Typical

Like always, I completely neglect writing when something comes up.  The campaign I was working on (unabashedly stolen from M:TG's Innistrad) got sidetracked when I started combing through the old modules at DnD Classics.  I threw together about 30 locations based on locales from Keep on the Borderlands, the Secret of Bone Hill and Lankhmar, and I sprinkled them around a starter area.  Then I got sidetracked again when our FLGS got a multi-arcade machine.

Previously I've built two arcades; a standup, years ago, and a cocktail more recently.  Both ran MAME, a multiple arcade machine emulator that's freely available, and a host of old arcade ROMs, which aren't.  This time, in the grand tradition of, well, what I do, I'm stealing ideas from a much better build.  Using MDF, I've so far put together a frame and am just finishing up the front/top/back pieces, including two access doors (for the monitor and the CPU and subwoofer) and the control panel.

I picked up a newish CPU and used 5:4 19" monitor off craigslist for a reasonable amount. I need to order the controls, but otherwise I have just about everything to finish up the cabinet.  It's still a long process; after the frame is put together, I need to sand, fill, and sand some more before I even start to prime, paint and finish it.  Oh, and before I play the living bejesus out of it in my basement.

The Southlands - Introduction and Background

This is the introduction and background information for the Labyrinth Lord campaign I'm putting together.  It borrows heavily from other sources, and the names have been changed to protect the mostly innocent (me).

Introduction

"Greyport, on the horizon!"

The popular trading hub between the port towns of Thalia and the mountain reaches of the Geir, Greyport seems like a fitting place for someone to start a new life.  The guilds around the city are always looking for a few brave souls to do the jobs they won't, and enough civilizations have fallen, risen and fallen again that their remains dot the landscape, like beacons showing a path to the wealth hidden beneath the mud of the Moorlands.

You step off the ship into the town of Greyport, and with that step you leave your old life behind you.

Background

The regions that make up the Southlands are divided into four distinct provinces:

Lavonry - Home to the capital seat of the Southlands, Greyport, Lavonry extends north from the South Sea to the twin peaks of the Strand, the mountain range that crosses east-west through the lands.  Its rolling hills are dotted with farms and forests, though they are dwarfed by Hessig's mighty hinterlands.

Within a few miles of Greyport's walls, there are several medium-sized towns. This area is called the Nearheath and is inhabited mainly by artisans and farmers. Being so close to Greyport affords a good deal of protection to these towns. Most have fortifications or walls in case of a ghoul attack or some other threat, but there are many outlying farms as well.

Thalia - This province is defined by water—by its access to the ocean (the easiest of any province), by its many rivers that lead deep inland, and by its deltas, marshes, and lakes. Water enables commerce here but also gives Thalia a silvery, mystical character; the clouds and the moon seem to be both above and below in most places.

Hessig - The province of Hessig consists of rolling farmlands surrounded by grasping fingers of dense, dark woods. The woods are almost supernaturally dense, filled with dark, sinuous trunks and a constant, hanging mist. The trees have broad leaves in muted reds, golds, and greens, and the forest floor is papered in damp leaves. The largest forest in the province, the Ulvenwald, tends to isolate Hessig from the other provinces, as travelers through the woods are subject to attacks by wolves, hauntings by all manner of primordial spirits, and mysterious disappearances in the mist. At night, the autumnal colors of Ulvenwald turn stark and steely under the silver glow of the moon. The only spots of color that appear are the luminous eyes of animals and the geistfires of shimmering apparitions.

Geir - The province of Geir is the darkest both literally and figuratively in the Southlands, but also the most dramatic, the most storied, and the most unexplored. Its valleys range from pastoral (albeit dusky) range-lands to black bogs into which dead conifers slowly sink. Its black-pine-forested midlands, riddled with wisps of thick fog, show colors from deep green to purple to orange-grey. Its far-flung indigo and black mountains disappear into the clouds, and humans can only imagine what dwells among the shrouded peaks.

Microsoft Surface Pro

Digital scans of old D&D modules are becoming one of my most bought and downloaded commodities, as sites like RPGNow, DNDClassics and 4Shared and allowing me to revisit modules that haven't seen life in nearly three decades.  I've been considering buying a new tablet recently as my Kindle Fire, while great for reading books, isn't holding up so well as a PDF reader; books can have their fonts sized appropriately and a page of text on the Kindle Fire doesn't have to be equal to a page of text in a document.  Not so with a PDF...digital scans are reproductions, often without any OCR, of the original documents, so I'm constantly having to resize and scroll around documents, which is annoying during play.

Gabe over at Penny Arcade posted a review of the Microsoft Surface Pro, including a video of him drawing on it.  I'm no MS fanboi, but they aren't Apple so my disdain is within the limits of still buying from them.  If they make a good product and don't lock it down or make it annoying, I'm willing to try it out.  From Gabe's review, it sounds like they have a winner.

