Tetsujin no Llama

In addition to the adventure see which I should have suggested Peter write (and which he eventually did), it crossed my mind that there's one I should have come up with:

As-Sharak, Do Do Do-do Doo: Delvers encounter small demonic creatures with elemental powers, like vicious feral kittens. While as-Sharak are thought to be produced by curses on mortal wizards, they discover that some have figured out how to reproduce. The adventurers must fight off the hunting hordes of juvenile as-Sharak, defeat their parents, and seek out the lair of the formidable grandparent as-Sharak.

I was going to make a post compiling or at least giving links to the monster seeds Peter Dell'Orto and I wrote for the DFRPG Monsters 2 Kickstarter (which, if you haven't already, go and pledge now), but Peter already did that here.

I'll only add something I mentioned over on the SJ Games forum: I can't believe I didn't think of this when we were reviewing one another's drafts, but Peter should have written an adventure seed about trying to reach a destination before some Draugr does and called it Draug Race.

I've been toying with the idea of working with tinted epoxy resin for a while and finally got around to doing some test pieces. These are some generic tokens which might be used for keeping track of hit points, turn sequence, or whatever.


The tokens are 3d printed and painted. Then I filled the recessed centers with a 30-minute epoxy tinted with a little bit of colored ink, which gives me a nice transparency.


The 1 has proven surprisingly hard to photograph. It's painted with Modern Masters Metal Effects iron paint, giving it a very nice crumbling industrial look, but it just looks kind of orange in pictures. Srsly, this is really nifty paint. I'm not quite wild about the look of the epoxy, though. The red is a little candy-like.


 The 3 worked out better. This used Modern Masters Metal Effects copper, which develops some lovely verdigris. And the blue ink provides excellent color.


I put a fairly plain gold paint on the 5. The purple comes from a mix of red and blue ink i…

There are a lot of 3d printed, CNC-carved, and otherwise manufactured dice boxes out there, most of which have a D&D theme, with that dragon-y ampersand on them. But I wanted something a little more in line with my system of choice.

Easel from Inventibles is my tool of choice for doing stuff for my CNC for ease of use. If my garage was in range of wifi, I might use something else, but direct connectivity isn't an option, so I'm resigned to downloading files and physically carrying a thumb drive to where my CNC lives. Anyway, this was a four-layer design: the top with an engraved design, inside of lid, main box body, and bottom of box. This allowed me to easily do two-sided machining on the lid and cut much, much faster on the box than doing pockets sunk into a larger block would have been. Holes at the corners let me stack pieces up on dowels for easy alignment and gluing. It's all oak; the box body is half-inch, while the other pieces are quarter inch. I may do somethi…

Yet another "might have done it for Pyramid": A discussion of libraries on the forum got me thinking about some book-related issues, which in turn got me onto my beloved lists/random tables. These may be used to add more detail to texts produced with GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 8: Treasure Tables.
Writing Method Roll 1d for any text where the writing method is not otherwise obvious.

1-3: Manuscript: The text was written by hand, likely with a pen or brush, though potentially with a fingertip or claw dipped in blood or something similarly entertaining.

4: Rubbing: The text was made by pressing the paper or other writing medium on a surface with the writing in relief and a block of a colored substance rubbed over it.

5: Block printed: The text and illustrations were engraved on a block which was then coated with ink and pressed on the writing surface.

6: Type printed: As with block printing but with a panel made up of small pieces of moveable type. Damage and Obfuscation Optional…

I came across another one of those historical footnotes which would in years past have prompted a Pyramid  article. With Pyramid still gone, here we go again:
Introduction The early Middle Ages were dangerous and chaotic for much of western Europe. Vikings raided along coasts and river from the north and all the way around Europe's west coast and into the Mediterranean. Magyars attacked from the east. And Muslims (mostly but certainly not all North African Berbers) took over most of Spain and raided elsewhere along the Mediterranean coast.

But while many people know at least about the existence of Muslim Spain, fewer people are aware of Muslim France.  For a time in the 8th through 10th centuries, large stretches of the south coast of France were under Muslim rule, and parts of that were administered from one of the world's most glamorous vacation spots. This was Medieval Fraxinetum.
History In 711 AD, things were going well for the expanding Muslim caliphate. An Arab-led Berb…