Happy Birthday Professor Tolkien

Who would have been 113 years old today.

I feel like I should bake a nice seed cake and sit by the fire.

Happy New Year!

Wishing everyone who reads this blog (and everyone who doesn't) a happy and healthy new year!

Savagery and Sorcery

So for quite some time, I've been playing around with the idea of running a game that I call The Savage Sorcerers of Sungor.  It was intended as a Savage Worlds fantasy setting.  The idea was to have a game world that was inspired by Thundarr the Barbarian, the Den and Taarna segments of the film Heavy Metal, and Gamma World.  This was then all to be done up to look like a Frank Frazetta painting.  Now this all sounds and looks good in my head, but of course things have been holding me back.  I kept telling myself that I didn't have time and was too busy to work on the world, and maybe partly that was true, but the real issue that was holding me back (beyond laziness) was that I didn't have a map.  I could see places in my head, but they had no spatial relationship to one another.  I knew what things were, but I had no idea where they were.  I needed a map, and started digging through my folders to find one.  I had worked on a map a few years ago that I really liked and thought that is might just do, so I cleaned it up in GIMP and I was pretty happy with the results.

I like this map a lot.  I could do a lot of things with this map, but this map isn't Sungor.  Something just wasn't right, and honestly I couldn't say what.  It just didn't feel right for the game that I wanted.  So things languished again as I had no map.
I've been meaning to play around with Campaign Cartographer for some time, and owing to having lots of unplanned free time over Christmas while I fought off some sort of virus, I got the chance.  I loaded the map above into Campaign Cartographer and traced it, adding some land to the west along with a few more islands, and then I set to work adding in the terrain.  What I wound up with was this:

Now this is more of what I imagined Sungor looking like.  It has the Smoldering Sea where the ancient and terrible city of Sungor lies.  It has the Great Bog, where the mighty hero Yaard was birthed.  It has the Western Wastelands, home to all manner of mutant horrors.  It has the trackless Jungle of Hroon with its lost cities and giant serpents.  It has the vast Crater of Uul, wherein lies the sinister city of the Wizard Lizards.  In short, this was the map that I was looking for.  Well, maybe a bit more brown, but I'm still learning the tool.  So, does this mean that I'll run the game?  Maybe, but even if I don't, I've got a map to start from and something to start working on adventures to amuse myself.
I did a bit of adjustment to the background color to make some of the terrain features easier to see.  I'm still not sure which version I like better, but this one certainly prints better.

Miniatures Monday

This week's Miniatures Monday has a holiday theme.  The dreaded Krampus Lurks outside a humble dwelling, while inside the naughty children cower.  The naughty children will be punished by beatings with the Krampus's switch, while the VERY naughty ones will be tossed into his barrel and taken away, never to be seen again.  Germanic Christmas was not necessarily the happiest time of the year...

Lurking outside the door

Avoid the barrel at all costs

I had trouble deciding what color to paint him since I've seen depictions of Krampus in a number of different colors.  In the end I went with a dark shade of purple highlighted in grey.  I tried a darker wash on the horns than the one that I usually use, and I think that they came out looking pretty good.

Winter is here

Sunset on the Winter Solstice as seen from my window.  Thus begins the longest night of the year.

Here is eternal spring; for you the very stars of heaven are new

For here, even though winter approaches and the days grow short, I can still find some measure of springtime.

So I realize that there is a whole generation of kids that grew up dreaming about going to school at Hogwarts, and for most of them it was just that, a dream.   I was very fortunate, for very long before there ever was a Hogwarts, and the stars were new,  I went to school here.  So eat you heart out Harry Potter. ;-)

Free Maps - Hero System

I haven't done a Free Map Friday in a long time, so I'm way past due.  Here is a set of maps that I did about 9 years ago for a Fantasy hero game.  It's a lost tomb and includes the overall map along with scale combat maps for use with miniatures.

The whole tomb complex

Combat Map 1: The Chasm

The chasm ledge was crumbling and there was some sort of cyborg tentacle creature down in the water that kept trying o drag the PCs to their doom.

Combat Map 2: The Flooded Hallway

There were hidden pits in the flooded hallway, mostly a nuisance, except for heavily armored PCs. :-)

Combat Map 3: The Flooded Chamber

There were skeletons under the water near the columns waiting to rise as the PCs past them.

Combat Map 4: The Antechamber of the Statue

I seem to recall that the statue was a trap...

Combat Map 5: The Crypt

And there was something nasty in that sarcophagus.

