Treasure Type Links

One thing I may not have made clear in the treasure codes article is that I’ve thought a lot about treasure types and written about them in the past. Lots of analysis, most of which we can probably ignore. But for the curious, these specific posts might be useful.

• Probably the most useful thing I’ve done with the treasure types is to create a list of monsters sorted by treasure type.
• I rewrote and tweaked the treasure types many times for my clone project, including these thoughts about treasure types.
• At least a tiny bit of that work resurfaced when I wrote about restocking dungeons.

Delta’s D&D Hotspot has some relevant articles as well, at least one of which was around the same time as I was writing about it. These are much more math-intensive than anything I ever did.

• Expected Treasure
• Expected Treasure and XP
• Dungeon Treasure Revisited

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0
International
(CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license.

Regional Hex Template PDF

Did a quick PDF this morning for something requested on a forum: a hex sheet with numbered hexes and an area to record notes on what's in various hexes. This is based on a previous hex sheet I made using mkhexgrid, but I removed the megahex (it wasn't lining up) and added borders and the record area. This is good for a regional map.

Regional Hex Template

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0
International
(CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license.

Other PDFs

How I Make Tower Illustrations

Still didn't have time to work on my next set of pamphlet dungeons, so I thought I could at least show how I make some of the illustrations I've been doing for the tower pamphlets.

They aren't fabulous illustrations, as you can see in this image from the generic bandit tower pamphlet. But they get the job done. What you may not realize is that it's a composite image made using two different programs. The main program I use for illustration is Inkscape (and occasionally raster graphic programs like the GIMP or Paint.) But the tower itself, and in this case the cart, were created in a 3d modeling program called Wings 3d. I've been using this for years, and although I'd say I still have a long ways to go, I'm reasonably good at modeling things from scratch in it.

What I do is create my scene and take a screenshot of it, as you can see in this image. In this case, each floor of the tower is a separate object, and the cart, if I remember what I did, is something like six different objects. (There's actually another hidden object because I recycled this file from the CorpseBrood Tower model. It's the weird little diamond magical artifact at the top of the tower.)

I then trim the image so that I can import it into Inkscape. Previously, I was using Paint for this, because all I was doing was cropping the image and setting the background to white. The GIMP is notoriously slow when it loads, so for a quick job like that, using Paint seemed wiser. However, I've started using the GIMP anyways because I always apply filters to desaturate the image, so it makes sense to do this in the image prep stage, as I did for the generic bandit tower.

I do both of these steps a second time to get the profile image that I use for the tower diagrams showing what's on each floor. Finally, I open my Inkscape template I've set up as a standard for my tower illustrations and start editing my new tower. I import both the perspective scene and the profile image on separate layers, then experiment with different filters to get different textures. For the cover illustration, I have a background layer where I create abstract leaf patterns for the trees, and I have foreground and detail patterns to draw other elements into the scene, for example the pathway leading to the door, or the projecting rays and bat-winged silhouette on the CorpseBrood Tower cover image.

As I said, not the greatest art, but it's something just about anyone could do, if they want some simple illustrations for a project they're working on. Both Wings 3d and Inkscape are free downloads, so grab 'em and try 'em out.  

Index Card Character Sheet Update

Updated the index card character sheet with two small changes:

1. Some people complained about the transparent background. It shouldn't matter when it's printed out, but I added a white background anyways.
2. I did not include a place to write down experience points originally. I debated for several days whether that should be on a piece of scratch paper, but I finally just put it on the card, below the Level and Dice entries.

Index Card Character Sheet

I thought for sure I'd already posted a concept for a character sheet that fits on an index card. But I can't find a copy anywhere. So I made a minimalist one.

The idea is to only put things that need to be accessed quickly on the card, and in particular to leave things like equipment and spells for other cards. The character's backpack and any large sacks carried would each be their own index card, with contents listed. Each spellbook would be a separate card as well and would be set to one side during an adventure unless taken along. A piece of scratch paper or another index card would list currently memorized spells. Only armor, weapons, and loose items carried in hand or tucked into a belt would be listed directly on the main card.

The Name and Race/Class labels are faint so that the player can simply write over them, like this:

The race and class level title are written together as a sobriquet. The literal class could be written in parentheses at the end, if it's not clear from the level title. "Year Born" does not need to be written down unless it's not obvious from the age, for example if the character is Rip Van Winkel or Sleeping Beauty.

