Things You Can Do With One Hand And A Blog...

In glamorous Hollywood news, Mandy's terribly ill and I've done nothing nonmedical all Halloween weekend except play 2 (losing) games of Small World* with the "I Hit It With My Axe" cameraman.

However, despite my left hand being completely occupied with patting Mandy on the head continuously and saying "there there" for 6 hours, I have managed to throw together this...

One Handed Blog Entry

Here's a a digital drawing I made with one hand on MacPreview (which has no "draw" feature)...

Here's a picture of Brainiac I googled that inspired the color scheme...

Here's another random picture of Brainiac...


Here's an RPG relevant thought...evil wizard casts some spell of annoyance which means the player has to do everything left-handed (roll dice etc.) or no-handed. Did telecanter already think that up?

Maybe.

Oh, here's a better picture of the big labyrinth drawing from my show (click to enlarge).

Resuming regular service sometime in the future.

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*Customers Who Bought This Product Also Enjoy: Math.

The DM Doesn't Hate You, He Just Represents People Who Do

Click here to see full size and without the Guitar Hero ad...

The Case For Fancy Maps

So I'm making these fancy maps for the city kit and it takes a long time and so naturally I'm asking myself why I'm bothering to do it.

After all, traditional grid maps are clear, easy to make, familiar to all DMs, and automatically include all the information a party expects to have. (For example--in the batcave map, how wide is the batmobile ramp? Can't tell. And, for that matter, how do you even get from Wayne manor to the cave? Can't tell. It's hard to squeeze all that boring stuff in to a picture.)

So, why bother? 2 main reasons:

#1 Well-executed picture maps are--to a DM--really fucking useful.

Traditional map: Let's say the PCs are in room 14. Cool. You look down and find the little "14" and you know all about room 14.

However, let's say somebody starts listening at the doors...what's the north door sound like?--now you've got to look up room 18. West door? Room 31. South door?...chase down room 356. You're flipping and flipping.

Or say you're trying to decide when to break for lunch...well how close are the PCs to anything interesting? Stop now or on a cliffhanger? Or what if somebody starts detecting magic--how close is the nearest magic?

With a picture map, you not only know that room 14 contains no giant gorilla, you know that room 17 does and it's close enough to smell that feast the wizard just summoned.

So, a map that makes you go "Ohhhh, that room" as soon as you look at it is gonna be helpful. A picture map doesn't have to have a picture of everything that's in the room, it just have to make each room distinctive enough that it triggers the DMs memory.

It's not such a big deal if it's a dungeon you wrote yourself and so you remember it all, but if it's a module and so it's something somebody else wrote, you're likely to appreciate reminders about what exactly is where.

Reason #2: In a product, picture maps are efficient. Most RPG stuff has pictures. Most D&D stuff has maps. Combine them into one thing you save money, you save space, and best of all the person buying it can get a better idea of what kind of thing they're buying than if they flip through it (or the pdf preview of it) and see an image which simultaneously shows the structure of the adventure and the kinds of things that show up in it.

Map, Second Draft

Made some changes to the map for added clarity.

(Click to make it bigger).

Obviously what the little pictures for each room are supposed to be will be more clear once the map gets keyed, but the basic idea of how the rooms connect to one another should be pretty clear. Lemme know if anything's hard to understand.

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Edited--thanks to Roger the GS for pointing out I had a stairwell going the wrong way.

Workin' On The City Kit...

That's a first draft for the map of Eshrigel the Medusa's place. The squiggly spiral thing above her head is the symbol for "secret door". (Click to make it bigger.)

Staring At Skeletons

There are a lot of skeleton warriors on the coffee table.

They're in between soup cans and tins of cupcake cups which were doubling as battlements.

Miniatures are interesting--toys can sometimes look like they're just lying there, but minis always look like they're doing stuff. In formation, ready to hit each other.

I should probably clean them off--they're left over from the game we had on the weekend--but I keep not doing it because I kind of just like having them there while I work. And also on account of laziness.

So anyway they're sitting there. They keep saying "Play with us, plaaay with us!"

Here's what I'd like to do, I've been thinking: convince the Thai karaoke restaurant down the street to let us play D&D there at night once a week. Or the bar with the free hot dogs.

I think this is the skeletons' idea. I think they want to get out of the house.

Vornheim City Kit

So, yeah.

It's going to be great. I get to make the urban adventure book that I keep wishing already existed. Nothing to wade through, no thickets of worldbuildy prose, just wall-to-wall useful DM stuff. A total Swiss Army Knife for running cities in D&D.

I'm very excited, mostly because I can't wait to use it myself. And draw the pictures.