The Final Four: Teleport Keys, Magic Teleport Doors, with Free Colorized Standee’s

So I colored the final key, door, and standee doors. The doors and keys make great player handouts, (at least for my game they do). The new black key is the only key that works on the black door, and will teleport the adventures to somewhere very, very dangerous or back to the starting black door/room. It is also the only key that will work on all the other doors, all the regular keys only go to the next teleport room. The yellow key/door teleports to the blue room/door. The blue key/door teleports to the red room/door. The red key/door teleports to the yellow room/door. The black door only goes to a very dangerous place, or back to it’s starting location. As always enjoy.

Here is the link to the door PDF.

Here is the link to the Keys PDF

Here is the link to the free Door Standees.

Final Magic Teleport Room Door Keys…..or “How these became my new favorite markers”

I finally finished the magic teleport room door keys and I really like how they turned out. Just used some chaos runes from an earlier post, and added them to the outside rim of the keys. Then printed out the balck and white copy and colored them with my alcohol markers. I think I first started experimenting with these “Master’s Touch” alcohol markers last summer. I get them at my local Hobby Lobby, normally they cost like $6.00 per marker, but they are on sale a lot for 50% off, so I buy them then.

I like these pens a lot. One end is a brush tip, the other is a regular marker tip. I have yet to ever actually use the regular tips. I enjoy the control I get with the brush tip, it’s almost like painting with a very fine brush, lots of control. They do have a tendency to bleed however, so I am very mindful of that when I use them. I feel like a kid again, just trying to stay in the lines of a coloring book.

Here is a link to the PDF of these Magic Keys.

My current magic teleport room door in color, with a B&W one for you to color.

“Master’s Touch” alcohol markers, my new favorites!!!

….”Friday’s Mystery Meat”….An encounter from last week’s Game.

~ Attention. Here’s an update on tonight’s dinner. It was veal. I repeat, veal. The winner of tonight’s mystery meat contest is Jeffrey Corbin who guessed “some kind of beef.”~

I felt the need to post something, and figured I would start posting “Fridaqy Mystery Meat” posts again. These posts are just for anything I feel like sharing, and or showing off.

This week’s is a small map / encounter straight out of my campaign notebook. The party is currently tracking down a mysterious force that almost broke through a strong magical door under Odyssious’s wizard tower (An NPC). Odyssious was drained trying to keep the force from breaking through the door. He called on the party to help find out what it was that almost broke through from the sewers into his tower. Being a strong ally of the party, and Marvollo the party’s wizard in particular, this was a no brainer for them.

After their first encounter in the sewers vs. some ratmen and a large rat ogre, they found a secret door that lead down some very old stairs. This was the encounter straight out of my DM’s notebook, just a picture, unedited, in all it’s ugly, messy glory. The stats and to hit numbers I use from AD&D / Osric. The centipede stats are from AD&D, I need to update it with Osric stats (Which are usually exactly the same, but once in awhile I find differences.) For example in AD&D a level one and level two fighter use the same to hit numbers, in Osric a level one fighter might hit on say a 14, while a level two hits on a 13. The orange highlighted line is what the corpse needs to hit the AC’s listed above it. The blue and green highlighted lines are what my group’s characters need to hit the animated corpse. It’s a way for me to keep all the info I need to run the encounter right there on the same page.

What’s in the Barrel? 1d100 Random Table

Here is another random table I use all the time in my game. The players seem to enjoy these, and they are a lot of fun during the game. Here is the link, What’s in the Barrel.

Cave Map for Deepfall Area

I purchased and downloaded the Fat Dragon Games – Copper Dragon: Caverns 1 PDF. They are cavern tiles, and they look awesome printed out. Printed a bunch out then mounted them to black foamboard. I cut them out and made a bunch of cavern tiles. I like the way they look, and that I can just lay one out as my players are exploring, dropping a new tile as they move further in. This map is a representation of the tiles laid out. It is also one of several caves in the Deepfall area of my campaign. It’s a random cave I can drop into the map depending on where the players go. I like most of this map, though I am not happy with the steps down to the next level. They just don’t work for me, need to make some adjustments for the next one.

Deepfall Cave Map: Number 1

Here is the tile layout of the map, using the Fat Dragon Cavern Tiles:

Fat Dragon Cavern tiles layed out.