Recent Links of Interest: Dwellings

I was slow to move on this, but thought I ought to point to some recent interesting/useful posts on JD Jarvis’s blog about the typical basic shelter and shelter types, for those wondering about some of the more obscure names for dwellings or what some old building techniques (like wattle and daub) would actually be. This might also serve as a take-off point for imagining cultural differences: how do the dwellings in a new region differ from the basic dwelling pattern? Different construction materials? Built on stilts? Hole in the ground covered by tarp? Environmental effects will play a role, obviously: hot, dry climates might prefer the hole in the ground, while areas prone to flood might prefer the house on stilts. But also, if the extended families are larger, you might see long dwellings that keep getting longer as the family grows.

Automating Topic Tuesday

As you may or may not know, Logan Knight recently whipped up some code to make your own computer-generation tables, and Paolo Greco added a bookmarklet function so that you can create your own tables to either drag to your bookmark bar or embed in a blogpost.

So, of course, I had to turn the OSRBA Topic Tuesday generator into an automated link. Behold!
OSRBA Topic Generator

(EDIT: Fixed. There's also a link in the sidebar that works.)

It’s different from the original tables in a couple of ways:

1. Prepositions are now randomized.
2. Objects of prepositions are no longer linked as
   closely to the rolls that generate the first two
   words (in other words, it’s as if you roll the
   d12, d4, and d8, then roll a separate d12 and d8.)

I did try to keep the weights the same, however, so “Dungeons” will be rarer than “Monsters”, and “Weirdness” wil still be rarer than “Wood”.

Fight On the Road of Kings

An update on the Fight On! situation: According to a thread I linked in a comment on the earlier post, the current issue (#14) was the next-to-last, with #15 scheduled to be the last. In a new forum thread, though, Calithena has confirmed that there's too much material remaining for one issue, so there will be a Fight On! #16, which I think is kind of a good thing because the compilations have generally been for 4 issues at a time, so with a run of 16 issues, you'd have four compilation books.

Not really related to that: I've mentioned before that I hardly ever buy games; I'm pretty frugal. In particular, I almost never buy apps for my tablet. But thanks to Delta's recent blog post, I wound up buying Road of Kings (cost: about three bucks.) This is sort of a computerized clone of Barbarian Prince with expansions. Only played it once so far, but it was fun so far... so I'm recommending it.

Android version on Google Play.
iOS version on iTunes.

The Geography of Wonders

Telecanter’s Receding Rules has been doing a series of posts about “wonders” in a fantasy sandbox: Wonders Part I and Wonders Part II. These aren’t the natural wonders or man-made wonders of the mundane world, but more like fantastic geography, similar to locations in mythology (the crashing rocks in Jason and the Argonauts, Charybdis in the Odyssey), folk tales (the mountain that stood on its head in the Paul Bunyan tales), children’s literature (the floating island in Doctor Dolittle, the forest where everything forgets its name in Alice Through the Looking-Glass,) and of course mainstream fantasy… although the latter, surprisingly, has become more and more mundane, much as fantasy RPG resources seem to be predominately mundane.

I’ve always chafed a bit at the banality of geography in RPG materials. It seems everyone is focusing almost entirely on defining locations in terms of what kind of creatures live there: so, the Shadow Woods is going to be an ordinary forest where shadows live, rather than an eerie forest made entirely of shadow-trees you can walk through. Sometimes, there isn’t even that much of an attempt at fantasy: The River of Knives will probably just be a river known for jagged ice right around the time of the spring thaw, rather than a river with actual knives flowing downstream. Just about the closest anyone comes to fantastic geography is Skull Mountain. Everyone has a Skull Mountain in their campaign. It’s a great iconic image from King Kong, but come on: try a little harder.

Anyways, this wasn’t meant to be a rant, but a post saying I like Telecanter’s ideas.

Written with StackEdit.

Fight On!

The latest issue of Fight On! (#14) is out and available. This issue, which will probably be the penultimate one, is dedicated to Rob Kuntz and includes both an article by him and a article about playing with him “back in the day”, written by Michael Mornard (aka Old Geezer.)

print version

PDF version

I don’t have an article in this issue, although I did contribute some layout help for the Chainmain scenario written by Baz Blatt.

Written with StackEdit.

The Underground Gardens

I've been watching a lot of videos at the Huell Howser Archives lately, partly because I have no TV, and partly because his videos are a fantastic general resource. Need to know what different kinds of terrain might look like? Try searching for “volcano”, “mountain”, “forest” or other key words. Want to pattern the homebase for a party of adventurers after an old-timey gold rush town? There’s plenty of examples of individual buildings and small towns. Just trolling for ideas? You might find some, like the town in the marsh where all the houses were arranged along a single road (which happened to be a railroad) on something that was just barely an island. There are several hundred videos online, and more to come.

