Armoured diving suit - 1882

2011-04-20T17:05:00.002+12:00

Diving suit - 1882

I'm not a big player of computer shoot-'em-up games, but I'm not wholly ignorant of the field. There was a game a couple of years ago that made a big noise, in which something similar to this 19th century diving suit appeared. I forget the name of the game; it's not that important.

This is just screaming out to be used as some kind of magical mcguffin. It could easily be built along the lines of the Apparatus of Kwalish (AD&D DMG p.137) or something like that.

It need not necessarily be intended for use under water, just because the original was — it might be designed to keep an interplanar traveller safe in the extreme environments to be found in many of the other planes of existence. Alternately, it could be used as a steampunk or VSF space-suit.

Whatever you do with it — it's just too cool :)

Mythmere's Adventure Design Deskbook

2011-04-20T15:14:00.004+12:00

I just downloaded Volume 1 of Mythmere's (Matt Finch's) Adventure Design Deskbook. He's reduced the price for this PDF volume (available for download from Lulu for $3.50 USD) as it's going to be folded, along with the other three volumes, into a single hardcover book.

He says:

"This is a book of tables for the "context" phase of creating an adventure; it contains table for generating fantastic locations, missions, patrons, villainous plans, and unusual minions. "

I really like it. I've only played about with it a little bit, but already I can see its great potential for making my life easier.

My experience largely mirrors that of James Smith over at The Underdark Gazette, so rather than repeat him pretty much verbatim, I'd suggest you go and see what he has to say about it. (He also has lots of other good stuff over there; if you haven't encountered his blog yet I recommend that you give him a read).

MADD (Volume 1) is basically a collection of interconnected random generation tables designed to give the overburdened DM's imagination a shunt, rather than to churn out a complete adventure with every T crossed and every i dotted, and it succeeds in that aim admirably. Not having seen any of the other volumes, I don't know how well they succeed in continuing the process, but on the basis of this first one I'm optimistic.

Scenery (sort of): Gamma World / Mutant Future characters

2011-04-20T12:59:00.001+12:00

These guys are African, but they'd be perfectly at home in any post-apocalyptic RPG.

House Rules: The Poisoned Chalice

2011-04-18T15:10:00.001+12:00

As I've mentioned before, I've made some fairly serious changes to the Swords & Wizardry core rules for my own campaign. Naturally, I think the changes I've made are for the better; otherwise I wouldn't have made them.

However, the blindingly obvious consequence is that I've made it a bit more difficult for myself to use any 3rd-party material in conjunction with my Frankenstein-system, especially adventure modules. I have to convert clerics, for example, into my fighter-mage priests, and because I've conflated the cleric/magic-user spell lists into a 20-level hierachy, I have to refer to spell-lists from sources like Labyrinth Lord or AD&D to see just what sort of spells they're intended by the module author to have.

None of this is insuperably difficult, but it's an added burden if I want to run a module instead of building something from the ground up; it partially negates the labour-saving aspect of using somebody else's creation.

My campaign is in hiatus at the moment; we're playing through a Traveller d20-ish scenario being run by my friend Joffre. That means I have a moment to take stock and see if I want to stay the course with the changes I've made or maybe revert to a more "by-the-book" system.

I have nice shiny copies of OSRIC and Monsters of Myth winging their way towards me right now, so maybe I might shift to something AD&D-ish. I'd have to take thought to ameliorate some of the things that grate with me in AD&D, such as the compartmentalization of thief skills and that sort of thing, but it's a possibility nevertheless.

The Cat's Protection League gets serious

2011-04-15T10:17:00.000+12:00

Keep that familiar safe!

Scenery: A few years ago they were just another snake cult...

2011-04-15T10:14:00.001+12:00

In D&D parlance this would be a hydra, but I believe the technical term for an Asian multi-headed snake statue is a naga, and it's a protective, rather than malign, spirit. This is an especially fine specimen; I'm guessing it's somewhere in South-East Asia, but I don't know for sure. What I do know for sure is that if your character comes across a statue like this in some temple or other, you just know you're in for some real trouble, and you'd better hope you're well stocked up on poison remedies.

The post's title is, of course, a reference to that fine piece of cinematic art, Conan the Barbarian, starring one of the great thespians of our age, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Scenery: Absurdly Steep Steps

2011-04-13T10:39:00.001+12:00

I don't know where these stairs are. Climbing them would be tricky enough with the support chains; without them... I would prefer not to have to.

I guess, in practice, they're not much harder to climb than a ladder, but because they're in the form of stairways they look much more precarious.

Portal

2011-04-11T00:32:00.001+12:00

This is — I'm not sure what this is. It just kind of grew as I drew it in my sketchbook. I guess it's looking through some sort of portal or something at the tower, but whether a physical portal or not I leave up to the viewer. I'd drawn the falchion beforehand and the portal image just sort of merged with it.

It's drawn with a fine black roller-ball pen. It's quite a pleasant medium to draw in, but I'm having trouble finding replacement refills that have a nice fine tip, so I don't know how long it can go on.

In Print

2011-04-08T09:06:00.000+12:00

Two of my pieces have been selected for inclusion in Surge of the Wine-Dark Sea, Matt Finch's (Mythmere's) new book of artwork from the OSR. I'm honoured to be included; there are some really excellent artists in there, and my ego swells to zeppelin-like proportions to be shown alongside them.

Follow the link above for Mythmere's release posting, along with details of how you, yes YOU, can buy a copy.