Red Cap and The Haunted Tower: A peek into my own DM Notebook…!!!

Many, many years ago I bought a copy of Brian Froud’s book “Faeries”. One particular image stood out for me, along with his short backstory and that was Red Cap. I totally loved the concept of a hard core goblin regularly soaking his hat in human blood.

REDCAP is one of the most evil of the old border goblins. He lives in old ruined towers and castles, particularly those with a history of wickedness. He re-dies his red cap in human blood. Image from Brian Froud’s book “Faeries”

This image and the concept stewed inside my brain for years. In my current campaign I finally created Redcap, his minions Bladze, Stinger, and Chopper. Gave him two Dire Wolves, Chomper and Ripper. He became a reoccurring villain in the campaign. He harassed the characters several times over the course of several sessions. They totally hated him, they tracked him down to his lair in the haunted tower, where over the course of another two sessions they managed to finally kill him and his minions. I am sharing some images of the miniatures I used, along with my actual notes and maps of the first three levels of his lair as written in my DM notebook, warts and all.

Redcap and his minions, Bladze, Stinger, and Chopper. Miniatures are from Reaper Miniatures, hand painted by me, many years ago.

Chomper and Ripper, Redcap’s pet Dire Wolves. Reaper Miniatures painted last year by me.

A handful of Redcap’s Goblin Hordes (I have a lot of these that I used)! Games Workshop miniatures, painted like 20 years ago by me.

The Haunted Tower – Redcap’s Lair: Actual pages of my DM notebook for this adventure. I use a mash-up of old Holmes Bluebook rules with Advanced D&D rulebooks. (That and I make up a lot of shit as I go, so don’t get weird or butt hurt on me and my stats/rules)

Next Pages

Level 2

Next Pages

Level 3 and rules on the “Pit”

Next pages

Last page (I Think) for Level 3

Level 4 is the Big Happy Spikey Fun Ball maze, Level 5 is the caverns where Redcap makes his final stand against the party. I may post those up here on the blog at a later time, or maybe I should just type all this up and publish it as a PDF on RPG Drivethru sometime? What do you kids think? Would anyone in their right mind, actually pay for an adventure module like this? Comment and let me know what you think.

The doorway to the “Big Happy Spikey Fun Ball” Maze.

“Big Happy Spikey Fun Ball” Miniature from Privateer Press, painted by me.

…..A DYI Drop Table…..

I created this little DIY dice drop table last year, works well if you put it inside a game box lid, (keeps the dice from bouncing all over). You can fill out one for certain types of monsters, dungeon levels, or outdoor terrain areas. I don’t know if it is cheating or not, but I drew out the weapons larger on paper, then scanned them, reduced the image sizes and then cut and pasted them into the table. The label banners, I drew them up separate, until I liked them, then pasted them in as well. It was a fun exercise, and I hope you get to try them out. Email me a copy of any that you fill out, and I will post them here. In a pinch it could also serve as a quick battle mat although the squares are only 3/4 of inch when printed out as a PDF.  Just Click on the image below to download the PDF Version. Have fun with it and enjoy!

 

Here is an example of a filled out Dice Drop Table:

 

 

….”The Fantasy Trip Character Sheets” or “What does one post when they haven’t posted anything in 5 years”…….

It’s been way too long since I posted on this blog, time to fire it up again. Why did I stop posting here, I have no idea, but mostly I think I just got lazy. So anyways enough about that.

I found a really solid gaming group last spring, and for the first few months I did not have to DM. We played 5th edition and get together every Tuesday night. We have five regular players (including me) and four or five others that pop in and out. Then Kyle (Our DM) asked me to start up a campaign so he could play once in awhile. I told them we would go old school, using a mish-mash of the Holmes Blue Book and AD&D. They all originally started playing with the 4th edition I guess, so they really had no idea what to expect. I created a sandbox campaign and had them create characters (2 for each player in the beginning as I knew some would die, and they did). Turns out they really enjoy the old style rules and my campaign has been going strong ever since. I will be posting more on that in some later posts.

