The adventurers revealed

Sometimes I consider getting appropriate miniatures for the characters of my players in the BFRPG campaign I've been DMing for the last year or so, but finding figures that are  "just right" is pretty tricky. Today, though, I found a site called Hero Forge which lets you design a character and then have it 3d printed. As you might imagine, such a service is rather expensive but the process of design is good fun. You can also export the images, so here is what 20 minutes of fiddling allowed me to produce for the characters:

Averaigne Inkarnate

Yay for bad puns as blog titles.

I can't find the post on FB which put me on to Inkarnate as a mapping app, but I'm glad they did. It's free to sign up, takes about fifteen minutes to learn all the controls, and then you're off. There are limitations (available stock art, how much you can scale it, lack of a good road texture), but it's pretty nifty. Apparently there's a proper commercial release on the way that will also allow city and dungeon mapping. Jolly good!

Here is my first attempt at mapping Averaigne with it. I need to work a bit on intermixing different scale trees, I think, and I need to rough out some more bits to fill in the map, but not bad for the time taken, imho.

BFRPG character sheet

A while back I posted some sketches of a character sheet I'd made to put a handmade touch to my Basic Fantasy roleplaying campaign (click the Averaigne tab in the title bar for more on that), but I realised I never shared them. This was remiss of me given ho much I have cribbed, copied, and been inspired by others; you may detect a massive influence from Dyson Logos in my efforts.

If they are useful to you, please use them, improve them, whatever. Roll high!

The front is the same for all classes and the rucksack and hands are how we cover encumbrance (although I crossed out three sections of the rucksack for halflings) which has exercised me somewhat in the past.

For the reverse, I have different sheets for magic users:

t'other half

In a brief moment of calm (real life having become disconcertingly Real over the last few days), I came up with the spell book that will be the back of the Magic User sheet for my BFRPG games. I'm also part way through the Thief-specific and generic backsheets and will post them all here for anyone to download and use as they please once they're complete. Oh, and I need to fiddle around to make the backpack smaller for the halfling front sheet.

Half a character sheet

Inspired as so often by Dyson Logos, and the fabulously illustrated sheets from the Doomslakers pages, and trying to get a handle on my encumbrance issues that I discussed recently, I've come up with the front of a planned two-sided character sheet for humans, elves and dwarves in BFRPG. I might redraw the backpack with one row fewer boxes for halflings.

Still to come is the reverse side with spell-book, thief skills and space for notes.

Feedback and suggestions welcome.
Rab

Knovember Knights

I've blatantly stolen the title of this post from Erny (do go and read his blog if you don't already) as it fits this post perfectly. Perhaps I should take inspiration from his Orctober success and encourage chivalric geeking next (k)November?

But back to today and the three reasons for stealing the title.

First, battle is soon to be joined. Based on the Combat of the Thirty, Whiskey Priest and Lenihan (I think) have devised a free-roaming foot tournament in an Oldhammer styleee for some of us Ogres to play on Erny's kitchen table tomorrow. My first adult-adult gaming for months!

Apparently there'll be jousting, too!

From the Interwebz #1 - Steve Dismukes

A while back I posted a couple of "Follower Guest Spot" posts with cool stuff from the blogs of those who follow here but there's so much crossover between the readers of each blog on my list that this seems less necessary nowadays, particularly with the advent of the Oldhammer blog with its roundup of the fantasy blogosphere.

However, there is still cool stuff out there that I come across from time to time from beyond my usual internet hinterland that I think deserves a wider audience. This is one of them; a great mini-comic by Steve Dismukes that gamers and parents (and gamer-parents) will probably particularly appreciate:

Further up and further in

Survivors of the band of raiders in the caves and the patrol in the storerooms will find the castle barracks at the top of the broad spiral staircase. Well-fed and well-equipped, these guards of Sir Reginald the Irredeemably Naughty will prove a stiff challenge, especially as some of them will have crossbows.

The Quest for Branwen the Fair, level 3

I've been playing around with scanner settings (this was drawn with Staedtler fineliners from 0.1 to 0.7 size tip over a pencil sketch) but don't think I've got it sorted quite yet. Stay tuned, folks, the denoument is coming up next episode!

Happy geeking,
Rab

The storerooms

Having defeated, or at least got past, the raiding band of goblins using the caves as a handy base for looting the surrounding farmsteads, our heroes ascend the narrow stone steps carved from the living rock and emerge in.... the distinctly unglamorous surroundings of the storerooms of Sir Reginald's Castle. They can't let their guard drop, however, as there are regular patrols to make sure those pesky goblinoid vermin don't try and sneak off with the wicked knight's favourite wine and sausages!

This time I scanned it in as a 500dpi b&w image with the brightness up slightly to remove the page's dotted grid, cropping and converting it to a .jpg in photoshop. You can tell I was doing this on my knee rather than at the table from the less than straight walls. I'd like to think it gives it a naive charm, or something...

Have fun and roll dice,
Rab

Pen and paper progress

This might sound a bit odd but I love stationery, particularly notebooks. There's something enticing about them, physical objects in an increasingly digital age. No cloud storage, no backup - if they get lost, stolen, or soaked by a spilled drink, they're gone. Full of their owner's handwriting and little sketches or tickets or photos that have been stuck in. Think of the Grail notebook in the Indiana Jones film. Marvellous, eh? all those decisions to make before deflowering that pristine first page: what content, what pen to use, what audience is it ultimately for? Sadly, for me, I think a part of the appeal is the willful self-delusion that I might have anything worth writing down and keeping!

So, with delusion intact, I bought myself a little gift back in December while Christmas shopping.

I'd never come across this manufacturer but the quality is lovely. Even better for my purpose, it has a dotted grid marked page. So, with pen and content chosen, I sketched in the first of the maps from my Goblinquest (still not quite happy with that name) adventure that I gave an AAR for a while back, "The Quest for Branwen the Fair". Scanned in, with shading technique learned from +Michael Wenman's fabulous series of sketching tutorials on his blog Observations of the Fox, here you go. I even managed to do this with the boys while they were busy with their colouring books.

I need to read over some advice on the best way of scanning in maps to get the brightness/contrast levels correct, and I'm considering how to show scale - perhaps I leave the levels such that you can see the dots at the edge of each square? Although I do like how clean it looks without them.

When complete, I'll be posting/publishing the whole adventure as a sample to go with the polished up rules themselves.

What notebooks/pens etc. do you chaps and chapesses use?
Rab

High art

Well, maybe that should be "Hi, I did some art" and even then, the "art" bit might be stretching things!

To celebrate this blog getting its fiftieth follower (Hi Steve, I love your blog; it's a big part of what drew me into the Oldhammer "movement") I thought I'd share with you some drawing I've been enjoying doing with my kids. There's a great "how to draw" book by Mark Bergin that has step-by-step instructions that are designed for children (or drawing dunces like yours truly) to create fun little knights and castle pictures that I think are full of naive charm. This is the book:

No amazon link - support your local independent bookshop!

And this is what I've art-ed:

Knight with pokey stick

Knight with spiky hitty thing

I even made up my own composition here - I'm practically Picasso

If you'd seen my previous failed attempts at stick men, you'd be impressed! I had fun coming up with different ways to shade. I could get into this drawing lark.

Happy creating,

Rab