It still gives me such a kick to see my work in print, even after all these years.

O Death, where is thy sting? Oh, there it is...

2011-04-05T10:04:00.005+12:00

Dyson, over on his excellent blog, has just been talking about the WHFRP system of determining damage and death. To summarize, if a blow takes you below zero hit-points, you get to roll a d20 (+ however many HP you are below 0) for Nasty Critical Damage which may leave you mangled or dead. I really like it, conceptually, and I think I may adopt it in preference to the HP/CON damage split I'm using at the moment. Reposted here, straight from Dyson's blog, is the Grievous Unpleasantness Table:

Effects of Mighty Blows (d20 + points below zero HP)
1-4: Merely a flesh wound! Continue fighting with a -2 penalty on attacks and saves.
5-7: Oof! Strike to the groin, head or other painful blow stuns the character for 1d3 rounds, and suffers a flesh wound as above
8-10: Crushing Blow! Character is stunned for 1d6 rounds, suffers a flesh wound, and must save versus petrification/paralysis or be rendered out of the fight – unconscious or otherwise crippled until healed.
11-14: Incapacitating Strike! Character is rendered unconscious or otherwise crippled and out of the fight until healed. Further, a saving throw versus death is required to prevent the obvious side effect of permanent and immediate death.
15-18: Deadly Blow! The character is dead.
19-20: Mangled! The character is dead, and body parts are missing, thrown around and otherwise mangled.
21+: Splatterfest! The character is not only dead, but is grossly dismembered and mangled beyond recognition.

For monsters and NPCs, just make a simple save versus death when reduced to damage from 0 to -5. If the save is successful, then the critter remains conscious but fights at -2. If the save fails, the critter is unconscious, if the save is a 1, the critter dies. If struck to -6 to -10, the critter is unconscious and dies if it fails a save versus death. At -11 and below, just kill the critter.

Effects of Mighty Blows (d20 + points below zero HP)
1-4:	Merely a flesh wound! Continue fighting with a -2 penalty on attacks and saves.
5-7:	Oof! Strike to the groin, head or other painful blow stuns the character for 1d3 rounds, and suffers a flesh wound as above
8-10:	Crushing Blow! Character is stunned for 1d6 rounds, suffers a flesh wound, and must save versus petrification/paralysis or be rendered out of the fight – unconscious or otherwise crippled until healed.
11-14:	Incapacitating Strike! Character is rendered unconscious or otherwise crippled and out of the fight until healed. Further, a saving throw versus death is required to prevent the obvious side effect of permanent and immediate death.
15-18:	Deadly Blow! The character is dead.
19-20:	Mangled! The character is dead, and body parts are missing, thrown around and otherwise mangled.
21+:	Splatterfest! The character is not only dead, but is grossly dismembered and mangled beyond recognition.

1-6: Flesh wound
7-11: Oof!
12-15: Crushing blow
16-18: Incapacitating strike
19: Deadly blow
20: Mangled
21+: Splatterfest

It occurs to me that it could easily be used as a standard combat Critical Hit system as well as for below-0-damage, though I'd probably run it in that case using a d12 rather than a d20 to avoid insta-death rolls; they're no fun for anyone. Or possibly I'd jiggle the numbers a bit to weight the chart more towards the broken-but-not-dead end, as shown here to the right:

This distribution only has a 10% chance of instant death, compared with the 30% in Dyson's chart, and some may see that as being soft, they may call me a big pussy, but I don't really care. If you get walloped again once you're down below 0hp, you're probably going to die or be horribly crippled anyway.

Reincarnation - Part II

2011-04-02T13:45:00.002+13:00

It occurred to me that if I'm instituting level-loss as a side-effect of dying and being reincarnated in a resurrection-bush pod, that cuts out any chance of poor old ailing zero-level Auntie Flo making it to her next life. I don't want that; I want the possiblitiy of reincarnation to be possible across the board.

Therefore, this:

When you die and wake up in a pod, roll 1d6.

If you roll a 1, you lose no levels at all.
If you roll a 2-5, you lose one level.
If you roll a 6, you lose two levels.

Newly-awoken bodies below zero-level are animated as zombies and can never again be reincarnated via the resurrection-bushes.

So, poor old ailing zero-level Auntie Flo has one chance in six of being reincarnated, and five chances in six of becoming a zombie. That's not great odds, but it's better than nothing. Muscular Mike the level one fighter has only one chance in six of keeping his level, but also only one chance in six of becoming a zombie.

Also, there needs to be some chance of outright failure, to spice things up:

After rolling for level loss, roll d%: on a score less than your new level, you are freed from the wheel of karma and the cycle of rebirth. No reincarnation, you are now one with the cosmos. Congratulations.

This means that a high-level character is actually less likely to be reincarnated than a low-level one. That's what you get for being more highly spiritually evolved.

Now, a newly-woken resurectee is a blank slate, a pure innocent without memory operating only on instinct. However, memories of their past life (or lives) return fairly rapidly. In terms of game mechanics, what this means is that a new resurectee begins to regain their old levels at the rate of one per 1d3 days, up to their maximum post-reincarnation level.

Note: magic-users will not regain the memory of any spells they might have had memorized when they died. Any spells will have to be relearned, if possible.

Resurectees will have access to any skills or knowledge appropriate to their current level as they develop, but as they come out of the pod naked and hairless, they will not neccessarily have the tools or equipment they need to take advantage of that knowledge.