But in particular, I was looking at videos of mines and caves and things like that, for insights on how to describe underground settings and how the structures might be arranged. And I saw one video called Under California that focused on two places. The second was a tunnel through a mountain that one old miner carved all by himself, which might provide some minor insights, but the first location was some place in Fresno I’d never heard of: the underground gardens.

Some landscaper hated the heat in Fresno, so he started building his home underground, and then thought “Why not turn it into a hotel and restaurant?” he never actually turned it into a commercial venture, that I’m aware, but he completed 70 or so rooms connected with twisty passages, lit by skylights, some of which were placed to provide light for trees. All covering several acres of land.

It might be a bit too close to the surface for most dungeon master tastes, but you certainly get to see some stonework that would be doable in a typical dungeon. And again, all built by one guy with minimal tools over 40 years, so it should give people more confidence in their sprawling dungeons.

Written with StackEdit.

Bundles & Dragons

I suppose I ought to say something about the OSR Bundle of Holding, even though there's only about 13 hours left in the sale. I didn't mention it before, because people with a much wider readership than I were getting the word out. But I'm much more frugal with my money than the typical gamer; I usually only buy RPG materials once or twice a year, usually around my birthday. So, the fact that I splurged on the Bundle of Holding, going for the bonus material, should be a pretty good endorsement.

It's all about the dungeons.

The basic bundle is, essential, just the Swords & Wizardry Campaign Kickoff Pack. Swords & Wizardry Complete, plus some materials to go with it: a monster book, a magic supplement, and the Tomb of the Iron God module. Also, some materials you can get free elsewhere, but which are conveniently included all in one place.

I already have an earlier printing of S&W Complete, hardbound, and you can now get S&W Complete with the Erol Otis cover for free, so that wasn't really what I was looking for. The supplemental materials were more important -- I can always use more monsters or weird spells.

But I really wanted to look at more modules. I haven't bought that many or used many in my GM career, so picking up Tomb of the Iron God was a plus... and by kicking in more money, I could get Stonehell Dungeon, which gets talked about a lot among the OSR crowd, and also a Raggi module, The God That Crawls. I liked The Grinding Gear and Death Frost Doom, so getting another Raggi module sounded pretty good. And that was before they kicked in three more modules.

Another plus was the extra systems. Free versions of Labyrinth Lord and Lamentations of the Flame Princess, for those who don't like S&W, but don't have an old school system already. And at the bonus level, Adventurer Conqueror King. I already know from various discussions and descriptions that ACKS is not for me, but there's bound to be a couple stealable ideas in there, and I would like to see it. Without the Bundle, I doubt I'd ever buy ACKS by itself. But now I have a copy.

Vornheim is also a bonus that others may find valuable. It wasn't as big a deal for me, since I'd already bought it a year or so ago. But it's definitely worth it, for those of you on the edge over how much you should pay.

Dyson's Town and City Maps

http://rpgcharacters.wordpress.com/maps/cities-towns/

Everyone knows about Dyson Logos and his dungeon maps. But I've been enjoying his town and city maps lately. They have a very natural feel to them (well, as natural as artificial structures can be.)

I have some ideas about modifying his maps, or maybe maps of my own, that I may address soon. Basically, I want to put all the info needed to run a town or city in play. But I will have to discuss this later.

Blog Link

Some of you already know, but for those who don't, The RPGPundit lost his previous blog due to chicanery on the part of Xanga (they ran a kickstarter to pay for a site redesign, then locked the blogs of people who didn't pay.) So The Pundit has moved his blog to Blogger. Because he can't post a final notice on the old blog, and not every blog reader also visits The RPGSite, he's relying on word of mouth to spread the new URL:

 The RPGPundit

I should probably add him to my blogroll, but I haven't cleaned that out for quite some time, because: lazy.

Long Expeditions

This past week, I saw part 1 of a PBS show on Lewis & Clark. I believe it's a repeat, so many of you may have seen it already earlier in the year. Aside from the unusually large number of laxatives they took on the expedition, I was mainly interested in the inspirational aspects. It's a well-documented lengthy expedition under conditions that weren't medieval, but were still low-tech enough to be a good guideline for pre-19th century wilderness travel.

Almost the entire journey is by river. Upriver, actually, so it's not as quick as you'd expect river travel to be, although it is quicker than it would have been overland. Because of the great distance involved, it took a couple years to complete. Part of the time was spent in "winter phases", when the Corps of Discovery didn't travel at all because that would have been foolhardy. A few days here and there during the rest of the journey were spent visiting/negotiating with inhabitants along the way. Lots of time was lost going around a couple obstacles.

