News

So let's face it, I am pretty terrible blogger, I get wrapped up in things and forget to update the blog.  So here is the state of my gaming world.

Legend of the Sacred Sword is going along at an OK pace.  I'd like to be faster, but I am waiting for outside resources, so that can't happen. 

Chibi Crawl is simply awaiting Tom's health to improve so we can have some beta sets printed and shipped out for people to test.

The Asian Chibi Crawl is currently taking a break as I was beating my head off a wall on it.

Combat Armor Mecha Miniatures is something new.  Due to more odd and lucky circumstances than are supposed to happen in quick order I will be kickstarting a small line of mecha miniatures hopefully next month once I get some art in.  These figures will be anime styled and 1/285th scale (Between 35-45mm tall) and multipart, all the joints will use the exact same sized ball and socket joins, meaning parts can be swapped between models.  Mechs will come as a torso, legs, right arm, left arm, head, and shoulder mounted accessories.  I am currently having art developed just for this project and awaiting the arrival, I am also waiting to hear back from one sculptor, though I have contacted 2 others who are interested in the work.  Presuming I get the line art back in decent order, I am going to estimate launching in about a month, possibly less. 

So there is the world of my gaming stuff.  Hopefully I'll get some previews of Combat Armor in the near future to get some hype built up. 

Sneak Peak at a far future project

So with Chibi Crawl being almost entirely out the door, I'm looking at my project list trying to decide what I want to work on next.  My wife has been really pushing me to just work on something that makes me happy and not to worry too much about the money or anything else.

So I've begun my next project.  I am not yet ready to divulge much on it yet, largely as there is simply so much work to do.  I have hired an artist though, and will be looking for one to two more.  If you are an artist, especially one who likes fantasy anime and is willing to illustrate items, treasures, map tiles and perhaps some characters or monsters, please send me an email with some sample illustrations to thefacelessking at gmail.com (forgive the simple spam filter)  For me art is such an integral portion of any game world that is imperative for me to get it right up front.  Also it will be one of the components I struggle the most with financially so I need to break everything down into waves, so I can pay a little at a time.

But what I have to show you are prototyped tiles.  I illustrated these myself, so they are not the highest quality.  I intend to replace them all with professionally illustrated tiles in the future (which I'll also want an artist for, see the art is gonna kill me)










Stay tuned I'll probably leak some real art in the future.  I am looking to try and start Beta testing late this summer, perhaps early fall, and presuming no major hiccups I'd like to have the game finished by Q2 2014.  I'll be hand building prototypes and mailing them to qualified groups.

If you are interested in working with me in any of the capacities above, please contact me.
(thefacelessking at gmail.com) Subject: LoSS - Artist/Tester

Chibi Hydra of Cuteness . . er . . DOOOM!

So I finally got off my butt and painted my Chibi Hydra from Impact Miniatures.  I used purple as a unifying color to try and tie her all together, all the shading has a purple tone and the belly and neck scales are all purple, as are the eyes.  It is a very nice figure and I am overall very pleased with it, despite my mass of issues getting her together, those were largely my fault it seems.

Warrior is About to Die! Complete

So I realized I somehow never uploaded the complete version of Warrior is About to Die!  This is a super easy dungeon crawl written to play at conventions. Included are the basic game rules and the character sheets.  There aren't any rules for how to set up the game though, you'll have to figure it out on your own, I just built a really big dungeon and put spawn points intermittently throughout it.

Warrior is About to Die!

So please feel free to download and share this with your friends.  Please feel free to alter the rules if you need.  Just let me see what you did :D

Dungeon Terrain - Mushrooms, Dwarves and More!

Been spending some time with some Dungeon Terrain lately.  Rather than boring you with tons of pointless details, here are the pics that are the real reason you come to my blog.

Dwarven Terrain Features (Skematic Pyramid Mold from Hirst Arts)







Giant Mushrooms, Crystals and Angry Fire Temple Faces (Custom work)





I may be selling casts of the custom stuff in the future, but I have been having problems with the mushroom with the spikes.  I may have worked out a simple solution by removing them all together and the attaching toothpick points instead, they are a bit thinned, however they won't break off so easily. 

Chibi Crawl Update 02/04/13

I know it has been a bit since I have done a big update, but I have been very hard at work.  And now you can see the fruits of said work.  Included in the link below is 22 Heroes, 7 sets of monsters, and a whole pile of event and objective cards.  I should note, to print these will be rather extensive at this point. At this point I am pretty comfortable with most of the game mechanics, though some minor tinkering s to be expected.  The rules still need a lot of work to be friendly, but there isn't a lot to it so you shouldn't have a hard time figuring it out. 

Please if you can read, review, maybe even test if you are able.  

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B_dGQQhS2y0vQnJtLS1lVFhWX0k/edit

I am also looking for someone who is very good with Vassal to make a module. I will give you high res everything so that the module will be as high quality as possible. I tried taking a look at it, but had no idea where to even begin. 