Groves of resurrection-bushes would be valuable real-estate. Benevolent cults like the hospital order of the Little Sisters of Carnage would tend them, looking after the mindless and vulnerable resurectees as they emerge and dealing, as mercifully as possible, with any unfortunate zombies.

However, less public-spirited individuals or organisations would also be very interested in gaining control of such groves. They would be a gold-mine for slavers, for example.

Reincarnation

2011-04-01T10:51:00.000+13:00

There are a few science-fiction and/or fantasy novels in which character death is but a brief hiatus rather than The End.

In Phillip Jose Farmer's Riverworld series, in the earlier books at any rate, a character who is killed simply wakes up elsewhere, naked, hairless and adult, with full memory of events up until their death. In Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light there are resurrection machines, which will transfer one's consciousness into a new body — though they won't retrieve the consciousness of somebody who's already dead. There was another book I was thinking about a minute ago, but I've forgotten it...

Anyway, as a thought experiment I was wondering how to run a campaign along such lines as a means to handle character death and reintroduction. To maintain campaign continuity, we would have to use the Riverworld-type adult reincarnation; otherwise we'd end up with something more like the Bushido RPG's system of familial development and inheritance — not neccessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that the campaign jumps forward in time every time you want to include a reincarnated character, as you have to wait for them to grow up again.

Note: If the Zelaznyesque reincarnation machines were used, they would have to be modified to work with a corpse to be useful in game terms, and in that case they really just become a replacement for the Reincarnation spell, so I discard them for the purposes of this musing.

We'd need to consider whether auto-reincarnation is universal, or if the PCs are somehow special in that respect. If it is universal, it would have profound effects on laws of inheritance and so forth, and birth rates would have to be rigidly controlled or else the campaign world would overpopulate in no time. Maybe it only works once adulthood is reached?

As far as game mechanics go, we'd need to consider whether the new character appears in its own body or gets a new one, and how much of their memory (i.e. class and level-based abilities) they retain. My personal preference would be to re-roll all character stats except for intelligence and wisdom, and to drop back one, or even two, levels. I feel that there needs to be some mechanical penalty to character death, if only to prevent ~~munchkins~~ unscrupulous players from attempting to improve their stats by repeated suicides, but at the same time I like the idea that one's new body might be an improvement on the old (or worse, that's cool too... though maybe not for the player).

Where and when does this new body appear? Maybe there are "resurrection bushes" in whose huge pods grow "empty" bodies; when somebody dies their ka or id (or whatever you want to call it) is immediately transferred to the nearest available fully-developed body. Maybe from time to time un-tenanted bodies also become active.... zombie plague, anyone?

How common are these resurrection bushes? Could every family have one in their back yard, lovingly tended to catch the ka of poor sickly Auntie Flo who's been feeling poorly for months now, or do they grow only in isolated areas steeped in magical mana? If they're common, it would be likely to affect the development of medicine, inasmuch as euthanasia becomes a viable treatment for any serious illness or injury. If they're uncommon, they'd be prized by the rich and powerful.

Is the reincarnation 100% reliable? Or is there a chance of failure? Either option has advantages and disadvantages as far as game play goes. I'd opt for a small, but significant, chance of failure, if only to allow for players who decide that they want to start again with a completely new character conception, and also because I feel that it benefits the game if death is sometimes death. I'd also probably (certainly) restrict it to human characters; immortals like elves clearly have no need for such a mechanism (being immortal), and besides, they get other perks, so screw 'em.

Once revived, the new (old) character would have to find their way back to their group, hopefully to reclaim any of their stuff that hasn't already been nicked by their comrades. They were just keeping it safe, honest.

I think a universal reincarnation mechanic could make for some interesting background details and adventure hooks for a campaign. Handled sensitively I don't think it would upset the balance of most campaigns, except perhaps those dark and gritty ones in which everyone is depressed and doomed all the time anyway. I think it bears more thought.

More bloggery

2011-03-30T11:04:00.000+13:00

Just a note for those who may be interested: I've started a new blog to cater to my non-gaming-related hoots and squawks. I used to do that sort of thing at Livejournal, but I find blogger's image-handling to be more congenial, so I've moved house.

Who goes first? No, What goes first...

2011-03-30T10:40:00.002+13:00

Over on Jeff Rients' gaming blog he has just been talking about determining initiative, and it sparked an idea in my overheated game-brainz.

As may have become apparent, I really do love the multiplicity of die-types used in D&D, and I like to use them all wherever possible. Rolling for initiative in combat seems like an ideal candidate for expanding the dice pool in a way similar to my idea for the surprise roll, and the type of die rolled for initiative would depend on the character's (or monster's — we'll get to that) DEX score.

DEX Score	Initiative Die
20 or more	d20
18-19	d12
16-17	d10
13-15	d8
9-12	d6
6-8	d4
4-5	d3
3 or less	d2

There are pros and cons for this system.

Con: It would require individual, rather than group initiative, which can slow things down a bit at the table, and in a large fight it can be easy for somebody to miss their turn, evoking howls of outrage and demands to rewind the action so that they don't have to bear the penalty of their own egregious lack of attention. However, we used individual initiative quite successfully in our D&D3e days, using my Patent DeLuxe Initiative Board and little slips of card with the character's name written on it.

