Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from 2017

Alea Iacta Est

Devices to ensure fair play in dice games go back a long way. The Greeks and Romans used devices like internally-ridged dice cups to make sure game players couldn't unfairly control the spin and roll of the dice. And, of course, they invented the dice tower. The earliest known dice tower is a 4th century item found near Cologne. I started playing with a 3d-printed implementation of it a while back, forgot, was reminded of it, and finally got around to finishing. It's not a perfect implementation. It lacks the pine cones of the original (not included in the picture above), nor the little bells, nor the dolphins, but those can be added easily. It isn't hinged like the original (Lightweight PLA hinges? Nah.). And the steps appear to go up a bit higher in the original. Still, it gets the job done and looks reasonably Roman. And for anyone interested in making their own, I've put the files on Thingiverse .

Cardboard Miniature Stands

I like paper miniatures like Cardboard Heroes . The price per figure is tiny compared to miniatures, they don't have to be painted, and they're easy to flatten out and store. Unfortunately, they're not particularly durable (though, with digital files where you can print as many as you like, that's a significantly smaller problem these days--go a head and set fire to those orcs when you kill them; I'll just make more) and their light weight makes them liable to being knocked down if someone bumps the gaming table or a light breeze blows through the room. The Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game contains a very nice accessory: plastic stands to put the miniatures in. They're sized for the cardboard on which the DFRPG figures were printed, but they do a perfectly good job with folded paper ones, particularly if it's thick stock. They line up nicely with the hex grid, add a little heft, and bring the center of gravity down to make them even harder to knock over.

DFRPG GM's Screen Frame

What could improve the GM's screen for the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game ? Not much. But that didn't stop me from building something to go with it. This is mostly just scaled-up OpenForge pieces, artfully connected to one another at a suitable scale to frame but not cover up too much of Brandon Moore's art, and of course painted to a nice stone look. The really nifty thing about it is that the crenelated wall forms a parapet where the GM can put dice, pens, and other small items, keeping them out of the way until needed.

Against the Rat Men Designer's Note

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

Sonnet On a Custom-Made Munchkin Shakespeare Board

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.

Dunegon Fantasy Roleplaying Game: Production Values

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

That's A Lot Of Meetings

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.

Doctor GURPS Author, Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The WYSIWYG Template

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 LibreOffic

Dungeon Fantasy RPG PDFs to Backers!

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 numbe

Back To the Geniza

This is the sort of thing which happens when you write gaming material based on real-world sources. Back in Pyramid #38 , I had an adventure the goal of which was a geniza full of scattered but useful information. This was based on the Cairo geniza , essentially a massive waste paper basket which has turned out to be one of the most important source we've got on life and Jewish history in Medieval Egypt. And while it's already been immensely valuable to modern scholars, it's still incompletely investigated. It contains many scraps of documents which haven't even been categorized by language, let alone translated. But now there's a project on zooniverse where you can get involved in research. They're crowdsourcing the identification of fragments of texts based on some fairly simple criteria. This is pointing to a phase two where stuff actually gets translated. There's absolutely no telling what will come out of this (lost chapters of important commentarie

All Is Revealed!

Well, something is revealed. A recent update for the DFRPG Kickstarter finally revealed the authors of the three companion works. Peter is doing the magic items volume, Christopher is doing traps, and I'm doing the adventure. It's a follow-up to the adventure in the box, so you can continue the storyline which comes with the game. I don't think I can say much more now, but I will say that I've seen the map, and I think it's lovely. Oh, and I'm not saying that the adventure is about getting the best seat next to the duchess at tea, but I'm not not saying that the adventure is about getting the best seat next to the duchess at tea.

