Sunday 30 October 2016

Halloween and Horror RPG Sales on DriveThruRPG

Halloween DriveThruRPG Sales Banner

Halloween and horror themed sale with many RPG titles, rules, accessories and scenarios at DriveThruRPG

http://bit.ly/DTRPGsales
(affiliate link)

Don’t forget to click on the pumpkins for treats! ;)
3 days left at time of posting.

Friday 14 October 2016

Visit to friendly local gaming store: Weekend Warlords (UK)

I briefly visited the bricks n mortar site of Weekend Warlords today.  A well stocked store with many tabletop ranges (including, surprisingly, some RPGs) and a large tabletop game play area. Friendly staff.  Not bad for the town of Loughborough in the East Midlands.  ;)


My actual purchases were pathetically small, this was an investigation sortie and we live in frugal times. See photo.


 



I have yet to play the wonderfully simple Cthulhu Dice, but I am planning to beat a man to death with the large d20 (blue d10 added for size comparison) or just break his furniture by slam-dunk rolling the die in a game.


Links

Online Store

https://shop.weekendwarlords.co.uk


Facebook

https://www.facebook.com/weekendwarlords/

https://www.facebook.com/pg/weekendwarlords/photos/

Monday 10 October 2016

Inked Adventures Simple Caverns cut-up sheets (PWYW) and why modern gaming is so cool with colour printers (designer thoughts)

(Cross-promotional from Inked Adventures (on DTRPG) plus some extra thoughts.)

simple_caverns__promo_cover___inked_adventures_2016

Simple Caverns Cut-Up Sheets
Pay-What-You-Want on DriveThruRPG


Check out the hand drawn goodness!  Celebrate the simple yet flexible design!
Although there's not much by way of actual cavern scenery in this set (stalagmites, pools etc) I'm rather proud of the floor. It's a good cavern floor, one that works for gaming.

Back when I first played D&D, the GW and TSR's Dungeon Floorplans sets were a much coveted resource. The early sets were very simple, but still more exciting on the table with figures than, well most things we were doing with plan or graph paper.  It was all mainly about room shapes, with colour and a grid (in the first set the wooden sheet was used for doors, chests and tables).  Back to today, I still can't get over the fact that people can print in colour at home and cut-up a colour map. I'm still fairly excited by the idea of making made-to-measure rooms with scissors - it feels so wanton! Unlike those early Floorplan packs, we can now print as many dungeon floor sheets as we want (I say this with total seriousness, my like a vinyl fan arguing with iTunes support).

Being the product illustrator, I think of my designs as disposable (test-prints spill out over the floor, begging to be binned), especially when printing straight to paper of card, but often people want to craft permanent tiles, perhaps applying them to foam core and so on.  "Reusable" is good for the environment I guess ;)  I'm sure it's gratifying to think of the longevity of a lovingly prepared tile, gained at a low price via the interweb, despite the devastation caused to ink cartridges. I think my point is that, as with a battlemat, you can almost instantly craft a very specifically shaped cavern, which you may only need once.  Naturally it's better if you can print straight to card, skip any mounting, but blue tack will also solve those slip and paper curl problems.  I'm talking about Dungeon Floorplans being an influence, but somewhere along the line the notion of the "cavern-flagstone" from 3D-mold sets has definitely infiltrated my thinking.  In games with a grid, caverns our hard to contrive.




I've included some graphics files as well as the printable PDFs  - just the 8x11 sheet graphics as PNGs.  what people do with them in an art package is up to them (as long as they don't resell the designs, or mass-distribute).  Also, I'm including there for the virtual tabletop players, with whom I can't provide IT support. ;) It's up to the purchaser to carve, crop and import cavern shapes into the VR_Table3000SoftBeta or whatever it is these boffins spend their time tweaking, whilst the rest of us elderly gamers complain that we can't get 3 people into the same room every Sunday ...   Okay, kidding, but what I mean this is still mainly a product for printing, chopping up and glueing perhaps.
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Mock-up of a possible cavern layout because my photos are not good enough.
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Actually, I'll let you into a bit of a secret here.  There's meant to be an Inked Adventures uber-sized sections, tiles and scenery counters pack (working title), but all of the art still lies in an unprepared state and is in a queue behind other just-as-awkward projects.  Somehow the floor illustration from part of that has slipped out and escaped into the greater world.  Maybe I should let the counters escape as well. ;)
 
Why is it "Pay-What-You-Want"?  I'm not sure.  It's a category I haven't sold through yet, and I can't give everything away for free, not whilst I can't sell both my kidneys.  Man, I'm broke,  Anyhow, I just needed to share about the pack and a little about it's provenance. Thanks for reading! :)


Simple Caverns Cut-Up Sheets
Pay-What-You-Want on DriveThruRPG