A similar board could be used for this system, but it would be smaller, only having to go up to 20 (unless one included a d30). It allows for characters (and monsters) with multiple attack routines to see just when they come in — I'd suggest 5 spaces down the chart from their initial initiative placing, with a minimum of 1.

Con: It would require that all monsters would need DEX scores. That could mean a bit of work for the GM rolling them individually, or else it could mean that he or she just use the DEX scores listed in the 3e monster descriptions in all the vast number of 3e monster books he or she already owns and are just sitting there on the shelf doing nothing.

Pro: It opens out the initiative system to accommodate quick, high-DEX characters without making them invariably the first to get an attack routine. Even if you're throwing a d20 and your opponent a d3, there's always the chance that you might throw a 1. I like that, because when it happens the groans feed the darkness in my bitter, twisted heart.

Pro: It gives the players the illusion that they have some sort of individual control over events. It's so touching that they think that.

Pro: It uses all the funny shaped dice. What's not to like about that?

Micro-forestation for Microarmour

2011-03-27T18:35:00.001+13:00

The forest-base is shown here with some Heroics & Ros WWII British infantry and a GHQ A9 Cruiser tank.

I have a couple of alders growing in the front of my section. They're not among my favourite trees, but they do have one use.

Making teensy-tiny forests to go along with teensy-tiny toy soldiers.


Alder cones

They produce small cones, and when they're seeding, these cones dry up and open out. They range in size from a couple of centimetres in length down to about 5 or 6mm, and they're conveniently bushy-looking for my wargames-scenery purposes. The picture to the right shows what they look like straight off the tree, still attached to their twig, but the cones will eventually drop off and lie all over the ground, a savagely spiky trap for the bare-footed.

I snipped some, of varying sizes, off their twigs and hot-glued them to a sort of kidney-shaped 0.5mm galvanized steel base. I sealed the lot with matte-black spray paint, added a bit of flock around the base, and loosely painted the cones in a couple of shades of yellowish-green.

The individual base shown above took me about half an hour from start to finish, but if you were production-lining them I suspect they would average out to more like ten minutes each.

My aim is to have a multitude of small forest modules that can be rearranged into as large or as small a forest as is required, rather than using larger, less flexible modules.

Essential supplies: Fnord's Super-DeLuxe Adventurer's Kit

2011-03-23T13:05:00.003+13:00

Item	Quantity	Weight(kg)
Acid vials (½ litre)	3	1.5
Battle-net	1	3
Bedroll	1	6
Bells, small	6	0.1
Break-lock	1	1
Caltrops (boxes of 100)	3	6
Candles (2 hour)	12	1
Chisel, cold	1	0.5
Chisel, wood	1	0.3
Clothes	1Set	2
Cooking Herbs	1	0.1
Crowbar	1	2
Ear trumpet	1	0.2
Ear-plugs	2	0.01
Eye-patch	1	0.01
Fish-hooks	6	0.1
Flint, steel, tinder	1	0.2
Grapnel	1	1
Handaxe	1	1
Hand-hooks	2	1
Holy Water (1 litre vials)	6	6
Hooded lantern	1	1
Iron rations (per day)	15	7
Leather sheet, 1m x 2m	1	2
Mallet	1	1
Mirror, glass	1	0.2
Mirror, silver	1	0.2
Oil Flasks (1 litre)	6	4
Oilskin poncho	1	2
Pack	1	2
Poles, 10'	10	25
Periscope	1	0.5
Pulley	6	3
Rope, silk, 50m	1	3
Sacks	5	2
Salt	½kg	0.5
Spike, iron	6	1.5
Vellum, 0.5m sq.	3	0.1
Whip-saw, metal	1	0.3
Whip-saw, wood	1	0.3
Wire, silver	5m	1
Wire, steel (No.8)	20m	4
TOTAL WEIGHT:		93.62kg

When I was playing my favourite old character Fnord the Pretty Gosh-Darned Nifty, over time I gradually developed a pretty comprehensive equipment list for him. The whole lot together comes to just under a hundred kilos (about 225 pounds), and being fairly strong he could just stagger along under the weight of it all bundled up, but quite apart from the weight, it made a big bundle and generally I hired bearers and/or mules to carry it.

This doesn't include stuff like armour or weapons, or non-adventuring stuff like his teddy-bear or ukelele. Or his skunk (don't ask, because I don't remember).

When I eventually managed to get my greedy hands on a Portable Hole, things got a lot more straight-forward. Man, those things are incredibly useful.

Every single item on this list saw use, one way or another, many of them frequently.

Scenery: Swamp

2011-03-23T12:26:00.001+13:00

This is a bayou in Louisiana, in the southern USA.

I'm fond of using swamps in my games; they start with a high level of creepiness, and only get worse when you start adding mist and drizzle and nasties like huge rotting undead alligator zombies. And you just know, if you happen upon any folk actually living in there, at best they're going to turn out to be Deliverance-style inbred rustics who would just love to have you for dinner — stewed or fricasseed, whichever. I just love watching a party, stranded on a squishy, oozing island, trying to figure out how to get to dry land without actually getting into the water with all the things.

Is it wrong of me to enjoy their consternation so much? I don't think so.

Scenery: Just climb up there and get the thing, will you?

2011-03-20T11:17:00.003+13:00

Mt Roraima, in Venezuela.

Got rope? Lots and lots and lots of rope?

6mm modelling/wargaming forum

2011-03-14T12:54:00.000+13:00

Angel Barracks is a web-forum, new to me, dealing with 6mm (1:300-1:285 scale) modelling and wargaming.