The Occasional Dungeon: Crypt, Ground Floor, Part 3

6) A group of monsters have collected near the hidden doorway and antechamber leading into the crypt. Roll twice on the wandering monster table. As ugly as this might seem, if adventurers retreat a bit, the pursuing monsters will have to come after them through two separate doorways, making them relatively easy to isolate and overwhelm, and it's still fairly close to the cave shrine, so spellcasters can stay in an area where they can speak, if they need that in order to cast spells. 7) This niche is set off from the corridor by a set of sturdy iron bars. Treat as X-Heavy metalwork ( GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 2, p. 18); the bars are permanently fixed in place and cannot be unlocked. The area beyond is blacked out with the Darkness spell. It's also difficult to use magic to pick out what's in the space; it's protected by a variant of the Pentegram spell (cast at level 20, if it becomes important). Breaking the bars breaks that spell. The space contains N/3 Demons From

Benefits of Working at Home

For about the past few years, I've been working from home. It's a long story of corporate shenanigans which resulted in me surviving a second buyout of my employer by another company but my physical office dropping out from under me. The point is that I'm physically isolated from my colleagues in an office in my house full of...well, any stuff I would want to have with me. On a mostly but not entirely unrelated note, I've long vaguely toyed with the idea of painting miniatures. It'd be nice for other hobbies I'm involved with. On the other hand, it requires at least a little hand-eye coordination, and I'm not good with that. What finally made me decide to do something about it was finding OpenForge , 3d-printable architecture and terrain for gaming. I like architecture. What made these come together is...y'know how some people doodle in the margins during long, boring meetings? I realized that I had the opportunity to "doodle" as extravagan

The Occasional Dungeon: Crypt, Ground Floor, Part 2

Here's what's in areas 1-5 on the ground floor crypt map: 1) The room is partly filled with a dense grey mist from a few inches above the ground to a height of about three feet. Oddly, does not flow or expand outside of the approximately 12' by 12' room. Anyone peering under the mist sees a wooden chest in the southwest corner of the room. The mist is acidic, doing 1d corrosion damage per turn spent immersed in it. It's possible, though, to crawl under it. Crawling under the mist requires a roll against DX - (2 x SM) per turn (that is, a -2 penalty for SM +1, a +2 bonus for SM -1, and so on). Failing the DX roll incurs a single point of corrosion damage, or a full die for a critical failure. The chest itself weighs 40 lbs. is somehow resistant to the corrosion. It is locked (a straight roll against Lockpicking opens it), but there's a poisoned needle on the mechanism: Detect: Per-based Traps . Disarm: DX-based Traps . Circumvent: The chest can be sma

The Occasional Dungeon: Crypt, Ground Floor, Part 1

The cave shrine is attached to a labyrinth-like crypt where various dead were laid to rest. Some had been noted holy men. Others were common people picked out for reasons lost to the depths of time. And some were very evil, stowed away in the supposedly safe confines of the crypt. But it's not so safe as one might hope. The crypt is full of magical power which has reanimated some of the dead, given an illusion of life to some objects, and let some things slip through the walls between worlds. Some time after the crypt was build and then sealed off by its makers, other monsters from the nearby natural caves broke in through a back entrance. Not long thereafter, they sealed it off again. The crypt can be reached thorough concealed doors to the south through the cave shrine and to the northwest through the ground floor caves. The entire paved area is covered by the Silence spell ( GURPS Magic, p. 171). It has somehow been applied to the entire volume on the crypt rather than on

The Occasional Dungeon: Shrine, Upper Level

The upper level of the shrine is mostly empty space. The corner towers of the external structure have a single floor at a second level. The stone staircases leading to them are intact, but the walls are crumbled and uneven above about ten feet; there used to be taller towers, but those have fallen into rubble. However, there's a ladder in the southwestern tower. Bandits occasionally use it to climb high enough to see over the ragged wall and keep a lookout for potential threats. The statue of the god in the cave shrine is a little over twenty feet tall, so it extends into the space of the upper level. The face used to have jeweled eyes, which have long since been removed. However, the top of the head has a hollow compartment (anyone who climbs up can roll against Search to see that it can be opened) containing a prayer wheel (see below). The remains of the shrine are occupied by a group of orcish bandits; see GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Adventure 1: Mirror of the Fire Demon for

