Whiskey dice

 Goofing around on Amazon the other day I stumbled upon a recent fad of drinkers called Whiskey Stones. These are stones you chill in your freezer to pour your whiskey over to chill it without diluting the drink.

As any gamer worth his weight in gold, I immediately saw them and though "OMG they are d6s!"

For just $12 on amazon I picked up TWELVE massive granite d6s that put my normal dice to utter shame.

I mean look at it! These are heafty, solid, and stood up to pretty harsh tossings on my desk. I need to figure out a better way to mark them than a sharpie, but I received them in the mail just now and wanted to start tossing them.

In a pinch they could be sling stones as well. ;-)

Old School Zine #02 -The Turtle Dump

What's better than a giant, pissed off turtle with gems encrusted on it's shell for greedy players to try to steal? Not much in my book. My friend Bill also pointed out with issue 01 I mention the troll's brother but then never address what happened to him so I needed to fix that. Thus, 02 is a continuation of the first issue. I do not plan on doing this with all of the future issues, but the next two will likely be needed to flesh out the rest of this cavern.

(click to download PDF)

Long time readers might notice that I have an affinity for water in dungeons and caverns. I have toured many caves and mines over the course of my life in Texas, Colorado, Kentucky, and Tennessee and one thing that I find absolutely horrifying is bodies of water in caves. Nothing is more terrifying that a black, still, and cold pool of cave water. What vile things lie hidden beneath is glass-like surface? I never, ever want to find out. 

In a cave in Kentucky about eight years ago I got the chance to do real spelunking, don a flashlight and hardhat and go crawling through a small cave. Not one of those touristy, stairs and solid path things, but crawling on your belly with an inch of clearing through mud, slit, and grime sort of cave. In part you had to climb up a slick cliff, scoot along a flat and tight area with about 10 inches of room between the floor and ceiling, and then drop down a short cliff into a pool of water. Looking down from that cliff, about ten feet, into that cold water was a horrible feeling. Sure, near the cliff it was only knee deep, but farther out you could not see the bottom. Just BLACK EMPTINESS. What was lying in wait there to gobble me up?

Anywho, every time my party ventures into a cave and we encounter water, that runs through my head. I am sure our little heroes are just thinking of killing orcs and taking their meager treasure, never really afraid. But damn it, I am not sure I could do what they do!

Quasi-black and white version for the ink-sissies out there:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hQNcAqQbr3bmv6I7QfgfKdu1a4BEi9cw/view?usp=sharing

Old School Zine #01 -Thar be Trolls afoot!

I have done this a few times, so bare with me. I wrote another one-page zine this weekend. Inspired heavily by the style of Christian Walker and his Legends of Gath zine, and by the sorta not-so-serious writing style of Vance over at Leicester's Ramble that I love. 

My goal here is twofold. One, use the damn domain name that I have owned for quite a while now and done exactly zero with. Check out OldSchoolZine.com. Yes, right now it just points to my blog here, but perhaps some day, years in the future, there will be hundreds of these short, little adventures....maybe even a mega-dungeon....will reside there for the utilization of the multitudes of DMs out there looking for a quick adventure. Second, I have been wanting to do something like Christian's one-pagers going way back to when he produced the One Square Equals Five Feet, and recently I have been talking to him often. It just got my juices flowing again and I needed to create something...anything!

So, here is the result of a couple days of labor. Hopefully you like it and hopefully it is the first of many.

For those wanting to download:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nz7zps0EEtixS5IjvPgYlcVmrp_uMMq-/view?usp=sharing

For those of you wanting to download and print this and are going to whine about color, here is a black and white version. If you are going to complain about the black ink use...grab your old school panties, hike them up a little, and suck it up!

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hQNcAqQbr3bmv6I7QfgfKdu1a4BEi9cw/view?usp=sharing

How to go from paper to digital, or, How I make maps

I was recently asked about my process, the way in which I clean my maps. So I will go through the process as much as I am able here. I am starting with a completed piece and simply going over the computer part of the process.

1) Scan your piece and open in am art program, here I am using GIMP because it is awesome.

2) Next I clean it up a little, reducing the image to just the parts you want to use. In this case I have removed the extra parts of my Moleskine journal I draw in so that all that remains are the actual drawing parts. I also rotate the image to how it will appear in the final map.

3) Next I copy the image over to Inkscape, I just use ctrl+c and ctrl+v because I am old school and know all those keyboard shortcuts. Once the piece is in Inkscape, I select "Trace to Bitmap" under Paths in the menu bar.

3.5) Next I change the settings to how they appear here. I up the Threshold slightly and check the remove background. It took me a while to mess around get these settings but this is where I like them.