Surprise!

2011-03-11T10:15:00.002+13:00

I'm in the process of running an AD&D adventure from an ancient edition of Dragon (#63, to be precise), minimally converted to fit my bastardized Swords & Wizardry variant. It's been very useful in revealing to me just which game-mechanics tinkering is actually worth the trouble, and which can be discarded.

I've been using the very basic surprise mechanic that D&D and AD&D started with: 1d6, with most characters or critters being surprised if they roll a 1 or 2 (roughly 33% chance of surprise). It's simple, which is good, but it lacks granularity: at best, assuming your character can be surprised only on a 1, the best possible chance to be surprised is still about 17% — pretty high really. It doesn't really accommodate the preternatural alertness of fantasy tropes like Conanoid barbarians or Tolkienoid elves.

I like the idea of a single die-roll though, without having to mess about with modifiers and what-not, and I thought that since we have all these funny-shaped dice, why not make use of them?

To that end, I decree that the actual die rolled for surprise will depend on the character class, species, and possibly level. The default die remains the d6.

Naturally alert critters like elves, barbarians, rangers, watch-dogs etc. are only surprised if they roll a 1 (16.6%).
Very alert critters like ettins, mid-level barbarians or rangers etc. get to roll a d8 for surprise instead of a d6, still requiring a 1 to be surprised (12.5%).
Extremely alert critters or mid-high level barbarians/rangers get to roll a d10 (10%)

And so on, up to a d30 (if you own one of those things, which I don't).

Things like wearing a vision- or hearing-restricting helm would drop your surprise die down one or two levels, so a fighter wearing a closed armet would be rolling a d3 for surprise (66.6%)

Now, all of this palaver could be sorted out easily by converting the surprise mechanic to a d20 or d% roll, but that has at least three strikes against it:

It makes it more difficult to adjudicate the effects of monster surprise descriptions, like those that surprise on a 1-5, and
It makes the "number of segments of surprise" thing more difficult to work out, and
It doesn't use the whole range of funny-shaped dice.

At the moment this is all theoretical, and hasn't been tested in actual play, but I think it could be a goer.

The Wall of Night

2011-03-03T12:09:00.001+13:00

This is a promo image I did for the UK release of Helen Lowe's "The Heir of Night", the first book in her "Wall of Night" series. The posters, postcards and what-not have an image of the book cover in the top left quadrant, and text covering much of the rest, so there's not a lot of detail in most of it.

Apart from some very brief blocking sketches, this one is entirely digital, produced in Photoshop and Painter with a little help from CorelDraw.

Image may be clickified to embiggenate.

Scenery - underground city

2011-02-21T11:01:00.002+13:00

This image of a whole city built in a vast underground chamber is by concept artist Jesse van Dijk, taken from the image shown on a CGTalk thread.

Pretty sweet stuff; I'm green with envy.

Click image to enlarge.

Dragons - the other dark meat

2011-02-15T11:47:00.002+13:00

It's been said before, but I'll say it again: D&D dragons are wimps. Considering that they're the eponymous creatures of D&D, and are presented as being one of the ultimate campaign encounters, they're ridiculously easy to defeat.

One of the things I approved of when AD&D2e appeared was that they made dragons a lot more fearsome, giving them more (and more dangerous) attacks, more hit-points, and more scariness in general.

AD&D 2e PHB Frontis

I also liked the frontispiece of the AD&D2e PHB showing a classic group of five adventurers, all looking very pleased with themselves at having defeated a rather pathetic-looking little dragon about the size of an alsatian dog.

But that's slightly off the topic.

A few years ago (about '03 or '04 I think) I gave some thought to how I wanted to treat dragons in my own campaign. I didn't want to stray too far from the traditional D&D tropes, but I wanted to fill out the back-story a bit, so to speak. What follows is the text of some notes I wrote to myself back then, and which I just rediscovered.

"Dragons consider themselves to be the dominant — the highest, most perfect — life form on the face of the planet. Humans (and most of the other sentient species) are of little interest to them except as occasional pawns, or snacks — though for any dragon other than a juvenile, a single human being is a fairly unsatisfying morsel.

Dragons spawn in large numbers, and abandon their young to the vagaries of fate. The mortality rate among wyrmlings is high; few will survive to reach adulthood. Those who do, however, find themselves at the top of the food chain and are unlikely to find themselves seriously challenged.

When they are first spawned, dragons are unintelligent and operate purely on instinct. That instinct revolves around eating and avoiding being eaten. Later, as they grow, their intelligence develops along with their bodies and their instincts turn to mating. Dragons will mate and spawn only a few times in their long, long lives.

After mating and spawning, the intelligence of adult dragons increases rapidly to the point of sentience. This stage of life is when they begin to gather their hoards. The motivation behind this behavious is unknown, but there appears to be elements of competition for status with other dragons. Certainly, they don't appear to have any obvious concrete use for their gathered wealth.

As dragons grow older, their mental powers increase steadily and they begin to develop powers which may be psionic in nature. Prescience, telepathy and mental domination are all traits commonly shown by elder dragons, but a wide range of other abilities have been known to manifest."

Obviously there's a lot more that could be said on the subject, and there are many questions still to be answered, but that fragment sets up some useful gaming situations. If a young dragon spawns near an inhabited area, the resulting plague of wyrmlings could pose a significant threat that would only get worse if left alone. Elder dragons might be in demand as oracles, with their powers of prescience — but the price is bound to be steep, and there's always the danger that the supplicant might become a snack.

