Found a freebie poster printer that might be useful for printing big maps that you can then cut out and tape together to play on to give your battlemap a bit of a visual uplift rather than jagged lines draw with a swipe of a vis a vis marker.
It looks quite useable and if you have something like CutePDF installed you can could just print it to a PDF and have it printed out at your local print shop and save your ink cartridges. Remove any copyright notices though as some places can be a pain in the arse about that.
The official forums are down so the usual chain reaction of servers going down is going on so there’s not any news not that there seemed to be a lot when I was able to glance through them. Things are slowing up definitely as people get more familiar with the rules, the initial flux of “Oh this is missing, I have to add it.” content folks have gotten what they wanted made and in general things are just a little slower.
I’ve got Adobe InDesign installed, the company has extra licenses actually and they didn’t have a problem with me using one with the caveat that if they ever need it back I give it up. Being in such a large company you can sometimes get perks like that but you also have a lot more stringent policies on licensing. And as I’m one of the ones that has to enforce things like that among other things I really shouldn’t be one of the ones breaking the rules.
I mention this because it’s so ungodly nice using a real page layout program. I was getting just so incredibly frustrated with Word since I’ve been a casual user of Quark and Pagemaker among other layout programs. I started with an awesome layout program back in 85/86 or so on a Commodore Amiga that put the current iteration of Pagemaker at the time to shame. It could print high res output on a flipping dot matrix printer. Although it did use up a ribbon pretty quickly.
So now I’ve transferred my labor of painful effort on Word 03 and 07 to InDesign and am working on a premie module.
For lack of anything of any importance to post here that I’ve found I’m putting up this old saw that you should read through and have your BBEG try to pay attention to. They key one is having a sexy daughter that turns on you after becoming infatuated with the sexy hero. Remember Solitaire from Live and Let Die?
Obviously you’re not going to be giving the intraweb to your employees anytime soon in a DnD world, well I suppose if you steampunked it or it was Eberron *lip curl* then you might but typically the internet isn’t going to be available.
But anyway here you go (NOTE: I didn’t write this although I’d change a couple if I had an I haven’t a clue as the originator of the original is thanks to Mdonle for pointing this out if your interested in the origins of this list):
The Top 100 Things I’d Do
If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord
- My Legions of Terror will have helmets with clear plexiglass visors, not face-concealing ones.
- My ventilation ducts will be too small to crawl through.
- My noble half-brother whose throne I usurped will be killed, not kept anonymously imprisoned in a forgotten cell of my dungeon.
Sorry for the trouble but my host is apparently having some server problems with the server this site is on. My other sites are working okay, it just appears to be this actual server.
Bear with while I send a snippy request for someone to look into it off.
Whoops, screwed up some things so nothing was posted while I was off on vacation. My first in almost two years to be exact. Laura and I went up north to Michigan to our annual Foog Fest which is a gathering of folks who play online together, ranging from old timers like myself from Ultima Online days to folks just now getting started in MMOG’s.
We had a pretty good time although the drive was one major ass suckage, 15+ hours one way so pretty much two of my vacation days were spent in the car.
We played several board games, Last Night On Earth, Settlers of Catan, several Munchkins, and some Guitar Hero Aerosmith, Rock Band and a few Wii games in general. We also got in a few games of paintball and I was able to break out my Line SI Bushmaster complete with Airgun Designs Six-Pack. Very old school shit but it still shoots like the sweatheart of a gun it is. I took my Automag but it ended up leaking down the powertube (seal issues) and the seals I have are old and have taken a set so I’ll have to see if you can still get them and get some. It would be shame to have such a legacy in a condition unable to shoot. I didn’t take my Autococker or Autococknocker as we called them back in the day. There’s only so much crap you really want to take on a vacation.
The host of this year’s gathering did an excellent job but took way too much on himself to provide food, cooking several really good meals for everyone but at the expense, in my opinion, of his own entertainment and enjoyment. I’m going to try and make a point of it to stress that doing one breakfast and one dinner is extent of any host’s permissions to take unto himself and everyone can fend for themselves as they see fit. And that’s optional. Seriously delivery pizza would be preferable if it means everyone gets a good time.
I’ve spotted some updates and news thingies I want to make note of and I’ll get to those tomorrow, it’s been a long day.
And it appears my appeal to my hosting provider (www.1and1.com) has fixed my issues with image uploads in my absence. I’m assuming they repaired the security issues with the tmp folder for the anonymous access account to allow the use of the ‘crunch’ of the uploaded images properly.
Addendum, while looking for an image to put in this post I found out that according to someone, apparently less than 150 of the AGD six-pack’s are known to exist. Well I know about 2 of them personally that I can attest to working perfectly. I also have a Micro-CA that works perfectly well as well. The Micro-CA is the littlest brother to the Six Pack.