4) Copy the resulting image back into GIMP. What you should get is a pure black and white version of your image. I am aware there are other ways to accomplish this same feat using filters and whatnot but I have been using this process for about two years now and I am an old grognard. I like this method.
Now, if you look close you will see that some spots that were faint in the original piece look pretty crappy after the Inckscape processing, look at the OCT 8 "Rock" for reference. This I will need to go over in GIMP slightly with the pen tool to fix. Sometimes I will also reproduce the layer and merge it on itself, effectively making the ink thinker/stronger.

5) Next up I use the "Color to Alpha" tool under the Color menu to produce a black only image, allowing me to color on new layers beneath it and not fear ruining the black map layer.

6) The resulting image should look something like this. Here I have pasted it into my 'stock' background that I put all my maps into.

7) The next step is the tedious, but more artistic, of the steps. Coloring. I create new layers such as 'walls', 'floors', etc and color using a brush I made and simply go about coloring the various aspects of the map.

I hope you like this and find it useful. It really is quite an easy process to get your drawn image into GIMP and ready for coloring. If you end up using this process please share it with me, I would love to see what others create using this simple process.

Drop a buck a month and get access to as many as 3-5 new high-resolution maps per month. Maps are provided in various color schemes and at 300dpi, 11x14 image files suitable for printing. Are you ready to become a patron supporter?

[crafts] Crafting a medallion

So I am still working on my secret project, experimenting with a few ideas as I ensure that I could actually pull of the bits and pieces that I need to complete the project. Today I attempted to sculpt a medallion - for no other purpose than to see if I could do it.

First, I swiped some clay (not sure what brand or anything) from my daughter's art area. I am looking at a few different kinds of clay that I can buy because I would need more, much more for the project. I drew up some random designs on paper as a example before I cut into the clay. Below is what I came up with.

 The reverse side:

I baked this in my convection oven for about 20 minutes, it was dry but still bendable at the end of the twenty minutes. Kinda weird, it looks like stone but bends a little like rubber. Strange....and perfect!

Next I grabbed some paint - literally whatever I had in the garage - and started playing around. I want this to be strange, sort of familiar but not exactly right. I grabbed an orange, blue, and bright red spray paint and took turns with each color, wiping some off here, dabbing it there. Then I filled the crevasses with black paint and then dry brushed the black off the top surface in a sort of haphazard pattern. The result is below, the one side turned out mostly brown with lots of pits and scratches.

 The other side ended up more red and strangely like bloody flesh in color. Really weird.

I wanted to see what a 'final product' might look like, so using the paper I made last weekend I wrote a quick letter and then a piece of scratch paper with drawings, notes, etc.

I am not 100% happy with it, but it is close to what I wanted. For a first attempt it turned out pretty well. This is entirely far too easy and so much more simple than I expected it would be. Fun lies ahead of me!

DIY Step by Step Zine or Booklet Making

Over the last year and a half I have been messing around with book binding, though not to a level I would really like (I really want to get into serious binding, not just stapled saddle binding). Yesterday I got a hair up my ass, bored I guess. I had an idea to take some of my maps that I post on Patreon and turn it into a nice little PDF. Maybe I would give it to my backer to say thank you (they seem to like when I put them into PDFs), maybe I would put it on RPGNow....really I just did not know.

So I made the PDF. Then I saw how it could be a cool little badass book, much like the copies I made on Friday of Pits & Perils. I made it and then had a handful of people asking to see my process for making these.

So first lets look at how I create the PDF, after all, we need something to print. I use Google Documents (drive, or whatever they call it now) for almost all my daily word processing and this is no different. I also use Libre Office for those times when gDocs will not do. In this case I am aiming for an old school, homemade feel like a guy had made this in his garage, so it is fairly simple. With mainly text and some images, gDocs will work perfectly.

I wanted to add a little flourish to the booklet so I went trolling for some public domain woodcut artwork. I love the look of these but I wanted something with really clean lines so I dropped them into GIMP and Inkscape to clean them up and get them to just black and white. This will make them print much more clean and strong black color. I think the woodcuts also give it a more homemade feeling.

With the document done, I drop it into a PDF form. I use PDF because some times gDocs will look good on the screen but then print a little strange. This was especially true in the early days but it seems they have really worked on fixing this at Google and I rarely see much difference these days. I look things over on screen to save paper and ink. In cases such as this, where this is not just for in-house use, I will often print out a test run using 300dpi draft mode (to save ink!) to proof read and make sure everything is just right.

Once I am happy with the product, I grab my paper (I have a pretty wide selection, I really need to make or buy something to store and organize it better) and print out the pages. I have a really crappy Canon printer (no Linux drivers, those bastards at Canon hate Linux!) but I discovered really cheap ink I can get from China that works with it (about $10 for an entire color set) and it does scan well. It took me about three weeks to get it to work with Linux to print and scan correctly, I hated every minute but I learned a good deal about working with Linux....so thanks I guess, Canon.