I've yet to think about things like how much a dragon needs to eat... maybe the need for food is something that diminishes as their other powers grow? That would explain how such huge carnivores can afford to live in isolated, relatively barren locations like mountain caves? I'm not one to be too anal about things like food chains and the like, but I do like to have some explanation for why they might be out of whack.

Scenery: Cliff walkway

2011-02-11T17:43:00.003+13:00

This is in the Xihai region, in China, in the same general area as the Fairy Walking Bridge shown in my last post.

This is just the sort of place you don't want to be having an all-out balls-and-all smashing clanging brawl.... but you just know something is waiting for you down in the mists, just around the bend. Very mysterious.

The image is by Wulong on flickr. Beautiful photograph, and it looks like a beautiful place too.

Scenery: Chasm Bridge

2011-02-11T09:19:00.002+13:00

I don't know where this bridge is, or where the tunnel goes to or comes from.

It just occurred to me: how did the photographer get this photo? Is there another bridge? Was he or she dangling from a rope? Or were they plummeting to a grisly doom with a camera and thought it looked like a nice shot to catch as they went past?

AD&D Character Sheet Design

2011-02-09T12:15:00.003+13:00

In Palmerston North, when I first started roleplaying (when I was supposed to be doing university study), we didn't have access to much in the way of official material. There was one bookshop who, for a short while, stocked a few AD&D manuals and some of those terrible TSR dice that crumbled like hard cheese, but that was about it. The first I heard of the famous "goldenrod" character sheets was just in the last few years, thanks to the internet.

What that meant was that if we wanted character sheets, we had to make our own — the sheets archived in my last post are examples of some that I designed with rotring and ruler, and photocopied at vast expense at university (if I recall correctly, it cost about 20 cents per copy — that's about a buck and a half in modern money).

The last sheet that I laid out manually (that is, by actually drawing lines and writing captions with a pen) was this one, copied at my work on to a bunch of surplus green card that somebody had bought a whole ream of and only used about five sheets. Just as an aside, I found the card excellent for character sheets; being so much sturdier than paper, it will take a lot more erasing and similar abuse, and it has enough body of its own that you're much less likely to accidentally punch through it with a pen or pencil when resting it against something yielding, like carpet or thigh.

This particular sheet is for another very old (somewhat munchkinish) character, Smirnoff the Fighter, who was immensly strong, extremely stupid, and hideously ugly. I haven't played him as a character for years, though I still employ him very occasionally as an NPC. You will observe that this design includes a bunch of stuff for Unearthed Arcana classes like the Cavalier and the Thief-Acrobat. By the time this particular sheet was made, we were using a bastardized AD&D1e/UA/2e melange.

When I got my first computer in 1990, along with a copy of CorelDraw 3, I designed this one, based largely on the green sheets above. The computer makes it very easy to keep your lines straight, your spacing even and your text legible, but in the end it's all a bit sterile. Functional though.

Note: you can grab a PDF of this sheet here; it's about 25 KB, so not a large download. Ironically, I designed the sheet just in time to stop playing AD&D — that's about when we changed everything over to the Hero System 4th Ed.

Ancient History

2011-02-08T23:19:00.001+13:00

WARNING! This is unlikely to be of any interest to anybody but me.

My second-oldest, and most-played, AD&D character was (and is) Fnord the Fighter. He's still going, though I play him very infrequently these days, and he's been through several incarnations as we've changed rule sets: AD&D 1e and 2e, Champions, a sort of Ultra-Runequest-like thing our DM was briefly enthused with until we rebelled at its extraordinary and pointless fiddlyness, Hero System (4th and 5th ed), D&D3e... I think that's all.

I still have a bunch of old character sheets for him, though the earliest I can find has him at 6th level. He came into an existing party being DMed by my old friend Mike Bolton, and I think — though I don't remember for sure — that he was created at level 3 (or maybe 5?). He's now at level 13, after 30 years of existence.

Looking at these battered, much-scribbled-upon character sheets brings home to me one of the differences between 1981 (when these sheets hail from) and now; we didn't have access to computers or printers then, and photocopying was both troublesome and expensive, so character sheets lasted a long time, until they were too battered or doodle-covered to be useable. These days it's an easy matter to print out a new sheet as soon as an old one gets a bit smudged.

Anyway, the purpose of this post is really just to get those old character sheets out into the dataverse, more or less as an off-site backup.


L6-7 Obverse


L6-7 Reverse


L7-8 Obverse


L7-8 Reverse

L8 Obverse

L8 Reverse


L9 Obverse


L9 reverse

Goblin Battle-line

2011-02-08T18:09:00.003+13:00

Some more of my drawing, this time a bunch of goblinoid critters in line of battle with a miscellany of polearms. I did it on 360gsm smooth Fabriano paper with the excellent pigment liners by Staedtler, which have all but replaced the much more expensive Rotring technical pens I used to work with almost exclusively.

Anyway, after doing the black-and-white drawing I scanned it, added the brown textured background in Photoshop, and highlighted it in Painter VIII, mostly with digital chalks. I like 3-tone drawing; it's so much easier to achieve a wide range of tone that way than in pure line.

As usual, the picture can be clicked upon to see a larger, more inflated version.

