Session XXXII: Chaos!

The theme of this past session was chaos and I mean that in more ways than one. First, we had a full table which was rather rambunctious (to the extreme even for us). Second, there was a trapped room that altered some PC's alignments. So it was an unruly game in more ways than one. I, as DM, probably could have controlled the table a bit better as well as some game elements but when the table is loud and chaotic, it's hard to maintain some of the flow of the game as well as making on the fly judgments. Oh, and actual role-playing is like climbing a mountain on your hands and knees. But alas, on with the recap.

As the party explore the 'mirrored' room they are joined by Televon and Gnarly along with his mushrooms. Exploring the room, some of the party began to fall asleep upon the divans and couches. Maudlin, Adesa, Skwanky and Wolfheir, who were still awake saw the others disappear until each is alone in the room with a mirrored version of themselves. The mirrored version is an evil version and attacks. Maudlin fought off the evil Maudlin by catching the tossed dwarve's hammer and then hammering evil Maudlin into oblivion.

Adessa, Skwanky and Wolf, however were not as lucky. They were defeated by their evil selves.

After their individual battles, they reappeared with the rest of the party and their sleeping comrades awakened. Wolfheir began to smash things in a rage.

The party finished exploring the chamber and Gnarly found a stone in the ceiling hanging from a chain. Having one of his mushrooms pull on the stone revealed a secret door. Beyond the opening was a small furnished living chamber with a door.

Going through the door they found a furnished bedroom unused for quite some time. Examining the room they discovered Zenopus' spell book!

While Wolfheir began to smash his way through this room's furniture, Skwanky explored down a passage that was filled with heavy webs. A torch was tossed in to burn the webs but immediately, two large spiders leaped out and bite the halfling who goes down poisoned and drooling. Adesa and the others leaped in to slay the arachnids. Before they fall, however, Adesa too sucumbs to the poison of the spiders.

As their two comrades lie there dying, it is decided to head back to the surface and try to heal them before it is too late.

They make it back to Caladan and Skwanky and Adesa are brought to the temple of Mithra and cured of their poison. Slick Vinny, meanwhile heads to the Cloven Hoof to talk with Onyx the old wizard that use to live in the tower before he was blinded by Zenopus. Onyx confirms that this is Zenopus' spellbook and they if Arvin's Avengers can find the Eye of Zenopus, he will be able to read the book, regain his spells and aid them in their fight against Zenopus.

Vinny decides to hide out in the Cloven Hoof in case Zenopus comes looking for the book.

So the session sort of ended at that point. With a rowdy table and three characters that switched alignments things were a little more up in the air than usual. I don't feel that I handled the battles amongst the good and evil selves to best keep the table involved and I think that's where things began to break down. I also didn't expect three of four characters loosing to their evil counter-part. That always throws a player for a loop in terms of his character concept. They have to suddenly shift gears and I think some of that was handled pretty well with the players. With some time to think about it I think they'll have a better handle next session.

I'll be clarifying a few things with the players this week over email to smooth things out and fill in some of the blanks from last session.

High Adventure Review

James over at the Underdark Gazette posted a review of Tales of High Adventure. Check it out!

More Minis

This week's theme at the Home Brew seems to be about minis, so here are a couple that I recently painted. The first one was given to me by my players to celebrate or first whole year of campaigning. It's from Otherworld Miniatures and needs no introduction...

I like to have a mini for the main 'villain(s)' in the campaign and if you've been following along, I introduce you to Zenopus!

Believe it or not, I've never painted a dragon mini so this is the first. It's an actual lead mini that I picked up at a yard sale (along with about 50 other minis for $5).


And here are some men at arms....

Behind the Screen Part 4: Miniatures

Continuing my behind the screen series on what I use for gaming at my table. The first 3 parts are linked at the bottom of this post.

I've talked about the pros and cons of using minis in your game session here and here. In a classic style game they're not really needed as the combats tend to be loose and fast. In fact, in our sessions we've gotten through some pretty mass combats without the aid of miniatures.

Still, there's something alluring about having minis a part of your play. Even if you don't actually use them, to have a tiny representation of your character that you spent time painting is part of the pleasure of the game.

I've tried to bring minis into the game off and on but they just haven't stuck. As a DM though, using minis on the tabletop does help when there is a lot of players (in our case 8) and folks are exploring rooms, heading off into different directions and battling hoards of grim crypt crawlers.

So I've come up with a couple of solutions.

So to save time on painting some minis such as hirelings, I go with a dry brushed silver over black. It gives the details some definition as well as makes the fully painted PC minis stand out more. Plus I think these look classy like chess pieces ("Mongo only pawn in game of life").

I picked up these guys with about 50 other minis for $5 at a yard sale!