With everything printed out, it is time to head to the garage (yes, the actual garage)! First I will go over my tools. Most I purchased a while back when I made my Edge of Space books. First up is my PaperPro long reach stapler. I am not 100% happy with this but the stapler companies all got together and have some sort of drug cartel like monopoly on long arm staplers and jack the prices up, so I am stuck with this one for now. It works and has some sort of spring assisted action to make stapling less taxing. When I get old and can barely move, I will still be able to use this to staple, so I guess there is that. It has a guide, but it slides far to easy for my tastes, so I used a few rubber bands to hold it in place. If you look very close at the business end of the stapler, you will see a vertical red line I drew with a marker. This is the mark for where the staple actual lines up and is pushed out of the stapler. After a few misaligned staples, I went through and did this. It helps to make sure I line up perfectly with the fold of the booklet.

The Bone Folder. It sounds stupid but you MUST have one of these. Initially I refused to pay a couple of bucks for a simple piece of plastic, but boy was that stupid. I tried a few other things that appeared to be similar that I found around the house but there is some sort of voodoo magic used in the making of these things. Maybe they sacrifice puppies or something. These things are pure magic and worth every penny. If you do not have one of these, then you are doing it wrong.

Badass metal ruler. Need it for cutting and lining up. Don't play around with a plastic or wood ruler. Those are for amateurs. Get the real thing, you will not regret it.

I have a paper trimmer but it is a $10 one I bought at Hobby Lobby. I think it was built for some sort of pansy assed trimming of doilies or something. It works but is made of flimsy plastic and often I am frustrated with it. So I bought the FATMAX. This thing is awesome. Cuts paper like butter. That said, it makes no apologies and takes no prisoners. Practice with it a little before you stroll in and start cutting all willy-nilly. Trust me, you will destroy your hard work.

And finally, the piece de resistance in my collection, the corner rounder. I do not know how many times people have commented on my books and mentioned the freaking corners. These are not cheap, I think I got this for $10 after a 50% coupon at Hobby Lobby...and this is one of the cheaper ones. Good thing is that it has held up well and rarely clogs. It will eat through up to around 25 or so pages of paper without a care in the world. I love it and am glad that I spent the extra on this.

I buy all my stuff at Hobby Lobby or Walmart, nothing special, but those are the stores we have in town. If you shop at HL, get the smart phone app as it includes a 40% off any one item coupon every single day so you can make a few trips to the store to add to your collection over time and save a great deal. I also get all my Micron pens and paper I use for mapping there. I almost always use the coupon to save on the cost of these.

Ok, so on to the actual construction of the books.

First thing I start folding the paper. I always fold the different paper separately, especially the covers. Each type of paper is different and folding them separately seems to make the folder better. Of course, I use the magical bone folder  to get the perfect fold. Were these actually made of bone at one time? That would totally be badass!

When folding especially thick paper or a thick book I break up the pages into small batches. As many pieces of paper fold, they don't always line up correctly and you end up with terrible edges. Folding them in smaller groups makes the lines much better. Here you can see the three groups I used: the cover and two halves of the book. Gratuitous shot of the bone folder basking in its own awesomeness included at no extra charge.

Next, I throw the pages all together and make sure it looks good.

Then comes the stapling. I use the rubber-stopped guide to line up the red line (on the other side of the stapler) and the fold on the cover. This is not always perfect, rushing tends to make me screw up. For this reason I am thinking of getting one of these in the future, but damn they are crazy expensive.

Here you can see how the thickness of the paper messes around with your folding. Also, the paper I am using for the inside pages I can only get at 9"x12" so I had previously cut these to 8.5"x11" before I printed the pages. I guess my cut was a little off. Needless to say I hate when the interior pages overlap the cover, looks like dookey. So here is where my metal ruler and FaxMax come back. Line them up and in two swipes all the ugly is gone.

Here you can see the edges fixed, the remains are to the right of FatMax. Next step is the corner rounder, just two quick cuts and the corners are nice and pretty.

I used some off-white paper for the inside of the book. I wanted this to not only have a homemade feel but also an an appearance of age to it. Perhaps this is some old tome you found in your attic that great-grandpa used when he was a young, spry adventurer!

And here is the final product.

I took the book out to my deck for some natural light photos (the light I have in the garage has a strong yellow to it). The natural light shows you what it really looks like in person. The front cover.

Interior pages. And yes, I need to restain my deck, ugh, that job sucks.

In this photo you can see the slight difference in the paper

And that is all there is to it. In all I think I have spent somewhere around $60-$75 on the tools to make the books but I am glad I did because it enables me to make these little books whenever I want (and not wait for Lulu to print and ship something to me).

If you make a book using this guide, let me know, I would love to see what you come up with.

edit:
A suggestion was made to provide links to the tools I listed above, so here goes. Note, clicking these will take you to an Amazon affiliate page.