Into The Depths

2011-02-04T17:01:00.004+13:00

Graphite pencil, finished in Painter VIII. It's a fairly generic dungeoneering/spelunking scene; I think it could do with something nasty lurking in there somewhere, but I haven't quite decided what or where. Or how, for that matter.

Edit: I turned one of the rock formations into a giant humanoid skull, but I don't know that I'm convinced. In fact I'm pretty sure I don't like it.

Click on the images to embiggen.

Base texturizing on the cheap

2011-02-04T10:42:00.001+13:00

You can spend an arm and a leg on various flocks and powders and sand and stuff for texturizing figure bases, or you can spend nothing at all for as much stuff as you need to keep covering bases until the sun goes out and the universe descends into entropic stasis.

Go to any cabinetmaker or carpenter and ask them if you can have some MDF sawdust. They will probably look at you like you're crazy, but never mind about that.

MDF, when it is sawn, disintegrates into a fine, slightly clumpy powder that is perfect for texturing figure bases, and it doesn't look as out-of-scale as sand usually does. It can be coloured just by stirring some paint through it, letting it dry and rubbing it through a sieve, but its natural creamy-tan colour is pretty good for representing sand and dust.

I've coloured the MDF dust green, but that's all I've done with it, and I haven't contoured the base at all -- just glued the MDF dust straight on to a flat, painted bit of 3mm MDF. The variable sizes of the dust clumps make decent small surface rocks. If you wanted more depth and/or variation in colour, you could seal, wash and dry-brush it as well.

OSRIC - the Arrival

2011-02-02T17:22:00.001+13:00

I don't imagine there are many people who read this blog who still don't know what OSRIC is all about, but for those who don't, you can find out all about it here. In brief, it's an AD&D 1e clone.

On December 16th, I ordered a copy of OSRIC (economy edition) from Lulu. It cost me, in total, under $US25.00, including postage and handling. Pretty good value for a 400 page letter-size book, and not much more than what I paid for the AD&D PHB alone back in 1982. The "economy" version differs from the "softcover" version only in having no interior colour.

It arrived in pretty timely fashion; a couple of weeks in total from the day I ordered it. I have had faster delivery times from the US, but not without paying an arm and a leg for it.

The paper and print quality is excellent. The cover is nice and shiny, and though it does feel a little flimsier than other softcovers of this size I've bought in the past, it should do the job. Only time will tell how the binding will hold up, I suppose, but it looks and feels OK to me. I honestly don't miss the interior colour at all; in fact I think I prefer having everything in grayscale. Mind you, if there were more of Pete Mullen's colour illustrations in there I might change my mind about that.

There are a few bleed errors on some of the pages; I don't know if that's an issue with the layout not allowing sufficient bleed for full-page printing or if it's a trimming problem at Lulu's end. In any case, it's a minor blemish, and I can live with it.

The back cover was very slightly munched on its bottom edge; the damage is inconsiderable though, less than I'd be likely to inflict on the book in the first month or two of use, and it doesn't worry me in the slightest.

All in all, on first contact I'd give the OSRIC Economy Edition a Highly Commended. I'll be pimping it to all my friends :)

So then: would I actually run or play in a game with OSRIC?

Yes, I would, if I were running or playing in an AD&D1e game (which I'm not, right now — I'm using my bastardized Swords & Wizardry rules).

I have a whole heapin' bunch of AD&D manuals from Ye Olde Tymes of course (from the days before TSR started paying the big bucks for cover art) and I have no doubt I would still cherry-pick some bits and pieces from them — mainly monsters probably. However, those books are, if not actually rare, getting harder and harder to find. OSRIC is a perfect substitute that I can use and abuse to my heart's content without the fear that I might lose or ruin some of my nostalgically precious AD&D books. It has pretty much all the information I'd need 99% of the time, and its organisation is a bit easier to follow than the old books too.

So, would I be playing OSRIC? Hell no. I'd be playing AD&D, using OSRIC as a reference. Which is, I believe, pretty much what it was originally intended for.

Scenery: Bran Castle

2011-01-31T20:03:00.001+13:00

Bran Castle, Romania. This is a fantastic example of a well-preserved mediæval castle — and one which has retained its nature as a fortification, nor having been turned into an indefensible stately home by knocking windows and things out of the walls. It's a museum open to the public now, and I'd love to have a look around it one day (though getting there from the other side of the world is a bit troublesome).

Here's a google image search page jam-packed with photos of the place.

Cthulhusaurus Rex

2011-01-31T18:36:00.000+13:00

Just because, wow. Greatest tentacle-faced dinosaur ever. I have got to find a plausible way to get this guy in amongst my party. Or even implausible. Because wow.

Cruiser Mk.I A9

2011-01-27T17:51:00.000+13:00

My friend Steve recently passed on to me a troop of three old Battlefront 15mm (1/100) A9 Cruiser tanks. This model has been remastered and re-released by Battlefront, but I haven't seen any of the new ones in the flesh, so I don't know how they compare.

Anyway: I've broken down the models, tidied up the castings a bit and reassembled them, replaced the white-metal 2-pounder with a turned brass one, and am painting them in the 1940 BEF disruptive scheme of Khaki Green No.3 and Dark Green No.4.

