Dem Bones - The Front Rank

Ten sword wielding skellies, ready for their close-up Mr. Harryhausen.

Remember the insignia on the shoulder of the hero -
here's his loyal mindless command.

D&D w/Porn Stars Challenge: Accepted!

Zak S over at D&D With Porn Stars unilaterally designated May 29 to be International Anklebiter Illustrator Day.  To whit:

1. Locate a child.
2. Locate two one-dollar bills or the local equivalent.
3. Explain patiently to the child that you--a dungeon master or otherwise appointed administrator of a substantial swath of fictional space--are desirous of illustrations.
4. Explain to the child that you are contracting him or her to provide such imagery at a page rate of 1 dollar per page.
6. After acquiring their informed consent, give them the specific assignments:The first drawing can be anything you, the GM, want--you can take a crappy town you drew and ask the child to redraw it better, you can describe a treasure the child needs to create and detail, you can have the child make a dungeon map of their own design. It is none of my concern so long as it fulfills a need in your campaign. The second drawing, however, must be a displacer beast.
8. Upload such work as is produced onto the internet on May 29th.
11. You have my permission to republish this message on your own blog. In fact, if you intend to participate or would like others to do so, I encourage it.

I actually had the two bucks squirreled away and was able to cajole the anklebiter  that runs my house (Lenore, age 7) into spending an evening as a member of the productive class.  I'm now sitting on two illustrations scheduled to be posted on May 29.  In the spirit of the thing, I'm doing everything I can think of to delay paying as long as possible.  She threatened to sic her legal team (Mom and De Boss LLP) involved.  This could get ugly.

Feel free to jump in - the water's fine.

More 3-D: Just Can't Help Myself

I feel like Lenny from Mice and Men.  I've found something new and shiny and now I just can't let go of it.  I have to love it and pet it and squeeze it and hold it and design it to death.  The good news is that you get to take advantage of my dilettante-esque largess.  Two more sets of three dimensional dungeon graph paper are available.  The best part is that you can use both of these two different ways; if you flip the paper over the design works just as well. Damn, that's spiffy.  Here are the two blanks:

And just to demonstrate a little proof of concept, here's a little number I banged out in about 30 minutes using the second template.  It's not going to win any awards, but this is a dungeon that isn't constrained to any two dimensions.  Just mapping this sucker is going to present a nice challenge for the players.

Loot!

No, literally, today I've got some loot to show you, complete with arcane spellbooks, bags of gems, and magic swords:

That oughta be enough to lure some dumb adventurer to his death.

And a Pendraken skeletal champion (FU26 - Hero).  You can tell this guy is a hero because he has a full, luscious head of hair.

Also, flaming red eyes.

I've got a whole lot of undead on the workbench right now.  The skeletons don't really paint any faster than the rest of the figures, despite the fact that my white base coat means that I don't have to paint the bulk of the figure.  You have to do a second drybrush of white after the brown wash to bring out the details.

His shoulder insignia matches that on the shields
of the rest of the skellies.  You'll see them tomorrow.

Three Dimensional Dungeon Graph Paper

Tsojcanth of Lost Papers of Tsojcanth fame offers up this gem of a post in which he explains how to make awesome 3-D dungeons out of horizontal and vertical dungeon geomorphs. 

Here's a peak at it, but you have to hit up his blog for the full skinny.

This is a really slick way of designing dungeons, and he sells the idea good and hard.  Apparently, climbing up and down presents challenges for characters that players actually enjoy.  Who knew? 

The problem that I had with this process is that I don't like using geomorphs.  They're great for inspiration and I can see why so many DMs use them, but overly random nature leaves me cold.  I found myself wondering why some clever guy didn't just make some 3-D graph paper that I could use to draw up my own dungeon.  Then I remembered that I'm a clever guy and got busy:



Click on this for the bigger version. You can see the
seams in my hacked together blocks, but you should
be able to work around that.

This isn't perfect.  If you use this paper, (and I encourage you to do so and wouldn't mind seeing how you use it, wink nudge) you're stuck with my big blocky structures.  But it does free up your imagination and allow you to a lot more control over your dungeon architecture.  I highly recommend hitting up Dave's Mapper for more inspiration on the vertical tiles.
Keep an eye out, as inspiration strikes I hope to put together more block files to give you more options, too.

The Dungeon: Sublevel 5A - Tomb of the Unknown Dwarf King

The Dungeon: Sublevel 5A - Tomb of the Unknown Dwarf King

Bonus Post! Size Matters

In response to a request on the Lead Adventure Forums, here's a size comparison shot of various figures.

From left to right: Copplestone Castings warrior, Irregular dismounted knight, Pendraken elf, Pendraken large rate with sword, and Pendraken small rat with spear.