The expedition had a general map of most of the territory, but they mapped their actual journey in detail: every little bend in the river, every landmark visible along the way. I think we tend to treat mapping in RPGs a bit cavalierly, assuming that any maps found are completely accurate at any scale. Players tend to skip mapping if they already have a map of the area. Eventually, the expedition reached unmapped territory... and later, discovered that even their general map of the continent was wrong, and the Pacific Ocean was not as close to the Rocky Mountains as they expected.

The expedition heard stories about a "monster" they'd never encountered before: grizzlies. When they first met a grizzly, it was pretty fearsome, but they beat it and felt pretty cocky. Several more encounters, though, and they began to wish they'd never seen one: sure, they were winning their monster encounters, but these things were taking way too much time to kill, compared to ordinary bears. And they didn't seem to get scared away as easily as other bears.

There were a lot of other things about the expedition that would make good examples of things a band of adventures might have to deal with during a long river journey. Overhanging trees wrecked the mast of their boat. The safe part of the river in many places was close to the banks, but the banks were soft and sandy, tending to collapse suddenly into the river and nearly capsizing them.  They came to unexpected forks in the river and had to guess which one actually came from the mountains. Waterfalls forced them to lose a month of time as they carried their boats overland, around the obstacle.

But the main thing all this made me think of was: boy, I'd like to see more very long journeys, instead of short journeys of a couple weeks, with most of the details glossed over.

Sharing on Google

OK, I'm getting some weird requests via Google Drive/Google Docs.

Every once in a while, since the storage part of Google Docs was renamed Google Drive, I've gotten requests to share a file that was supposed to be shared with the general public already. I figured that was just some crappy flaw in Google's switch-over.

But today, I got two requests to share some PDFs, and both are *currently* listed as publicly viewable on the web. So people should be able to download them right now. I'm not sure what the requests are about.

Here's one of the files: The Sketchbox Dice Tool. I haven't changed the settings on that. Anyone having problems viewing or downloading that?

Cambrian Horror

Last night, I watched a TV show about the extreme history of Australia (as in, the first 4 billion years worth.) And there were some recreations of pretty freaky- looking Pre-Cambrian and Cambrian creatures. I knew about trilobites, hell, everyone does... but I hadn't heard of Anomalocaris before. It's basically a giant, abnormal, predatory shrimp.

I should turn that into a monster. Someone should turn it into a monster. Quick, someone do some stats!

 

Hex Sheet Specfile

People seemed to like the tilted coordinates for the hex sheet I posted earlier. Below is the specfile I used with mkhexgrid to get the small hexes with the tilted coordinates. I'm not actually sure they are half-inch hexes, I just assumed "100 pixels per inch, therefore make hexes 50 pixels high." They seem to be about right, though.

mkhexgrid places the coordinates relative to the center of the hex using distance from the center in pixels and direction (bearing) relative to "due east". Bearing 90 degrees is the top of the hex. With half-inch, 50 pixels high hexes, 16 pixel coord-distance is a smidge more than an eighth of an inch from the center, and the 150 degree coord-bearing means the coordinate is aligned with the hex face to the left (counter-clockwise) of the top of the hex. To change the tilt of the text itself, I set coord-tilt to 60 degrees (measured counterclockwise from the horizontal.)

# specfile for .5in hexes

output = svg
hex-height = 50px
image-margin = 50px
image-width = 850px
image-height = 1100px
rows = 18
grid-color = 0808FF
grid-thickness = 1px
grid-grain = v
coord-color = 0808FF
coord-format = "%02c%02r"
coord-font = Courier
coord-size = 8px
coord-bearing = 150
coord-distance = 16px 
coord-tilt = 60
center-style = n

Blank Hex Sheet

So, I've been working on a blank hexmap with small, numbered hexes and large secondary hexes for use with my Last-Minute Hexcrawl process. And I discovered that I was having a hell of a time with aligning the grand hexes with the small hexes. Plus, a grand hex that is 15 small hexes from face to face wasn't fitting on the sheet. So, I changed it to 9 small hexes from face to face and finally got it aligned. The finished image (PNG) is here.

Video Resource

I forgot to mention this a couple weeks back. There was a man named Huell Howser who made a whole bunch of travel videos for PBS, mostly about locations in California. He died this year. His will donated all his California Gold and related videos to Chapman University, which has begun digitizing all of them and putting them online for free. Some of the videos, especially those about state and national parks, could be of interest for location ideas; for example, he did one about "hidden" canyon of ferns, and another about Lassen Volcanic National Park. Other videos about historic sites could be useful to period horror/adventure games, like one he did about Ridge Road.

Not the usual stuff I talk about, but I figured it might be useful to somebody.