The Critics Rave

The first review for GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road is up, and Blind Mapmaker is quite kind. There's a passing mention of there not being a lot of jokes in this one, which is accurate. In addition to using my Very Serious Historian Indeed approach for this one, I had specific alternative plans for the pull quotes, which are a primary source of humor. The creation of some one-line spaces for pull quotes put a bit of a hole in things (no room for an attribution, so they emphasize a short line from the book itself), but basically all of the pull quotes are from primary sources. Most are from letters written by people living along the Silk Road, but there's one from a stuffy Roman moralist complaining about Chinese silk, and there are several from Journey to the West , which is about Silk Road travel, more or less. Oh, plus there's a bit from Kipling in the section about the Great Game which is from the book giving us that very expression, and one from Aurel Stein in the i

The Occasional Dungeon: Shrine, Lower Level

The most obvious entrance to the dungeon (though it's really not obvious at all) is through the shrine. The remains of an earthen wall are still detectable around the precincts of the ancient temple, though it is nowhere more than a foot high and in places isn't there at all. Nevertheless, it delineates a region of high sanctity including the former courtyard, the exterior structure, and the cave, though not the catacombs beyond. The shrine proper consists of a two-story-tall structure built against the hillside which enlarges the enclosed area of the cave beyond. The walls are three foot thick stone (DR 468, DR 135). The floor is made of heavy stone tiles, still in quite good shape after many years. There are no windows and a single door. When it was in use, the shade was pleasantly cool, but the roof is all but gone now, so apart from a few crumbling rafters, there's little shade. However, there are vaults supporting a second floor for four tower-like structures p

Silk Road Miscellaneous Comments

GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road is, at long last, out, after languishing for some months behind the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game . There's a more substantial bit on this forthcoming, but I've got some other thoughts that didn't make it into that, so... The Silk Road is something of a departure from previous Hot Spots volumes. Instead of a single city, it covers a large, more vaguely defined, and much more culturally diverse region. In the pitch I sent to SJ Games, I described it as being more like GURPS Conan than any of the previous Hot Spots . It's more about trends and areas than specific people and events. And I think that actually makes it a much better setting for setting adventures. It's more of a sandbox (indeed, the Taklamakan desert is one of the world's biggest sandboxes) where the GM is relieved of the weight of specific historical events. And the specific nature of this region and its time make it easy for anybody from that time (or, at

The Occasional Dungeon: Key

I'll probably change my mind about things once it's far enough along to be really confusing, but I'm starting out with some conventions. The space between level floors is about 15 feet. Floor-to-ceiling distance on any given level, then, is typically in the 8-12 foot range, though see below for exceptions. Most of the dungeon is completely enclosed underground, so it's pitch dark unless delvers bring light with them unless otherwise noted. Some cartographic conventions are represented here: The dark hatching represents the solid interior of the cave. It's rock.  No background indicates a space with no floor at that level, or possibly no floor and no ceiling; see explanatory text for the level for details. This may be a space like a long vertical mine shaft or the upper or middle parts of very large underground chambers. Lightly stippled areas are sandy unfinished floors, which predominate both inside and outside the dungeon. There is rock underneath a hand

The Occasional Dungeon: Overview

In order to get some more GURPS out there and play with some maps, I started toying with something. I've worked up a large map ("ground level" is below; I may need to poke around with image hosting to keep enough maps at the proper scales) of a dungeon complex. From time to time, I'll post magnified excerpts from the map with details in GURPS terms, with specific reference to Dungeon Fantasy (that is, mostly stocked with things from GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 8: Treasure Tables and the Dungeon Fantasy Monsters volumes, but occasional pointers elsewhere). They may prove useful to somebody somewhere under some odd set of circumstances. This dungeon is set in a fairly steep, rocky hill. The natural caves underneath it have long been home to a variety of creatures, natural and otherwise, but pretty much all horrible. There's also a large natural cavern accessible through a very large opening at the top of the hill where the surface caved in. It has been home to a n

Pyramid 3/102: DF Goes To War Designer's "Notes"

