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Showing posts from 2019

2d10 Peace On Earth And +3 To Goodwill To Men

It's only the 24th, but I think I already got the best present. Certain Happy Sorceresses to whom I am married turned up this little 24-drawer cabinet to use as an advent calendar. So what's in there? A die?  Dice? Lots of dice! Lots and lots of dice. d6s, d20, and everything else, even a d30. Individual dice and sets. Plastic, metal, wood, and stone. She's absolutely the best, and oh brave new world that has such dice in it.

Pyramid Dungeon Collection Reference List

As I've mentioned over on the forum, the Pyramid Dungeon Collection contains an article ("The Wellsprings of Creation") which fits most PDF-Pyramid and GURPS 4e fantasy locations and adventure locales not already spoken for (for example, nothing from Yrth is included) into a single game world. Here, for everybody's dining and dancing pleasure, is a list of what those are and which publications they're in. Amadan, Pyramid Dungeon Collection Amanapur, Pyramid Dungeon Collection Aquaclaro, Pyramid #3/40 Aulos, Pyramid Dungeon Collection Caerceol, Pyramid Dungeon Collection Caverntown, GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Setting 1: Caverntown Devouring Lands, GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Adventure 1: Mirror of the Fire Demon Echo Wall Mountains, GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Adventure 2: Tomb of the Dragon King Empire of Thebor, Pyramid #3/41 Golden Geniza of Ezkali, Pyramid #3/38 Hellsgate, GURPS Locations: Hellsgate Kunruk, Pyramid Dungeon Collection Saroo, Pyramid Dungeon Collec

Painting Practice

As anybody who ever reads what I write here surely knows, there's a new edition of the classic automotive combat game Car Wars in the offing, with the Kickstarter beginning in about a week as of this writing. I have very fond memories of playing it back in high school, and I'm looking forward to getting my hands on the new, faster playing version coming out soon. One notable feature of the new version is that it'll contain plastic minis rather than the old cardboard counters we used back in the 80s. That's awesome, but there's an issue. Minis want painting, and my painting sucks. So, then, to get in some practice, I printed out a bunch of cars and weapons I got off Thingiverse. And I also tweaked a watchtower, attached a few TV cameras, and modified it to be a dice tower. Fun! Layers of red and blue metallic paint making an interesting purple. Glamouflage! Of course, what I'm getting out of this is that once the game co

Not So Anachronistic

Through the power of wireless, steam, and Gaming Ballistic's new GURPSDay feed , I was reading a post by Peter about " modernisms " in his campaign. One of them struck me, so I thought I'd put on my historian hat and discuss it a bit. This is what Peter says: Racial Equality is generally a thing - so much so that you get a whack of points back if you aren't treated equally and few people earn those points. The thing about that, from an historical point of view, is that if you're presenting a pseudo-Medieval society (which dungeon crawl games more or less are), then racial equality is, in fact, the norm, not a projection of modern attitudes. Certainly, there were all manner of ways in which historical societies might divide the world into "us" and "them:" language, ethnicity, religion, place of origin, and so on. But by sets of physical differences? Not so much. Racism as we know it is literally a modern invention. Before the Renaiss

Making More Terrain

I've been using 3d printing to make gaming terrain. That's cool, but there's a time issue. That piece took a couple of hours to print. Doing enough for a large room takes days, or weeks for a sizable dungeon. Pieces can be reused, certainly, but that's still a lot of lead time, and if I want to have terrain representing, say, forest floor vs. natural cave vs. paved dungeon floor, that's either a lot of repainting or a lot of new prints. Then I saw that there are people selling reusable rubber molds for casting terrain pieces. You can mix up a little plaster or, if you're willing to spend a little extra, dental stone, fill up several of them at a go, pop them out a few minutes later once it sets adequately, and in...well, not no time at all, but in vastly less time than it'd take to print them out, you've got an awful lot of terrain to play with. So I wondered: Can I do that? And the answer is yes. I got some two-part silicone rubber stuff which

DFRPG Monster Adventure Seed I Should Have Done

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.

DFRPG Monsters 2 and Adventure Seeds

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 .

Gaming Tokens

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

Dice Box

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 some

More Book Attributes

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 Obfu

What GURPS Doesn't Have

I was reading this post by Refplace about common GURPS myths: it's dead (no, it gets regular monthly support and doesn't need a new edition), there are no settings (no, there's a zillion of them), and so on. And while GURPS has lots of stuff, the no-settings meme in particular did get me thinking about notable gaps which still exist in the GURPS line. I can think of three gaps that might usefully be filled. A vehicle design system is, of course, one of those gaps. Many games need no such thing, but general-purpose rules for stuff are very much in GURPS 's lane. The 4e vehicle design book is still going through its interminable process, so I suppose we'll see it when we see it. I'm curious as to whether we'll ever see a similar gun-design system, which would also be appropriate. Then there's a setting line. Yes, yes, I know. GURPS has settings. It has many settings. I would respectfully submit that there's no setting line for 4e in the way the

Physical Cartography

I've been working with Campaign Cartographer for the past several years to produce the maps I use at the table and in publications. It's excellent software for that purpose for any number of reasons, not the least of which is that I'm a terrible artist. That said, I got a book on fantasy cartography for Christmas, and I started working with it over the past few weeks, just playing with some of the techniques. Mostly pencil, with colors provided by a mix of ink washes, acrylic washes, and watercolor pencil. I don't think this is going to replace my digital tools, but it's kinda fun, so this may become the new doodling on a notebook during meetings.

Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu

I've remarked elsewhere on the sad demise of Pyramid . And I mentioned that my not writing as much for the third iteration of the magazine was a consequence of moving on to writing longer works. That's certainly a part of it, but another part was that the looser format of the second edition lent itself to a more eclectic, impulsive style of writing. Something which happened quite often is that I'd read a book, realize that there was a gaming angle on it, and write a brief article about it. "Atomic Zombies of the Pacific," for example, was the result of reading a book about recent exploration of the sunken ships of the Bikini Atoll and dashing off a lightweight piece on the topic before moving on. The tighter format of the newer Pyramid made that kind of thing more difficult (whatever I was reading at any given moment might not fit well with any theme Steven might come up with, though given his historical performance, I suppose that's deeply and unfairly unde

For My Next Trick

Kromm and others have been indicating that they've been signing a bunch of contracts for new GURPS projects. I don't have one in that stack. Until recently, I've been busy with some other stuff (notably, revising articles for the Pyramid Dungeon Collection , coming whenever and hopefully demonstrating some ideas I've had about building a campaign world) and haven't had the time to concentrate on new stuff. But my part of the PDC, so far as I can tell, is done now, and I can start thinking about the next project. I've got two projects in mind. One is relatively short and largely uses real-world information for GM guidance. The other is likely to turn out longer and is in the location/setting/adventure line. I'm not sure which one to pitch first. The answer, of course, is "whichever one I feel more like writing," which makes raising the question here entirely rhetorical. But writing it down here helps crystalize the topic.