Skip to main content

Dice of Place

Another thing I've enjoyed seeing out there is dice which give a sense of place: tiny landscapes, galaxies, and so on. So naturally I've been putting together some dice which work with those ideas, with a big boost from 3d printing for some of them.

The one that didn't use 3d printing involved the use of a series of hemispherical molds. I started with making a mottled blue and green hemisphere with tinted resin. Then I glued the flat side to a stick and suspended it over a slightly larger hemisphere filled with clear resin. Once that was set, I painted clouds directly on the resin, so the cloud layer is slightly above the "ground" surface. That went into a mold half-filled with black resin with a few bits of glitter thrown in for stars, then topped off with more clear resin for night and day sides.

One of the nice things about this is that it's all resin, save for a trivial quantity of paint and glitter, so it's as balanced as the mold allows. The remainder are based on terrain out of the real world. It starts with the Terrain2STL generator, which uses GIS data underlying Google Maps to create STLs of a selected area.

Once you've got that, you can import it into your favorite 3d editing program and do as you like with it. This one, iirc, is a river valley somewhere along the Colorado river.

What I did, after appropriate scaling, was to merge it with an icosahedron to get the union of two shapes. That gives me a shape like this:

That is, it's the bit of terrain carved into the body of an icosahedron scaled to fit tightly into on of my d20 molds. I handed the shape off to my 3d printer, painted it, popped it into the mold, and filled with tinted resin for this undersea canyon.

Finally, I got arty. I was thinking about Bocklin's iterations of the painting "Isle of the Dead." It's a tiny island, isolated on a dark sea with a few tomb-like structures built into the cliffs. 


The technique was essentially the same as for the undersea canyon, plus a little messing around with the icosahedron-limited terrain to add the niches and structures, plus a few bits of artificial greenery for the trees.



 I like aspects of this, like I like aspects of all of them as first attempts, but I've got an underlying technical issue: too many bubbles. I'm going to have to pull out the air compressor and fiddle with a pressure chamber to really make these work well. Next project, I suppose.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Spaced Out Rides

(This is the kind of thing I'd have sent into Pyramid   back in the day, but that's not an option now, so here we are.)   The GURPS Action series is the gift that keeps on giving for a lot of modern-and-later gaming. GURPS Action 2: Exploits has rules for sneaking around, running away, and all kinds of other activities which can be easily transplanted to cyberpunk and other high-tech settings. GURPS Action 6: Tricked-Out Rides provides more of the same for its topic, giving an easy framework for describing and even designing common types of vehicles without all the math and paralysis-by-analysis of GURPS Vehicles. Pick a standardized vehicle type (van, compact car, etc.) and apply modifiers (rugged, tinted windows). But, of course, it’s limited. It’s just ten pages, after all, so it’s great for common passenger vehicles for the modern(ish) era. But higher-tech vehic...
Post a Comment
Read more

G$ --> DND GP

A GURPS $ is worth 1.27 D&D 5e SP, which is interesting because in GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, the typical $1 coin is a silver piece. And a D&D GP is worth about $7.87 in GURPS. So, where does that come from? A while back, I cautioned someone considering using (among other things) GURPS Renaissance Venice: Merchants of Venice  in a non-GURPS game that prices listed in the extensive lists of trade goods were expressed in GURPS $, which might not have obvious conversions into other game systems. But if one wanted to convert GURPS prices into D&D or vice versa, how would that work? It crossed my mind to take a "basket of goods" approach. Economists measure inflation not by picking a single commodity, like the price of gold or oil or wheat, and seeing how that changes over time, but by taking the combined value of a set of common commodities. This provides a more comprehensive picture of the cost of living. Perhaps gas becomes less expensive while the price of whe...
Post a Comment
Read more

2020 GURPS Challenge PDFs: Incense Trail prices

Over on the forum, somebody asked me how much frankincense and myrrh cost in antiquity. Well, we don't know. We never get as much price information as we like out of history. There's the occasional mention of this or that product being worth its weight in silver or gold, but we can reasonably believe that those are descriptions written by political, cultural, or philosophical commentators trying to give an idea of how expensive things are, not people who have actually done an economic analysis and discovered that the material in question is, by coincidence, exactly the same value as silver or gold and not, say, one and a half times the price of silver or three quarters of the price of gold. We know it was valuable, but not how valuable on the level of individual purchases. But for the convenience of the GM, we can use those comparisons to establish some ballpark figures. Mind you, this is based largely on GURPS rather than historical sources, so it's not something I would h...
7 comments
Read more