Old Tower Ruins Hex Map

Here is an Old Tower Ruins Hex Map for you. This one is much smaller scale than the previous ones, probably best to call it 30' to a hex.

This old tower ruin would be fitting for a brief adventure, some property a character inherits in a deed, or maybe standing over a dungeon entrance. It would work out pretty decently for a small skirmish battle as well.

I had a heck of a time getting the elevation contours hatch marks to come out right, I'm pretty happy with how these turned out. I made a variety of them that'll be truning up sometime in the next few days. 

 

Pot Familiar

A quick piece of 3-d art inspired by the amazing work of Cedric Plante and fellows in issue #1 of Chromatic Soup. It's a pretty awesome rpg zine.

Learn more bout it and get links to the zine itself here: http://chaudronchromatique.blogspot.com/2017/03/chromatic-soup-01.html

Castles& Habitations Chart

While working on my campaign map I brewed up a new set of icons/symbols for castles and other habitations. Sharing them here as a 1d100 chart jpeg file and it will be downloadable from drivethrurpg as a spiffy PDF soon.

Click for full size verison

The pdf will allow copying so you can use any icons you like on your own mapping projects. I'll post when it's available.

Solider Aper Paper mini-concept

As a related part of the Simian Savanna I want to make some paper miniatures for the various sorts of apes and mutants. I'd like to produce a few pdfs of the paper minis and offer them for sale (inexpensive or PWYW) on drivethruRPG but i'm not too sure about the trade dress issues.  The sample fellow here is pretty classical and maybe the straight classical look will be freebies distributed differently from the main line.  I imagine soldier apes dressed a bit more like Napoleon wars era might give it a unique and tradedress free look. 

For now the classical gorilla soldier:

Click for full size which is 150 DPI and would be about 2 inches tall if printed at 100%.

 

 

Good idea, bad idea?  Want to see the Napoleonic look or is that bonkers? Maybe WW2 style?

Spiketooths

Spiketooths are odd mutations of felines larger than a normal tiger with curved fangs. Should they hit with both fore claws against a single foe, they can  rake with their rear claws allowing them 2 additional attacks. Large creatures attempting to bite or claw them must attack at -2 or suffer 2d4 points of damage from their spikes. If surrounded a spiketooth will bash against all creatures surrounding it who mush make a save or be impaled on spikes for 2d4 points of damage.

Spiketooth: HD 7; AC 5[14]; Atk 2 claws (1d4+1), 1 bite (2d6); Move 12 (Swim 6); Save 10; AL N; CL/XP 9/1,100; Special: Rear claws and Spikes.



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The spiketooths pictured above are from a modified D&D miniature I downloaded from shapeways and fiddled about with. Here's a link to the original 3D miniature model: https://www.shapeways.com/product/NFDX8DC7A/saber-tooth-tiger?optionId=59690959&li=user-profile

Visualizing the Dungeon

As a DM I'm often wondering if I'm presenting the dungeon to the players and even myself as best as I can.

Do players see the same thing I do? Can they? I've noticed over time groups if players tend to develop a shorthand to describe a dungeon environment to as quickly and meaningfully as possible (unless it;s an insanely boring campaign) but I wonder what is lost in that shorthand.  While I still spend plenty of time analyzing and exploring the traditional dungeon maps I do tend to find the classical empty dungeon map boring, there is so much wasted space to convey information and keep notes but we habitually split it all up or keep the details lite.  I understand some of the reasons to keep the details on the low end I tend to scribble on maps as the PC go rampaging through noting doors broken, piles of bodies, and missed loot on my copy of the map so I can track and present those changes (and other that may follow) to the players later in the adventure, yet  I still wonder if more could be put on the map in the first place. There was a brief trend for isometric looking dungeon maps but these fell out of favor becasue not every DM is an artist and the time spent prettying up isometric dungeons didn't always add to the play experience, sure it made the maps less boring for the DM to stare out compared to a set of squares and rectangles with numbers in the middle but didn't really add significantly to the experience.

I wonder to myself if by keeping to old tools we are keeping our campaign and adventures from developing beyond old boundaries. My imagination can picture vast dungeon environments that the classical graph paper method is just sorely lacking in properly recording. Maybe the computer has given us the means but the exact tool-set isn't here yet as compter and video games allow impressive spaces to be designed but the means these are explored by players are still significantly different from how tabletop play unfolds.

Are we visualizing our dungeons well, and are the other players really seeing what we think they are?

Dungeon Encounter

Just having some fun with the silhouettes from Telecatner's receding rules.   A gnomish dungeon expedition has bumped into a demonic dandy with two half-breed ocean spawned minions.

Time for a reaction check.

The silhouettes are public domain and I've used them a couple times in the past. There's a fair amount to pick from and a little editing and there's a whole bunch more to illustrate house rule docs and blog postings.

