Tetsujin no Llama

 One of the things I like most about Gaming Ballistic's DTRPG bestiaries is the monster reference cards. They're 4x5 inch cards, big enough to be quite visible across a game table, with an illustration of the monster on one side (with a human silhouette for scale) and full monster stats on the back. Players can visualize what they're running into, and the GM doesn't have to keep one more book open on the table to check stats. Very useful.   The concern I've always had, though, is that they come in the form of a deck of cards. That's trivially easy to knock over inadvertently or just drop and scatter all over the floor, so I've needed a storage solution. My first instinct was to work up a design for a box and 3d print it. I did, but it just didn't do it for me.    I recently realized, though, that 4x5 cards would fit nicely in photo albums (I'll tell you kids about photo albums later) designed for 4x6 pictures. Cheap and easy solution, though ironica...

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...

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...