There's nothing particularly mechanically innovative in my article in this issue of Pyramid . It is, though, chock full of historical inaccuracies! But they were put there on purpose. Given my work on other projects , I thought it might be worth issuing a disclaimer. This was not written with my Very Serious Historian Indeed hat on. Consequently, as the introduction indicates, considerable liberties have been taken, specifically to make units fit into size classes of about a squad and a few hundred troops. The faux-Bronze Age Mesopotamian chariot units, for example, are essentially made up. There are records of garrisons or other smallish units combining a body of infantry with a handful of chariots. That handful allowed me to rationalize a nine-person unit. The chariot kirsu is far from a standardized unit, and the one presented here is very much on the small side when it comes to real ones. While one might find historical examples of the Greco-Roman and Medieval units as lis

Review: 5 Minute Dungeon

Our gaming here is heavily shaped by a couple of factors. One is that we quite like cooperative games. Another is that we pay way too much attention to Kickstarter. Some of the games we've backed, notably Burgle Bros. , have been excellent additions to our gaming collection. So today, a new box showed up on our doorstep. How was it? Well... 5 Minute Dungeon from Wiggles 3D is a cooperative dungeon-themed card game. Two to five players have five minutes to work through a series of monsters and other challenges to finally face off with a boss monster. There's actually a series of bosses, so a full round of them can theoretically be accomplished in about a half hour. Each player chooses one from among ten different adventurers: the sorceress, the barbarian, the valkyrie, the ninja, and so on (for those who care about such things, the gender mix is evenly split between male and female). Each adventurer has their own deck of cards (which, by the way, are flexible enough to

Yeah, So Why GURPS?

I saw this on Doug's blog , and that prompted me to review why I like GURPS, my go-to RPG system since I first ran into it in...hmmm...must have been 1986. I use it for basically everything I'm willing to run (except Paranoia, of course). Why? Well... Mechanically Simplicity For all the hoopla about how GURPS is an insanely complicated game, it pretty much all boils down to a single rule: roll a target number, usually based on one of a character’s capabilities modified for the circumstances, or below on 3d6. That’s it. I’m not stats geek enough to care specifically about roll low vs. roll high or 3d6 vs. 1d20 vs. 1d100; the point is that it’s a single, standardized die roll. Such complexity as GURPS has in play is about figuring out which capability to roll against and how to modify it for the situation, but those are a necessary consequence of one of GURPS’s other virtues. Point-Based The point-based system provides a single currency and relatively open set of

Storage Solution

We have...several games. Enough that we have trouble keeping them all in one place. We've had some stacked in a corner here, under a bench there, on a bookshelf somewhere else. Recently, certain persons to whom I am married suggested that it'd be great to have some kind of rolling cart we could put our games on, which we could wheel out when we wanted to pull out a game and then put away when we were done. She thought it was something which we could build, and after looking at prices for library carts (we're looking at $300 for something with the kind of storage we need), build one it was. The lumber was reasonably cheap, less than $70 for manufactured pine panels, plus a few bucks for some nice wheels (two with built-in brakes to keep it stable when needed). An hour of router work gave me some reasonably functional dado joints, and construction went pretty quickly. The only really time-consuming bit, as ever, was finishing, which is always "lightly sand, put on a qu

Blast From the Distant Past: Ready Ref Sheets

After quite some time of intending to but completely forgetting about it, I finally got over to DriveThruRPG to buy the PDF of Judges Guild's 1978 landmark work, Ready Ref Sheets . This work from the dawn of RPGs, a mere four years after the publication of the original D&D and two years after the white box I learned the game from, has been called the first GM aid. And it is, if not the first, then at least one of the earliest works aimed at GMs but wasn't an adventure or location description (those being heavily overlapping categories at the time). I remembered it fondly from years and years and years ago as a fascinating source of gaming-related riches. On the other hand, I haven't really looked at a D&D volume in the past decade, haven't played in two, and haven't played this particular archaic version since before leaving high school, and for my own gaming needs, there would seem to be very little going for it beyond nostalgia. So how does it hold up?