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.

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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...

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...

Argonath 5

A while back, I made a Barad Dur case for The Kid's Xbox . And then he got a PS5. So... The first possibility I looked at for a way of dressing up the console was Minas Tirith, but there's no way I could make that fit in any reasonable space. Then I hit on the Argonath, the twin statues marking the northern border of Gondor on the Anduin. One statue on either side? Doable. There are a bunch of free versions of the Argonath out there, but they kind of suck, so I shelled out a few bucks for a much better model , and I do not regret it. Much like Barad Dur, I went through the simple process of scaling up and dividing into printable parts and then the multi-week process of printing them all out. After gluing together, I put on a coat of sandable primer. The thicker paint helps conceal the print lines a little bit. Then stippling to give a natural stone look. I wanted the unsculpted parts to look like they still had natural ground cover on them, so I masked the st...

Tetsujin no Llama

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