Tix-ka-tix

I didisome are for the Petty Gods Revised & Expanded, the petty god Tix-Ka-Tix. 
My first go at it was from the wrong direction, I made the inhuman petty god a bit too humanoid.

Second pass Tix-Ka-Tiz got reworked to ber much less human,

It was fun to draw the above and I'm glad I got to contribute to the book. Both were a mix of 2D and 3D art (done with Adobe Illustrator and Carrara) manipulated in Photoshop before sending them off for approval and publishing.

Geomorph Contest Entry

Inkwell ideas is having a Geomorph Map Contest. Here's my entry:

Random Monsters

I had a few moments and wondered what I could whip up for an animation in 20 minutes with 3D art tools and here's what I managed:



http://youtu.be/oQ2Ik7Lihu8

It's also over on my art blog but I figured I could share it here as well.

I wonder what level dungeon is appropriate for a Tank-Rex and a Shark-Blimp?

Big Citadel

From an idea i've been kicking around for a good long time now thanks to some inspiration on the elfmaids and octopi blog, a darned big citadel/citystate. Not sure if I'm ever going to go far with this idea but I felt like sharing.
Part of my design process for an adventure/campaign area is sketch things out, sometimes it's a relationship map, sometimes it's sort of a storyborad, maps, and other times it's panoramas.

Overall shot:

A painted sketchy render of the idea. The rows of grey blocky dots are a couple thousand buildings each.

Closeup on one outer bastion.

The little red dots are 6' tall people.

Going all 10' by 10'grid precision on this would be awesome and insanely crazy.  I have to wonder how much mileage I could get out of using these shots and others at the table to explain and illustrate the adventure setting and how much grunt work I could skip thanks to the limited spectacle; do players have to know where the barracks room is inside the outer western foot of the that bastion or would just knowing it's in there do the job?

The March

A piece I whipped up today.

Sci-Fi Lady [art]

A Sci-Fi lady I whipped up this morning.


She doesn't go with any recent projects, she just leaped out of my mind onto the digital canvas.

She's also over on my art blog with a few other pieces.

Mapping the Whole World

Ever want to map your whole game world. Not just the main campaign area but the whole world?
I'll admit it I have. I have to settle for projection problems caused by drawing a the surface of a sphere (a planet) onto a plane (the map). With modern software and computers we can draw a 3-D globe.

Here's a sample map:

Here's a couple shots of that sample world map wrapped onto and rendered on a sphere:

Not amazing since the source map was so simple and low res but definitely proof of concept. cool thing is 3D software, even something as simple as the 3D feature in newer versions of Photoshop let you draw on the globe itself.

Just have to figure out how to map relatively non-distorted hexes onto the 3D globe for a traditional hex crawl.

The Big Bang [ART]

My youngest son just drew this , handed it to my wife saying "This my picture, this The Big Bang".
"What's the picture honey?" asked my wife.
"The Big Bang Mommy" said my son



So there you go, The Big Bang as drawn by my 27 month old son.
The wife and I are both a little surprised.

Three Old-School Monster Sketches

Three old-school inspired monster sketches just begging for statistics.

Beastly Map Monsters

The following image is part of a collection of monster map icons.



Legal Mumbo-jumbo:
These map symbols are copyright 2011 by James D. Jarvis, anyone is free to use them for private, shared or commercial projects all I ask is to be notified about the project (a comment here would work fine) and to be credited for my contribution to your project (a link to this post would be cool). An exact copy of the specific image above isn't authorized for redistribution.

Humanoid Map Monsters

The following image is part of a collection of monster map icons.



Legal Mumbo-jumbo:
These map symbols are copyright 2011 by James D. Jarvis, anyone is free to use them for private, shared or commercial projects all I ask is to be notified about the project (a comment here would work fine) and to be credited for my contribution to your project (a link to this post would be cool). An exact copy of the specific image above isn't authorized for redistribution.

Undead Map Monsters

The following image is part of a collection of monster map icons. These and those that will follow in future posts are inspired by the old Heroquest game which had an adventure booklet full of one page dungeons where monsters were indicated on the map with graphics. I liked the idea then and I still like the idea.



Legal Mumbo-jumbo:
These map symbols are copyright 2011 by James D. Jarvis, anyone is free to use them for private, shared or commercial projects all I ask is to be notified about the project (a comment here would work fine) and to be credited for my contribution to your project (a link to this post would be cool). An exact copy of the specific image above isn't authorized for redistribution.

Busy,busy, busy

I've haven't been blogging a whole lot lately as I've been busy with a few art contracts, great for me, not so great for the blog, really bad for this guy...

My lovely wife also got me the Tome of Horrors Complete for my birthday, lot's to read in there.