Tetsujin no Llama

The DFRPG Kickstarter update #88 addresses Against the Rat Men, so I'll add a note here of my own. This is one of those "how the sausage is made" things which doesn't actually help anybody's gaming.

When I was offered the chance to write Dungeon 2, aka Against the Rat Men, for the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game, it came with an additional consideration about components. It had been determined that Dungeon, aka I Smell a Rat, would require three maps. Two of them would occupy the sides of one large sheet in the boxed set, but the second map would have blank back. That side could be used for a map for Against the Rat Men.

But there was a complicating factor. Unlike the electronic products I usually work on, which are rather flexible until quite late in the game, there were a physical product with its own serious deadline involved and a cartographer who wasn't me to work with. I had to finalize the map in a matter of weeks, well before the adventure was finish…

Shall I compare thee to a Munchkin game?
Thou art more ruthless and more intemperate.
So lest my Munchkin Shakespeare board cause shame
I used an Elizabethan template.
The CNC is where we set our scene,
Half-inch birch plywood board a blank-versed plain.
The Minwax can’s labeled Jacobean
For the Virgin Queen is without a stain.
Through GIMP and Inkscape and on-line software
A bitmap image becomes a toolpath
A sixteenth-inch fishtail bit cuts through there
Polyurethane coats it water-fast
The edge is plain and without a bevel.
I’ll monsters slay, and go up a level.

Now that I've got my hard copy of the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game box (woot!), I can look at it as a physical product, and I'm quite happy with it.

Consider, for a moment, the GM screen:
Currently available images of the screen don't do justice to it as a physical object. We'll ignore the art and such for the moment (I'll be coming back to it). This is a substantial item, made of thick cardboard under those glossy covers. The four-panel display stays up quite nicely on its own and is unlikely to be collapsed by passing breezes.

The cardboard heroes are made of the same sturdy material. These are designed to fit into the manufactured stands, a significant change from the original version made form sheets of thick paper/thin cardstock, designed to fold up into triangles. The fold-up-triangle approach was certainly viable, but they were still easily knocked over by drafts and inadvertent table collisions. These are heavier and less subject to the vagaries of the …

A little while ago, I mentioned that rather than spending my meetings doodling on a notepad, I was painting 3d printed gaming terrain. Unfortunately, as useful as that is keeping my hands occupied, I can't actually use it. I play GURPS, which uses a hex grid, rather than a square grid. I've found some designs for wall-only terrain, which I can plop down on a hex map, but I've got a bunch of terrain that doesn't do me any good. As it happens, I've got a nephew in town this week who has recently started playing D&D, which does use a square grid, so I'm shortly going to hand the terrain off to him (and cleverly obligate his parents to ship it back to the Left Coast where they live rather than do it myself). Before sending it way, I thought I'd lay it out and see how much there was.














Turns out there was a lot.

In other news, I go to too many meetings.

Something I see over at the forum from time to time is people saying that they're interested in writing for Pyramid or GURPS but are instantly driven off by the size and complexity of the style guide and the WYSIWYG template. And they can be intimidating documents. They're long and there are some really specific guidelines for certain kinds of material.

And that's necessary. Despite working almost entirely in the realm of the imagination, Steve Jackson Games is a technical publisher. They need to organize information in regular, predictable formats. It's like Safety Data Sheets, just of their own design.

But the thing I've noticed in several years of writing GURPS material is that you won't need most of it.

So if you want to write an article for Pyramid, here's what you do: Once you've gotten a thumb-up from Steven on your proposal, get the template, create a new document based on it (Don't use Microsoft Word? Me neither. I use LibreOffice. The temp…

It is, at long last, out! Sort of! PDFs of the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game have been released to Kickstarter backers. I don't think it'll be generally available until next month, but since it's in the wild in at least a limited way, I feel I can talk about this a bit more like a customer than someone involved in the project.

The Dungeon Fantasy RPG is a complete fantasy tabletop roleplaying game. It's based on GURPS 4th edition rules, but it's a stand-alone game, requiring no other books, or even prior knowledge of GURPS. I've already made some general comments elsewhere (I got an advanced peek for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that I was called on to write some follow-up material coming out later). I'll expand on that here.

For those unfamiliar with GURPS, it's a point-buy system rather than randomly rolled, class-and-level, or life path, and pretty much everything in play boils down to "try to roll a target number or less o…