Of dice and men

I mentioned once before of my love of dice and I probably have more than I need.

My first set of dice came with the TSR Marvel Superheroes rpg; two blank ten sided dice with a white crayon to colour in the numbers. I still have them somewhere and the once sharp edges have softened somewhat.

I also have the two tiny miniature twenty sided d10s that came with Middle Earth Roleplay and the two sharp red twenty sided d10s that came with my edition of Deluxe Runequest. Both of these sets also required colouring in and I’m glad I still had the crayon to do so 🙂 .

Until recently I kept my dice in a simple padded pouch which used to house a laptop mouse. Several years of use and a growing number of dice prompted me to replace it with a proper dice bag with a greater capacity. So I did a little checking around and found one that met my requirements and ordered a limited edition space patterned bag from http://www.koeddicebags.co.uk/ . I’m quite happy with the bag and it makes a change to see something attractive sitting at the table rather than the old plain pouch I had. Plus it also houses the d100 I bought all those years ago without bulging at the seams 🙂

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April 3

Roll20 the virtual table-top

I know this may seem somewhat of a redundant post doing two in one evening but this doesn’t really belong there and it should be separate and distinct. Rather than being a story related article, its more of a nuts and bolts piece; a glimpse behind the curtain.

When I started gaming miniatures were not exactly the norm, you could quite happily get away without using them but they did add another dimension to the game. You could see where people were in relation to the things that were trying to eat them and it was a good thing.

The problem lay with trying to find the perfect miniature for your character or the monster for the evening. You could get common miniatures like giant rats or goblins for the games but some of the more esoteric creatures were harder to come by. Plus you also had to be a dab hand with a brush to bring them to like; anyone who ever saw my undercoated space marines knows what I’m talking about 🙂

So while the added dimension was worth it the many complications weren’t and slowly I gave up trying to use them.

When D&D 3 was released like many other gamers I picked up a wipe clean ChessexTM battlemat and wondered how I was going to portray the action to the players. That’s when I discovered the joy of map tiles, pre-printed tiles you could purchase on-line and print them out to assemble a map. I bought a few, printed several out, cut them and laminated them to great effect but there was also the added work of trying to assemble a dungeon that resembled the one in the module that you had.

It was about this time that I discovered Fiery Dragon Press, a company producing 25mm tokens in packs that you could buy and cut out, so if you needed a few goblins you were covered. The quality was certainly a step up in the counter market and I got a lot of use out of them. They later sold CD-ROMs packed with the images and you could easily print one or two or even a whole host of these tokens for you game. Since they were paper you could abuse them knowing that more could be printed out for another day.

Anyway, moving the clock on a bit further I came across Roll 20 the Virtual Table Top, a browser based service that lets you play virtual games with your friends almost as though you are sitting around the same dining room table.

A system like this calls out for quality maps and tokens and this is what I wanted to draw your attention to; several manufacturers who produce high quality products for you to use.

Maps.

DramaScape produce some excellent maps both in pdf and have taken to including a file for use with your virtual table-top. I have purchased quite a lot of their product and have been impressed by it. The only downside is that the files for Roll20 are bigger than the maximum upload size and I have been using an image program called RIOT to shrink them. You can find DramaScape here: http://dramascape.net/

Fabled Environments also produce some excellent blueprints and they are pretty good, I just wish they would provide a file that can be used in Roll20 rather than a straight pdf. There homepage is here: http://fabledenvironments.com/wp/

Stoneworker Cartography have some very good looking maps and some interesting designs. I am quite taken with the modern ones and hope to use one or two of them in an upcoming game. Website: http://www.stoneworkercartography.com/

Tokens:

Arion Games have created some great looking paper miniatures and I hope that they will branch out into the marketplace for Roll20 tokens. Website: http://www.arion-games.com/

Devin Night recently saved my backside with his free zombie token and I have since purchased some more to use later on. Website: http://immortalnights.com/tokensite/

Studio Wyldfurr produce top down tokens with a variety of poses for each character with distinctive features that make them stand out from other companies. Website: http://www.wyldfurr.com/

I’ll add more posts as I discover and use more content.

The Roll20 Website: Roll20.net

Category: RPG, virtual table-top | 1 Comment

April 3

Z Day +1

So the All Flesh Must Be Eaten campaign carries on.

The intrepid heroes heave made a bold escape from a diner out on the middle of the interstate and are speeding back to their city in a school bus that was found in the parking lot.

With the diner stripped of the food, something in the region of 45 days of canned food and several new survivors added to the team, at least the players have replacements in case somebody succumbs to the plague.

Next report coming soon 🙂

Category: All Flesh Must Be Eaten, RPG | LEAVE A COMMENT

April 2

In the beginning…..

I have spent some time considering this post, an origin story of how I got started in gaming and rather than stew on it for much longer thought it about time I put pen to paper.

My first ever RPG was 1st edition AD&D, I spent a weekend poring over the players handbook which I purchased from my local games store; the long since closed Games World in Hammersmith for the sum of £11.95. After much deliberation and some consultation with the DM I created a cleric. We played one session as the group sort of broke up after that.

At that point I was hooked.

I played with several different games systems from the heavy simulationist Phoenix Command and the sci-fi version Living Steel to other systems.

Phoenix Command Combat System (PCCS) was a real revelation to me, I had never imagined such a detailed game could exist and I devoured it, charts and all. Of course some people claimed it was cumbersome and somewhat unwieldy in play and I agree that they were right, but if you wanted to know the effect of a bullet on the body you could certainly do so. I still have the books and supplements but haven’t played it in a very long time indeed. In fact I don’t think you could play it, rather experience it would be a more apt description.

Living Steel was the futuristic equivalent of PCCS and had everything I wanted in a game; power armour, teleportation, strange aliens, a lifepath based character creation package which threw you into various periods of the climatic battles before your character was frozen and shipped off for revival at a later date. The problem was that it was rather deadly and also a sandbox environment.

I still played AD&D then but I seemed to prefer the modern day or futuristic games. I remember one of my friends getting Traveller and playing through the character creation process; the idea that your perfect character could die during the process lent a note of caution when rolling for survival. The idea that one more term could potentially kill you left the galaxy full of 36 year-old ex-servicemen or that’s how it appeared to me 🙂

I lusted after more strange worlds to plumb the depths of my imagination during which period I stumbled across Call of Cthulhu the game of Lovecraftian horror where your poor character could go mad rather than die. I have a lot of fun with CoC, even if I do make the occasional blunders as the GM and trying to maintain an atmosphere is very tricky but it is a game of the Jazz age and who doesn’t like the idea of standing on the running boards of someone’s roadster while blazing away with a tommy gun?

So there we are, a brief if somewhat rambling introduction.