He grabbed Sketchbook Pro, a drawing package, Steam and several games and tested them out.  The ability to draw on this  thing, then read through and markup PDFs, then whip out a few minutes of WoW or Civ 5 is pretty impressive to me, and would meet my needs almost completely.  I currently game/program/read on my Asus G71G series gaming laptop...it's great, but huge; I basically cannot take it places as it's so bulky, but it works great as a living room laptop.  It is, however, showing it's age.  It's running into heat problems and is getting choppy on some animations.  It also doesn't have a great feel for programming; I want something that has a smaller footprint and can easily be moved around or popped open in a coffee shop for a few minutes.  It's never really come back from hibernation well either.

All that said, it looks like the Surface starts out at $999 without the keyboard.  That's high for a tablet, but about right for a laptop, so as a combination product I think that's probably a great price point.  The ability to draw out a map, read through a PDF, connect with Google Hangouts

Of Mice and Mystics

I'm fairly fortunate to have a wife that digs board games.  With several of our couple friends, we'll pull out Settlers of Catan, Dominion or even Diplomacy* and throw down some gaming time many weekends.  I'd love for her to be into D&D, but the few times I've sat her down with a group, even our closest friends, she's had the same basic complaint...it's slow and it doesn't hold her interest.  She's not terribly interested in role-playing...she'll come up with a background for a character (I thought a princess, with the ability to speak to animals, escaping from her overly protective royal family to pursue a life of adventure was a great background for a ranger) but once we get into the meat of the game, she's not really into spending time bartering with the local fence over a stolen ruby for that extra 100gp.

I'm tempted to pickup Mice and Mystics for several reasons, and she's one of them.  It's enough like a board game that I think it would maintain her interest and I think the scant bits of RP it does contain she, and our other non-RPing friends, would be able to get behind.  It also would give me a reason to pick up minis like these.  I mean, come on...rat minis? Who can resist these (hattip Carmen, of Carmen's Fun Painty Time, for the paint job).

The play reminds me of the D&D board games (Wrath of Ashardalon, et al), which I picked up because they were a good deal on minis.  If, once I get sick of painting the horde of Reaper minis that are showing up in about a month, I'm still interested in painting anything, I'll probably see about this one.

For kicks, here's Rodney from Watch it Played demonstrating the play for Mice and Mystics.

*this happened one time, was a fluke, and I've been promised it will not happen again

Maps, sketches and doodles

For the past two years, I've been in a weekly game of D&D with a group of guys (and the occasional girl) out at the FLGS.  During those games, I doodle...a lot.  I'm a big fan of map making, but just as often I'll doodle whatever's going on in the current game or a picture of my character or whatnot.  I don't concentrate very well if I'm not doing something else...I'm one of those people that can't just sit down and watch tv, I've got to be doing something else at the same time.

This is one of those doodles.  In the spirit of the web and the OSR community, I wholeheartedly and unabashedly steal from other  peoples' styles that I like.  Dyson Logo's maps are a great insipration...his crosshatching has become my favorite fill style by far (as an aside, he has a book of maps for sale...I grabbed two copies, including the limited release hardback, this Christmas).  Heather Souliere's site had this post awhile back that was a direct inspiration for the map above.

I dig playing around with shading, shapes, figures, etc.  Probably the original inspiration for most of us, Tolkien, is the style of world maps that I enjoy drawing the most.  This one, at left, is based on locations described in the Magic: The Gathering expansion Innistrad.  I've been meaning to come up with a good campaign based on Innistrad for awhile, something that mixes good Ravenloft gothic horror with the tone (werewolves and vampires vs. the rest of human society) and magic system of M:TG, and I think I have one.  I'll write that up in another post, but for anyone interested in the meantime check out the Planeswalker's Guide to Innistrad, a great background guide to the plane.

First Post

I've followed blogs like Dyson Logos, Grognardia, Roles, Rules and Rolls and probably 20+ others for years now.  The work that's come out of them has always impressed me and the resources they've provided the gaming community is nothing short of amazing.

No great writer, I've avoided creating a similar site because each time I start thinking about it I get sidetracked and lose interest.  I'm hoping this time will be different.  As my friends have gotten older, they've begun having families and kids, and I'm finding it harder and harder to get together in real-life for some much needed gaming.  I'm going to start trying to do Google Hangout or Roll20 games occasionally, and I'd like this site to become a clearing house and repository for some of the ideas I've grabbed, discovered and collected over the years to share with them as we're gaming.  A time saver and a quick "Go look here", since most of  them aren't quite as into this as I am.

Alternate Reality's Devourer

The name "Devourer in the Dungeon" came from a creature in a little-known game called The Dungeon, a game I played it on a buddy's dual disk drive Atari back in the early 80s (image credit to this site).  The Dungeon was a 3d dungeon crawl years before Wolfenstein had been conceived, and featured a sprawling map (that you had to hand draw, by the way), guilds and random encounters, including this little menace that would show up and eat your items. A classic creature in the same vein as the Rust Monster.