I'm trying to get all my un-built 15mm stuff assembled and painted, because I'm thinking of selling it all off and concentrating my WWII wargaming efforts on 6mm (1/285 - 1/300). The smaller scale is less impressive to look at on the table, but it has several advantages:

I can buy a couple of troops of tanks for the price of a single 15mm one.
A game requires less space to set up, or a larger game can be had in the same space.
The models are easier to transport for 'away' games.
The models, being so much smaller, require less painting to look acceptable, and at close range, good quality 6mm stuff (like that from GHQ) look just as good.
Storage for both models and terrain is much simplified, being so much more compact than 15mm stuff.

However, I'm dithering a bit. When I've sold off gaming stuff in the past, I've almost always come to regret it. Plus, selling it all is bound to be a huge hassle, and I don't actually need the money that badly.

We'll see.

Scenery - Underground city, Cappadocia

2011-01-27T16:17:00.001+13:00

In Cappadocia (in Turkey) there are whole cities burrowed under the ground. There are lots of them — nobody is quite sure how many exactly, because they've pretty much all been abandoned and over-built, but the largest at Derinku is (I believe) open to tourists, and others may be too for all I know.

Click here to jump to a google image search page full of pictures of them.

Actual subterranean 'dungeon' complexes. How cool is that?

Scenery - Crystal Caves

2011-01-27T16:06:00.001+13:00

When I first saw the images from the Naica caves, they just blew me away. At first I thought I was looking at a close-up of the inside of a geode, and then I saw the guy sitting in among the huge crystal shards, and my mind boggled.

Tell me you can't get some dungeoneering mileage out of this stuff :)

Scenery - cliff dwellings

2011-01-27T09:24:00.001+13:00

I'm not entirely sure where this structure is, or what it's for, but I suspect it's another monastic retreat. Monks seem to like living in peculiar places.

I don't know about other people's campaigns, but in mine terrain has turned out to be as deadly — or more so — than any nasty monster with teeth this big. Climbing and swimming (or more accurately, the failure to climb or swim) has claimed the lives of several brave adventurers, so getting at a place as inaccessible as this is bound to raise a groan or two.

A couple of potential scenarios come to mind for this scene: maybe it's a prison, from which the party have to rescue an almost insanely arrogant and touchy prince, sequestered there by an imposter who has taken his place (the Man in the Iron Mask schtick). Or maybe it's the quarters for the guards of some potentate's treasure vaults, carved into the cliffs behind them, and therefore a legitimate target for any band of adventurers of the usual low level of morality and high level of criminality.

The dice saga continues

2011-01-25T16:35:00.002+13:00

In my endless search for Gamescience precision dice, I happened upon Gamestation. They appeared to have good stocks of the dice I wanted, and though their prices were a little higher than those quoted on Zocchi's site, I thought I'd order a few sets.

Until I got to the shipping section of the checkout routine.

The cheapest shipping option they offered to NZ was over fifty US dollars! That's about 150% of the actual order value, and for an order which would weigh no more than a few ounces, nor amount to any great bulk. I've had orders shipped from the UK on the other side of the world for a fraction of that, and bulky book orders from the US for under $10.

Those shipping rates are outrageous, and needless to say, I won't be back to Gamestation any time soon. I offer this in warning to any potential non-US customers*. I wouldn't recommend that you support Gamestation as long as they persist in this phenomenal price-gouging.

* Note: I have no idea what their shipping rates are like within the US, but I wouldn't be sanguine about getting anything cheap from them.

Scenery - monastery or wizard's lair or something

2011-01-25T15:01:00.002+13:00

This is one of the Meteora monasteries in Greece, occupied constantly since the 9th century. It would make an ideal isolated wizard's lair or something similar; the mists and the towering sandstone crags are certainly atmospheric.

The building itself is on two or three levels, and if you felt the need for more you could easily burrow down into the sandstone pinnacle on which it stands.

Scenery - Masada

2011-01-25T14:53:00.002+13:00

Masada was a fortified plateau, occupied and defended in the first Jewish-Roman War by Sicarii rebels. In 72AD, the Roman governor of Iudaea Lucius Flavius Silva headed the Roman legion X Fretensis and laid siege to Masada. The Roman legion surrounded Masada and built a circumvallation wall and then a siege embankment against the western face of the plateau, moving thousands of tons of stones and beaten earth to do so. Tradition holds that the garrison fired the buildings and committed mass-suicide just before the Roman assault, but archaeologists have found only 30 skeletons on the site.

Anyways... the place is just perfect for the ruinous first level of a huge mega-dungeon with entrances on multiple levels.

Scenery - Senoufo village, Ivory Coast

2011-01-25T14:43:00.001+13:00

This is a Senoufo village on the Ivory Coast in Africa. The little domed things on the left are granaries, and the animals in the corral at bottom-right are cattle. I'm not 100% sure what the crops are, but I think they're likely to be millet — they eat a lot of millet in Africa.

Click on the image to embiggen.

Scenery - a roadside inn

2011-01-25T11:15:00.000+13:00

I happened on this image somewhere on the internet, and it immediately grabbed my attention because it's almost exactly the scene I was imagining in an episode of Zosia the elf's adventures I ran a few years ago.

Note: Zosia is one of my partner Annette's oldest characters, and has been around in various incarnations and game systems since about 1980-81

I thought I might start using this blog to collect together some of the game-useful scenery and/or artefact images I've gathered over the years. Hopefully they'll be of some use to others as well as to me.

Anyway, this image: I'm not sure exactly what function this particular complex serves, or even whether it's Japanese, Chinese, Burmese or whatever (no doubt somebody with more knowledge of Asian architecture could tell at a glance).

I would use it as a roadside inn and/or bath-house.