Friday, August 28, 2020

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:


Monday, August 24, 2020

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:

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!


Sunday, August 2, 2020

QA07 - Saturday chill map


So yesterday I worked out in the morning, then pretty much chilled all day. Been watching The Alienist on TNT, which is pretty good. Anyway, since I was blaspheming all over one of Dyson's maps, I thought it only prudent to give one of my own maps the same treatment. I dug around a bit on my Google Drive and found this little gem. When I was looking at the original as a reference, I somehow flipped it upside down, not sure how that happened. I liked the switch better than the original though, so I kept it. I also decided to add little notes in the black on the sides. I really like how that looked and will probably do more of that in the future (possibly removing the hidden elements like the trap doors and such to make it easier to use in a VTT).

My original map from 2016:

A small note:
If you click on the map, then right click and "Open in another tab" you should get the original version which should be large enough for use in Roll20.