Okay the Alpha version of the new table top is done and in place. As mentioned previously this is a piece of Lexan from Lowe’s cut down to fit inside the inset on the gaming table I built. (which by the way has rope lights embedded in the edge of the inset for that uber geek pimp look).
In the picture here the top safety film is still in place so it’s a little hazier and less translucent that it will be in actual game play. With three small children used to playing on the gaming table with my miniatures, dice, their miniatures etc. I left it on so the first actual game usage would be relatively scuff, fingerprint, and scratch free. After that it’s all bets are off as usual around here.
I drew a grid on the ‘underside’ of the lexan using metallic sharpie. I tossed around the thought of using a dremel tool in a little homemade jig and a routing bit to scribe lines in the lexan to make them permanent and probably a little better looking but the plastic isn’t that thick to start with and I could easily see it just fracturing along those scribe lines when I lift it up to put things underneath it leaving me with a bunch of broken pieces.
So one asstastic amount of grid lines later I’ve got the tabletop on the table and it doesn’t look too bad. Given the size and the fact I was doing this on the floor not all the lines are perfect and the ink flow from the metallic sharpies wasn’t all that standardized so. And one of the pens had a very hard time writing on it. But over all I think it came out very much okay. 
As you can see it’s possibly in theory to put things under it and have them still be readable through the map. Also in theory I could create maps in a mapping program like Dundjinni, Campaign Cartographer or even just Photoshop or Illustrator or GiMP, print those out and slide them under the grid to have color maps. Nifty eh?
I still need to ’stonify’ the gray matte paper underneath, but I need to do some testing to figure out what I can use that won’t eventually or immediately stain or discolor the lexan that’s going on top of it.
Found this image when I was looking for something off the beaten path for the Skaven article and thought it was pretty cool. The artist’s other pictures are also for the most part interesting to look at. Your opinion may vary of course and feel free to do so.
Also in doing so I found the ‘elfwood‘ site that I remember from a long time back. The artwork ranges from child like scribbles to some pretty great stuff like this image here.
You can check out The Best on the site to find things that the majority of people have ‘tagged’ as favorite and in general barring ballot stuffing will let you find some nice things depending of course on your tastes and level of need for nice things.
Like this one for you orc lovers. Or maybe you need a pair of a paladin love birds? Or something from the darker side of life? Or that Big Bad Evil Guy that your players are going to be facing off with next?
Not that I really expect it to be ‘needed’ I’ve fixed the contact system so you could in theory use the site to email me a comment or whatever. Even in my prime when I was creating 3d resources and scripts and the like for Never Winter Nights I rarely got any email directly through the site, most of it was through regular email. But hey I’m not putting my regular email on this site because of spam scraping so you might find it hard to send an email that way. Hint - my name at this domain will work.
I’m also trying a lot of oddball little plugins. Apparently WordPress doesn’t really have a Private Message system they can incorporate into their code. Which is really odd IMO as that’s pretty much a staple. Even when I wrote my own CMS that would be the thing I’d put in after I added the ability to add and edit posts.
Anyway you can use the Contact Me link over on the right somewhere. If you feel a need to contact me.
In looking around at the site I realized it had been awhile since I’d upgraded the base site code which is Word Press. I’ve now taken care of that and migrated from 2.1.3 to 2.5.x. On the back end a few things are different and I’m not sure if it’s an improvement but it’s not a dis-provement so I can adjust to change.
In addition I’ve had to update my existing plug ins and as a result of finding new versions I’ve added some others that I came across so there are some new things there.
The site shouldn’t have been down for more than about 10 minutes, the time it took to dump the files up and overwrite the existing ones and do a database upgrade. FTP from a network location in Vista is dog ass slow. Which is a strange phrase really but my aunt says it a lot, she’s around 87 now I think and if I live to be 67 with half the ability she has still I’ll be happy.
Anyway sorry for the brief outage to anyone that was visiting trying to get some the PDF’s I’ve posted recently. If you use them for play testing I’d love to hear about them as I haven’t had a chance to play test either the Half Orc race or the Bard class.
An interesting thing I just saw, I was using Google to search for “true20 alternate core ability” and I was very surprised to see that this site was the first return. I’ve only mentioned True20 once I think and didn’t use that exact phrase. Well now I have but even so this worked before.
Anyhow I just found this very strange that out of all the True20 sites out there that the first time I search on a phrase I came back with my own site as the first hit. And I thought I’d share.
There won’t be a DnD session this weekend although there will be other gaming going on. I’m thinking of running a webcam pointed at the playing field and pump the images or video out to the world. No real reason other than I think it would be interesting.