Today I am just posting some TFT (The Fantasy Trip) character sheets, I got the new boxed set from Steve Jackson Games Kickstarter. I remember seeing the game in the late 70’s early 80’s and I always thought it looked fun, but I never got a copy back then. I eventually picked up some original copies of Melee and Wizard on Ebay, but still had never played it. Once I received my new set, I was so happy to see the reverse side of the Mega Hexes were drawn by Dyson, that was a very cool surprise. Kudos Dyson! I brought the game to our group, and we gave it try. I just have to say WOW, we had so much fun, we play it quite regularly now. It’s fast, quick, and deadly perfect for winding done after a good session of D&D or those nights when not everyone can make it. We’ve had battles between Highlanders and Romans, Fighters and Orcs, Wizards battles, it’s a lot of fun to get creative with. I was inspired to make up my own character cards so here it is, the health boxes on the bottom are Dyson’s style of boxes, I copied his style, but I got his permission to post this first.  Click this link for a full sheet of for full PDF sheet of five cards for your own personal use, just print and cut them apart: Full Sheet 3×5 Cards

Our group like these cards more than ones in the game, and I have started on a new improved version as well. Enjoy.

 

….”Friday’s Mystery Meat”….Village Geomorphs w/ Rivers….

~ Attention. Here’s an update on tonight’s dinner. It was veal. I repeat, veal. The winner of tonight’s mystery meat contest is Jeffrey Corbin who guessed “some kind of beef.”~

Well, I somehow broke one of the pins to my USB connection on my printer/scanner…Damn!!! Even though it is a wireless device as well, I can not get the wireless part to work right now. In the past when it lost the wireless connection I would have to reload the drivers and the software using the USB cable to get the wireless functionality back. It was always such a hassle, I just quit using the wireless capability. Last night I spent a couple of hours working on it, I could see it on my laptop, but without the USB connection I could not get the driver to install properly for some dumb-ass reason. So I gave up for now, I will probably just have to buy a new one soon. Hell if I could just open the case (which I see no way of doing with out seriously breaking it apart) I could just solder a new USB connector onto the circuit board…problem solved. The good news is I can adjust some settings on a scanner at work so I can scan my stuff in until I get a new one, the bad news is I just spent $60 on new printer cartridges for the damned thing. Such is life, and if that is the worst thing that happened to me this week…then life is still pretty damned good.

I told you all this, because I wanted to post something else for this week’s “Friday Mystery Meat” but I could not scan it. So instead, I have this set of village geomorphs with a river, I really like how these turned out…and I have another set of these done as well. I created these for the new Village and City sets of Dungeonmorph Dice that Joe Wetzel started on Kickstarter, but we’re not sure we will be making a set of dice with rivers this time around. The first two drawings are just concept drawings for river geomorphs, I did them just to get my head wrapped around the best way to make rivers flow on geomorphs. Besides that I had a lot of fun drawing these, if anyone wants the PDF’s for these let me know and I will link them up. I am not sure if they would be of any use for gaming but I do love how the second one looks for some odd reason…it was just fun for me.

First drawing of River Geomorphs Concepts: This one I do not like so much.

 

Second Concept Drawing of River Geomorph concepts: This one I like so much more, its much more organic, and for what it’s worth….I really enjoyed drawing this….!!!!

 And finally here are the Village with Rivers Geomorphs, click on the image for a full page PDF. As always, Enjoy!

….Megamorph-4….Something Different….

This Megamorph was totally inspired by the first (or was it the second one..?) Hobbit movie, the scene when they are running through the goblin caves on all the rickety wooden platforms. In my mind when I started this, it seemed like it would be really awesome, but it did not turn out that way in my humble opinion. After some trial runs at drawing the wooden bridges/pathways I found a great way to depict them….which I plan to share in the future. But the combination of the wood bridges with the style in which I do my crevasses just gets too damned busy and doesn’t work for me visually. I can see that they would look really great over some water or less busy spaces, just not so much with my crevasse style. Even though the final drawing doesn’t work for me so much, it was really a lot of fun to draw, and is sort fun to look at. If anyone has any suggestions on how to make it work better with my style of crevasses (Which I like too much to ever change) please let me know. One idea I have had is to keep them more at right angles to the cliff faces, to break up the lines a bit more. Anyway, let me know what you all think.

Click on the image for a full page PDF, and as always enjoy!