Another problem with minis is that, as a DM, you usually have to supply all the monsters. That means there could be hundreds of possible creatures to choose from with multiple instances of these creatures; 20 orcs, 50 goblins, etc. I like to keep the game as inexpensive as possible and it occurred to me that minis are just simple representations of what is happening on the table top in just a brief moment of game time so why 'invest' a lot of time and money into buying and painting monster minis?

Moving on to the hoards of monsters and other creepy crawlies, I tried to use paper minis and you can find a bunch online but the issue with those is storage and durability. They tend to get...crushed.

I like the concept of tokens. They're compact and durable. You can place them on the table quickly and they're still abstract enough to not distract from the role-playing at the table. But I wanted to spice up my tokens a bit with an old school feel.

So I picked up some 1 inch wooden discs online, bought a 1 inch hold punch at a craft store, pulled out a bunch of my classic books (Monster Manual, modules, etc) and began scanning. And this is what I ended up with.

I like using the black and white images as I feel that it doesn't distract at the table. The black and white stands out enough for one to see what it is without having to focus on it. Black and white, IMO, lends itself open to one's imagination.

Now, since I used copyrighted images for my tokens, I can't give you the finished sheets but I can give you the photoshop / GIMP template file (see below) for you to make your own tokens.

1. Just scan your artwork at 300 dpi greyscale
2. Drag them into the template
3. Size them to fit within the mask.

Make as many copies of the monsters as you need to. A sample of one of my sheets is below.


Once you fill your sheet, print them without any scaling.

Pop the paper tokens out with a 1" hole-punch then glue them to the wooden discs.

Your hordes of the Underworld will be ready to wreck havoc on your unsuspecting party.

To go along with the tokens and the minis I've made some custom dungeon tiles. Again, they are very simple, nothing too distracting from the focus of the game, the role-playing. The grid on the tiles are 1 1/4 inch squares (five feet game scale) which will work great with your based minis and tokens.

I bet these guys are thinking they should have stayed in the tavern!

To cap this all off, I picked up an unfinished wooden box and with a little work created a storage for the minis and the tiles.

Cheap hoards
Free tiles
Hours of gaming fun!

Resources

1" Wooden Discs
1" Paper Hole Punch
The Warlock's Dungeon Tiles
Token Template TIF File (about 9mb) Right click and save as onto your desktop. It's a layered TIFF file so it should open up in both Photoshop and GIMP.


Behind the Screen Part 1: Rules and Supplements
Behind the Screen Part 2: The Screen
Behind the Screen Part 3: Random Charts

Quality Time Painting Minis

Last weekend was a cold wet weekend here in Tucson (relatively speaking to those of you in the mid-west and the east) and probably the last nasty day until maybe next December or January. Lucky us, here in the southwest.

So my wife and I spent the afternoon painting minis. Yes, you read that right, my wife. She's been playing in our campaign for over 10 sessions now. Her character is a 3rd level hermaphrodite dwarf warrior with a uni-brow named Maudlin. She pretty much knocked the concept of old school character creation out of the park with that one. Remember, this is her first RPG - ever.

Over the holidays I picked up all my players minis of their characters from Reaper Miniatures (or in some cases dead characters) in the hopes that we may use minis more in play (yet to happen). Christy received a female dwarf warrior.

Shhhh, she'll kick my ass if she finds out I outed her with these pictures. See we're all a little geeky inside, aren't we?

She did a fantastic job painting her mini, don't you think?

While Christy worked on Maudlin, I painted a Half-orc warrior I picked up for Zach (a future character if his halfling Skwanky gets killed). He asked me to paint it for him so that's what I did.

Good times with the best of company! What a way to spend a rainy weekend with the wife, no?

A Lulu Gift For All You Faithful Warlocks

Take 20% off any Lulu book order from now until March 7th. What that means for you is you can pick up some great OSR treasure for a delicious discount! Just enter code GIANT305

And may the Warlock suggest a few items?

You can pick up the pdf version of Tales of High Adventure, our first pulp style magazine. Yes, I know pdf and pulp is really a contradiction in terms but we're not bound by convention, right? Sorry, the print version is being sold through ComiXpress so no discounts there as of yet. But if one comes up, I'll let you know.

Also check out the new issue of Knockspell #5 from Mythmere games as well as his compilation books.

And from the contributors of Fight On! magazine pick up "Role The Bones!" fantasy tales from contributors of the OSR.

There's also tons of great stuff that I'm sure you've been putting off picking up but now there's no excuse!

More Tales Of High Adventure

Tales of High Adventure, the book of pulp style adventure stores in both prose and illustrated yarns is now available as a pdf download! 52 thrilling pages for only $4 for either the print version or the pdf version.

Pick up the pdf of Tales of High Adventure at Lulu

or

Pick up the print version of Tales of High Adventure at ComiXpress

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