Tetsujin no Llama

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.

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 ...

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 ...

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.