Barbarian Twins

Here are two identical miniatures that I did in different paint schemes about a year apart.  The one on the left is older, and I like to think that the one on my right shows that my skills are improving a bit.

Have Yourself a Barrowmaze Christmas!

The miniatures from the Barrowmaze Complete Indiegogo Campaign just showed up and they are really sweet!  I've long been a fan of Otherworld Miniatures, but the shipping costs from the U.K. have kept them a bit out of my price range.  I was really excited that Barrowmaze was going to include miniatures from Otherworld, and now I have them in my hands.  I'm sure that I will be painting some of these in the coming months, so stay tuned for more details.

The miniatures come in a very nice zippered case with foam inserts.  Very professional!

The book should be showing up any day now!

Death in the Tower of the Tongue!

So tonight we finished our zero level funnel foray into Cyclopentaxor's castle.  The party has already been depleted by two characters after their encounters with the skeletons and the bat people, so it was with 10 remaining that they faced the iron throne of skulls.  There was skeletal liquification, incineration from within, creative uses for a skeleton-less corpse, a water slide (somebody got stuck in the pipe), and a pitched battle with a giant tongue that tore the flesh from its victims.  Five of the original twelve characters managed to survive, and I think that it all went fairly well.  I for one had a blast.  :-)  There is a lot more to say, but I'm not sure that I could do it all justice.

Miniatures Monday

This week's miniatures Monday takes us to the lightless caverns far beneath the earth.  There in those night haunted vaults dwell the dreaded mushroom people!  I can't help but imagine that a small village of Smurfs lives on him though.

For next week I plan to have a bit of a holiday theme to celebrate the season.

Holiday Adventures

A mysterious envelope arrived in the post today...

This year's DCC Holiday Adventure!  Trials of the Toy Makers.

Toy making gnomes, murder, and missing children.  It must be Christmas!. :-)  Get your copy here while you can!

Miniatures Monday

This week's Miniatures Monday brings us a barbarian war chief.  I'm not sure how he keeps that helmet on his head, but it does look stylish!

Magic Potions

I came across this last night.  It's a tequila bottle, but it looks like it would make an awesome potion bottle.

So what sort of potion do you think would be found in this?  Would it be baneful or beneficial?

The Presents of Christmas Past

As I've grown older Christmas has become a lot less about the gifts to me and more of a winter version of Thanksgiving.  I enjoy sitting by the fire sipping a drink and talking with family and friends much more than I enjoy unwrapping gifts and certainly more than I enjoy going to the mall.  This doesn't mean that I don't like gifts, just that they have become a lot less important to me.  However I do hold on to very fond memories of gifts that I received at a time when Christmas was really a lot more about presents to me.  So I give you a photo of part of my Christmas haul from I believe 1982, which could more appropriately have been called a very D&D Christmas.

It was a great year for D&D and a great Christmas.  Garay Gygax was still with TSR, and my parents got me some of the very best that the game had to offer.  I finally had my very own copy of the Dungeon Master's guide with its vast array of arcane knowledge that I could use to bedevil my players.  I got a Dungeon Master's Screen so that I could shield my maps and notes from the prying eyes of players who wanted to try to get an advantage over my adventures.  There was a booklet of Hexagonal Mapping Paper so that I could draw my own wilderness maps like the one that was in the Isle of Dread.  Dungeon Module I1, Dwellers of the Forbidden City was under the tree and the evil frog men that dwelt within it did not disappoint.  Now these had all been on my Christmas list, but then there was a surprise.  My parents were always good at getting me things that I wanted but didn't know that I wanted yet, mostly because I didn't know that they existed.  Probably the best example of this of all time was the Dark Tower boardgame from Milton Bradley that I had received the Christmas before.  I'm sure that I'll be writing about that in the future, but that year the surprise was The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth.

Now I had never even heard of this adventure, but as I unwrapped it, I knew that it would be awesome!  just look at that great cover painting by Erol Otus.  Who cares if I could even pronounce the name?  Tsojcanth.  It just sounded awesome.  I'm guessing that while my parents were Christmas shopping, most likely at Walden Books, as that was the best place in our area to get D&D stuff, they must have come across this and been as enthralled by the picture as I was.  It turned out to be one of my favorite adventures ever.  It had it all: a great wilderness trek through the mountains, a vast labyrinth of caves, a foxy vampire queen, and yes, even an underground river.  It was the best D&D related surprise ever and a great Christmas like all of the Christmases in those days.  So this holiday season, as we gather to game, or to talk about gaming, or just to hang out, let's remember those people who first encouraged and indulged our love of gaming.