The Wilds - Bring Out Your Dead

Had a bit of a low-response turn this weekend, so the corresponding turn is short. The good thing about play-by-email games is that everyone can participate on their own schedule. That bad thing about play-by-email games is that it's easy to push things off. My players and I seem to run through a cycle of ups and downs in this regard. Anyhow, here's what's going on...

Dungeon?

In a fit of madness last night, I pulled out an ancient D&D map and copied it into InkScape room by room. This was the first level of a small dungeon I created back in 1978 or 1979. There are about 30 levels total in this monstrosity. This particular level was originally drawn on two sheets of four-lines per inch graph paper. There are some details missing, like a bunch of scribbled markers for puddles, moss and mold, but it's mostly intact. The original was also rotated counter-clockwise 90 degrees, but this fits the page a bit better.

Villa Map

I've been working on my InkScape and Gimp skills this weekend, trying to get some consistent quality, and improve my speed. Today's project was inspired by my Daruna game. The players recently spent a big chunk of their cash on some property outside Shalish, a villa and small orchard that had fallen into a state of disrepair. This doesn't exactly match up to their villa, but it's designed along the same lines. Squarish outer structure wrapped around an open central courtyard. This was about an hour and a half's work. Unfortunately I was dumb and saved this after a plug-in I was trying out flattened all my layers, so changes are going to be painful. Anyhow, here's a map!

Note that this *should* just plug and play in Roll20 as a map, but I'm not sure what blogger is going to do with it. Guess I'll found out in a minute...

Edit: Bleh. Blogger randomly resizes the image. That's no good. Hmm. Or not. If you click on the image above, you should get the correctly sized 1039x1039 image.

The Wilds - Around and Around

The party is back in the caves, and continuing their explorations. I forgot to post Monday's turn, so here's a double-header that covers the party's adventures this week. Highlights: water, weird tentacle monster, deep crevasses, and a decision... When we left, Rawon had just spotted something moving in the water.

The Wilds - On the Odor Hand...

As the group presses on, there's a bit of confusion at the crossroads. Raúguey impatiently chooses a tunnel and starts things moving. Everyone else sort-of follows along, with various folk nervously eyeing the other tunnel. As always, the doughty hirelings take rearguard. Perfect time for a grue.

The Wilds - Carp Tarp

In which the party deals with a sprung trap and opens a chest. Carp tarp, is a running joke within my group, referring to an unfortunate typo by a party member when describing how his father, a local fisherman, used to use set crap traps in the local river. He'll never live it down.

Deadly Blows - Now on DriveThruRPG

A few months back, I wrote about Deadly Blows, web-based, system-agnostic, critical hits tables for fantasy RPGs. I'm happy to announce that Deadly Blows is now available as a PDF product via DriveThruRPG as the first product published by PBE Games (that's me).

Cover Image

Deadly Blows is a set of six critical hit tables that can be used with any fantasy pen and paper role-playing game. The tables provide both descriptive text and conditional effects for critical attack successes. Results are determined by attack type and a d100 die roll. Deadly Blows pulls no punches. The tables include broken bones, severed limbs, blindness, and many other dire results, but the in-game effects of these terrible injuries are determined by you and the other players at your table.

Deadly Blows is a 14-page PDF that includes system-agnostic critical hits tables for crushing, piercing, and slashing weapons and bite, bludgeon, and claw attacks. It also contains advice on adapting these tables to your game, and a Campaign Summary Sheet you can use to record the choices you make when applying Deadly Blows to your campaign.

• Here's the Deadly Blows product link

I hope you'll check it out, thanks for reading!