DIY

Make, build, and create it yourself

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

Aron Clark3 Comments
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.

The Tower

Aron Clark4 Comments
Art by Rolla Nordic (Murielle Berulfsen) – Prisma “We Can Do It” filter

The Thought Eater podcast recently jogged my memory on dice towers. Which I find to be an interesting table top accessory. Probably speaks to my neat’freak ascetic – everything in it’s place. That along with my appreciation for mechanical / tactile tools.

I’ve heard from some who are defiantly anti-dice tower. The basic complaint is they are too big, take up too much space, are noisy, and ugly. I do agree that a dice tower can create these problems. Imagine a table where everyone had their own personal dice tower – maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

A few years back a good friend, Dave S. told me a tale of a fabulous game where the DM had a dice tower – all their rolls done in the open – with the advantage of the being decorated in the the theme of the game. That story sparked a moment of creativity – I made a tower for Dave as a gift.

Dave’s Dungeon Craw Classic Dice Tower (DDDCDT)

I made two more of these with the same collage theme and was always frustrated with the actual construction. Plans sketched on paper – cut lines drawn in pencil on 1/8” press board – hand cut w/ carpet knife and steel ruler – all contributed a good deal of wonky variance that I would try and resolve during construction with predictable results.

Solution – a template – grabbing my trusty iPad I laid out in iDesign a simple pattern template – print without scaling and paste directly to the press board – hand cuts still not 100% but much much better. Download the template here.

The tower in action, complete with sound effects

Tech

Aron Clark2 Comments
2x filter via Prisma iOS

In my hobby today I use so much tech, it’s like I was born and raised in Silicon Valley or something. Desktop publishing was the boon of the 90s while teetering on the edge of the always connected internet age. Now digital is everywhere, it is everything, it is the tools I use daily – you probably do too.

One of my favorite aspects of RPGs are deeply nested random tables which create a staggering array of combinations while yielding unexpected results. The best of these can take a good deal of dice rolling, note taking, and inspired interpretation. Not really a tool that can be used “in game”, but that all changes when we go digital.

Behold the power of:
=index(Lookup!Y3:Y32,match(RANDBETWEEN(1,30),Lookup!$K3:$K32,0))

What is this strange gibberish you say? Simply the logical power of a digital array (spread sheet) that provides instantaneous lookup against random entry (dice rolls) from a given table.

Want to know something special about a city – push a button:

Maybe you need an NPC for that city – push a button:

Or maybe you have favorite tables you’d like to convert to a digital solution, for instant generation from nearly anywhere. Here’s a Google Sheet sample that you can study and build your own thing. Doesn’t make sense? Ping me and I’ll walk you through it, we’ll record a video of that and post it here.