Five-O

Aron Clark3 Comments

Fifty – I’m Fifty

Today I’m celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons. I’m 53 myself this year and my experience with the game goes back over forty years. It’s strange to consider how this one game of imagination has impacted me on the whole, and I’ve written some about that here:

A Gift

My fascination with The Lichway adventure continues and today I’m happy to release a new copy edit of the adventure. Tomorrow I’ll run this adventure for a friend’s birthday celbration.

You can download this copy edit here.

Original art by James Richards

Print Copies

Following my return from GaryCon XVI there are a limited number of print copies available, cost is $2.50 plus a little something for shipping. If you’d like a copy please get in touch. You might also be able to grab a copy from Black Blade Publishing if you prefer.

Acknowledgement

My own copy edit of The Lichway is not the first, there is a very fine effort from 2023 which you can find here. Please let me know if there are other such efforts so they can be linked here.

Get Ready to Play – Salute of the Jugger / Blood of Heroes

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Ruger Hauer – Blood of Heroes still; Prisma Udine filter

Wait a minute…

Salute of the Jugger is the original name of the cult favorite – Blood of Heroes? Apparently it’s true and all these years I’ve been denied 10 minutes of this sci-fi cultural phenomena. Bah, another botched US release.

I hadn’t thought about Blood of Heroes in a long, long while; but today Alessandro Piroddi released a play-test version of Torque Arena. Skimming the design log, “this sound great!” Download the pdf:
“Yes, yes, interesting.”
“Ok I want to try this.”
”Hmm… what miniatures could I use.”
“Nothing in the collection that’s really suitable – drat, that’s going to take me a while to got to the table.”

Sudden Inspiration

Steeling my nerve for a web search for suitable post apocalypse miniatures, I wondered if I could find any standees like the old Steve Jackson Cardboard Heroes. Then quickly realized I could just make some:

  • Image search for “post apocolypse standees”, saving 10 suitable full body images – I opted for teams of men and women
  • Convert the image to black and white, “lift the subject from iOS Photos App”, saving it as it’s own unique photo
  • Load the lifted image to iOS Prisma App and apply the Udine filtered – applying filters like this can help give disparate images a common look and feel
  • Layout 20x40mm standee template in iOS Curve App, which I’m using for technical drawing
  • Drop the new filtered and lifted subjects into the standee template, et voila

You can grab these custom standees here, or try your hand at the same. What follows is a brief photo journal of the process. I will report back here on my progress with the play test. Thanks Alessandro for sharing your ideas with us!

I’ll report back soon on my play-test experience.

Best Laid Plans

Aron Clark2 Comments
“Maus” by Art Spiegelman

123123…4

The new year has come and gone, and I’m not entirely too sure what day it is – thanks in large part to some extended time off from my regular 9-5.

As is tradition amongst my tabletop gaming friends we consider our hobby plans for the new year, describing projects we plan to take on or commitments to finish things long overdue. In an attempt to organize whirling ideas I have for my own tabletop games in ‘24 I’m applying some principals from my professional world.

In short, I’ve set broad goals for myself and defined some projects that fit into goals, with a simple task list that I can organize week over week. If projects are not on the list, or doesn’t fit into one of my goals, I don’t work on them. All the crazy ideas that pop into my head I collect in a separate list which can be considered if and when I have some spare capacity.

There’s a good chance this could work well for me, and if you’d like to take a look at how this concept is shaping up here.

Let’s Review

‘23 was a fine year for my tabletop gaming efforts. I have continued regular games both online and in person, but with little data to show for it (above methods should help in the next year’s analysis). This blog continues to grow with 2,220 visitors in ‘23 (up 31%), the most popular post being Holmes & Clark with 1,110 views.

Post volume is still low, with on 4 posts in ‘23 (down 40%). So perhaps that’s something that needs more attention.

I did experiment with tracking my miniature purchases and completed output in ‘23, but by the summer I had fallen out of the practice of tracking such things. However, it still seams a reasonable excercise and one I’ll attempt again in ‘24. Find those details here.

Holmes & Clark

Aron Clark5 Comments
Original artwork by Justin Russell – link tree

In 2019 I started running Basic D&D using the Holmes Blue Box, I’ve written about that here. During that time my games were heavily house ruled with ideas that addressed how I wanted the game to work at my table. As new players joined in my open table games I committed to convert these house rules to something that more resembled a traditional rulebook.

It was an interesting, if not difficult, project producing a complete rpg rulebook. Even when this project was informed by concepts that are now familiar within our hobby. My guiding principle in this work was to produce an accessible reference to my interpretation of the game; simplifying concepts and to perhaps offer something new.

2020 and the quiet years that followed allowed me to run more games using these rules, all the while shaping and refining the presentation. What exists now is something that matches my original vision and these rules have been tested in well over a hundred sessions with dozens of players.

This work which I’ve termed “Holmes & Clark” is offered here without charge. Print on demand copies are made available at cost. My hope is that others will pick up these rules and attempt a game like D&D that is not overly complicated with expense or minutia, and rather; enjoy a fantasy adventure that can propel the imagination and excite the mind.

Google Drive Folder – includes the following:

  • Google Doc of the Current Release
  • PDF w/o gutter offset
  • PDF w/ gutter offset
  • PC Control Panel
  • DM Control Panel

At Cost Lulu Print on Demand:

  • Softcover – w/ gutter offset – current Lulu price $4.50
  • Hardcover – no longer available, sadly Lulu cannot produce an acceptable full-bleed color cover.
  • We now have a Discord server! Please get in touch if you would be interested in joining the conversation there, or find the link in the rule book.

Preview Pages

Update Nov 10

Jason Conerly of the Nerds RPG Variety Podcast has be on as a guest recently to talk about ol’ school games and the Holmes & Clark rules in particular. You check out that episode here.

The You Tuber “Hex Pressed” has done a read through (flip through?) of the Holmes & Clark rulebook. Check that out here.

Advanced Bundle of Adventures

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Peter Mullen cover for AA16 w/ Prisma Gothic filter.

In January of 2023 Bundle of Holding offered a large collection of Advanced Adventures, these being originally designed for AD&D 1e / OSRIC.

Always on the lookout for the next adventure for whatever campaign I’m currently running this bundle was irresistible, especially when a few comments on Redit mentioned how good some of this work was. SOLD!

However, the collection was delivered as 43 (!) separate pdf files without great detail on PC level range for each. So I set these aside without much attention.

3 months later I was starting to cast around for the next adventure for my bi-weekly Saturday game and went back to this collection, creating an index of sorts to better facilitate my review.

That index is available here. Perhaps others will find it useful as well.

As an aside – if you’ve run or played in any of these adventures I would love to hear your feedback about them. The google sheet above is shared with “commenter”privileges.