Not sure where I’d put the camera, I think directly overhead would make the most sense but then I’ve got a webcam stuck on my ceiling. Perhaps in a corner of the up on the wall pointed down at an angle? But first I’ll need a pretty long USB cord. I went on CompUSA’s web site and that showed them selling 15′ cords for $3.49. And yet when I went to the actual store they were more like $34.95. For $3.49 I’ll be happy to avoid going through my storage boxes full of cords to see what I’ve got stockpiled. For $34.95, not so much.
I’ve been looking for a new theme to put up on the site. I’d like something ‘undeadish’ or ‘horror’ based but man I really don’t want to sit down and spend the few hours it would take to do the design, layout, css and graphics. Such is life.
I’ve been reading through True20 and angling toward a NoTLD thing or actually it would be more a Dawn or Day of. Perhaps an Evening of? I’ve really got to point buy up some characters (no rolling involved with T20) and go through some basic combats and such as more than a few of the powers don’t seem balanced very well. In specific Cold Shaping lets you deal damage equal to half your power rank which I’m shakily assuming is your ranks of Adept levels. But Fire Shaping gives you a +2 damage. That doesn’t seem very balanced at all. Especially given that fire will damage something a LOT faster than cold will given an equal energy expenditure in real life.
Porra, Ghimli, Gnatsum showed up, Alhman was tied up and Jo is of course still out of town. Next week though I expect to have at least 4 of the 5 at which time we’ll forge ahead with the Temple.
If I get the time this week I’m going to write, direct and produce and stick in a little side adventure as well while they’re on their way back from town. If you’ve played my only released NeverwinterNights module it’ll be based on the crypt sequence I put into that one.
As for yesterday we played Munchkin of which everyone won one game and someone won two. Who the someone was I don’t remember other than I don’t think it was me but I could be wrong. We played Super, Star, Impossible, Fu, hmmm maybe everyone only won one game as I can’t remember the other type of Munchkin we played. Oh well.
I think I’m going to pick up Zombie Town (ratings)as well. If nothing else it gives me 100 zombie miniatures to use in our DnD campaign. And from the people who bothered to review it, they enjoyed it. What’s not to like? It has zombies and PVP?
We tried again to find the Order of the Stick boardgame but were unable to. We’ll probably have to just buy the silly thing from some place like FunAgain which I’ve used in the past. Reasonable prices and so far at least reasonable customer service.
Anyway that’s how we spent our third weekend in a row without any campaigning because too many people couldn’t make it at the same time.
I’ve been invaded by wierdo’s around the country and there won’t be any session this weekend. We’ll pick back up next weekend where I’ll do my best to kill people.
D
Sadly, in the nook where I’ve got my gaming table I’ve got no ceiling fixtures, indeed in the entire huge ass room (20×25′ish) I call my computer room there’s one ceiling fixture and it’s off to the side in a really WWTT location.
So I’m looking at track lighting that I’d like to put up there, I hate overhead lights but I need something shining down from above on the table for lighting purposes and track lighting is different enough that perhaps I won’t hate it completely. I’d actually prefer cove lighting in order to bounce indirect light off the ceiling and downwards but then I’d have to cove the whole room and that’s expensive.
But… there’s no way to run wire to the location that doesn’t entail knocking holes in sheet rock and removing a large chunk of the ceiling because of the way the joists for the second floor run versus the points of access.
Now I’m looking at having to run that ugly wire conduit up the side of the wall and across the ceiling. Granted I could paint it to match the wall, crown and ceiling to help it blend it a bit but it’s still ugly.
I need something really cheap (termite prevention and new guttering killed my disposable income for the year and then some) but attractive. Get your mind out of the gutter please. 
Well we won’t be having a session this weekend but after this I’m going to try for as many weekends in a row as possible. Being old with three children it’s not like my Saturday nights are full of important events.
Brandon will be joining us hopefully next time. He’s Greg’s son, my nephew, which if you’re doing the math makes Greg my brother. I’ve rolled him up a ranger (and yes gd’it rolling applies in this instance unlike the term’s usage in MMOG’s). His favorite World of Warcraft character is a hunter so I thought he’d like a Ranger as his first foray into PnP gaming.
I’ve been reading ahead in the module (duh) and also going through rules and such to try and familiarize myself from a DM’s point of view of the 3.0 version of Dungeons and Dragons. I also (shhhh don’t tell anyone!) downloaded pdf’s of the 3.5 books. If I print them out it should only cost me about $100 a book. 
What a bargain!
This is a new site that I’m doing with the vague thought of documenting some kind of roleplaying gaming sessions. In case you’re wondering the domain comes from a very hilarious comment made by Temple, one of my players, after one even more so than normally harsh fight.
As the characters lay sprawled about, so nigh death that they were hearing angelic chorals in the background, Temple said, “What are you going to do next?! Key our cars on the way out?” referring to the fact that that was the last battle for that night’s gaming session.
Temple has a lot of good quotes really. One day I’ll perhaps post them here for posterity.
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