Chibi Crawl Early Test Copy

Alright folks, this is a very early test copy of Chibi Crawl (Tentative Title) It is currently set up to be running with the new Dungeon Adventurers line from Impact! and dungeon tiles they produce. 

Chibi Crawl Beta

Co-Op Dungeon Crawl Update 3 (Chibi)

Alright, so I've been chewing through my dungeon crawl rules as quickly as I can.  I worked out a small collection of cards to get tested through and some rough mechanics.  There are a lot of questions at this point.  I need to work out boss spawning, treasure deck density, and monster density.  But, I am making some decent strides.  As always, I appreciate any feedback you can provide, if you'd like to help out by making cards, or trying to help work out the balance issues and such, please let me know.

Rules

Heroes

Monsters















Thoughts?

Solo and Co-Op Dungeon Crawl Rules A2

So I've been spending a bit more time with my Dungeon Crawl rules (which need a proper name, suggestions?)  And I have made some alterations.  I am ditching the d10 and going to a d6 as the extra granularity didn't really do anything.  All successes are measured on a 4+, there may be certain special abilities or items that alter this rule, reducing the number needed.  I have expanded the stats slightly, and renamed them, so you'll see Level, Movement, Strength, Dexterity, Will, Armor, and Health.  This lets me give everyone a Dexterity and Will value for purposes of letting certain effects have dex checks and the like.  So to determine if a figure will have Ranged attacks or Magic attacks you'll have to look for the special abilities that state that.  I am working hard to ensure that most special attacks have very concise wording.  I am also trying to come up with a rough idea of how many treasures you can have in your deck.  Meaning that some monsters will have no treasure.  One option is that when you kill a monster you have to roll to find it's treasure, another is that some will simply state no treasure. I am leaning towards rolling to see if you get the treasure as it means it will be easier to balance the Encounter Deck.

Here is the same monster card in both Chibi form and normal fantasy (Pathfinder)





I'm gonna keep rolling a bit, I am fairly happy with the stat cards as they are right now. 

Modular Ruins Board Pt 2

So I whipped up the next two tiles, they just need spacking alpplied where needed and sanded.  Then off to painting and flocking.

Modular 3x3 Terrain Board

So I had the incredible urge to try a new bit of terrain, this is a 3x3 board made of 4 1.5' panels.  I should not it is far from complete, but you can get the overall premise from this.  The bridge tile and the blank tile need a lot of work, the other 2 need detailed.  Obviously I haven't messed with painting or anything yet.  So far total expenses are about $15-$20 as all it is is Pink board and Hot Glue.  I will be attempting to keep it that way.








Cheers

Caverns of Roxor - Super Dungeon Explore Expansion

One of my purchases from Gencon was the expansion for Super Dungeon Explore, the Caverns of Roxor.  Naturally I've been busting my butt to get it all painted as soon as I could.

While there is a little bit left, the majority of it is right here.







I painted all the Fire Flow Denizens with UV sensitive paints.  I'll be embedding black light LED's into some of my future terrain.











Enjoy!!

Freebie Coop Dungeon Crawl

So, been searching around trying to find a game that suits my ideals for a dungeon crawl.  Like normal, I can't find anything.  Which makes me sad.  So I took some concepts from a few other games and started piecing something together.

Essentially the game plays similarly to the D&D Board Games by default (though I am working on options to utilize with a normal map style game)  With players moving along tiles, then revealing tiles when they have reach the edge of where they are.  When a new tile is revealed it will be marked as either a normal or difficult tile, with some being even more challenging.  A normal tile has you reveal one card from the Encounter deck which will generally be a monster, but some environmental effects are in there as well.

The mechanics are fairly simple, using a d10 engine all you need to do is roll the number of dice listed and try to get the result of your skill.  Monsters are always treated as having a skill of 7 (Minibosses are 6, Bosses 5)  Characters will be variable as it allows some basic granulation and controls what kinds of equipment they can use, sure you can give your warrior a wand of lightning, but he may need 8's to use it where as the wizard will only need 5's.

When you have killed a monster or completed an encounter, you can rotate the Encounter card and gain the treasure it carries. The quality of a treasure will be based on the monsters level, which is basically a quick look at a monsters overall strength.  

Sample Gnoll Warrior (Reaper Miniatures)


Dungeons will have a few specialty tiles shuffled in, one will be the miniboss tile and one will be the boss tile.  These tiles will help control the overall length of the game. 

My hope is to be able to stat out the entire line of Reapers Bones list as well as any other dungeon crawl style games. 

Sorry for the mildly rambly post, just dumping the rough idea, hopefully fairly soon I can provide a more detailed look or even demo set of rules.

Simple Trees

So I have seen a number of simple tree designs in the past, some aren't too bad, some are insane, some look like crap, some aren't too shabby.  However, I recall seeing a post once upon a time on the Heroscapers forums about some trees a gent made using something called Naturally Wired, it is wire wrapped with a sort of plant material, it is a shade of brown with natural variation. So I looked it up and managed to snag a 40' roll from JoAnn fabrics for $8.  I then grabbed a few different sorts of plastic plants to experiment with, one is bamboo leaves, the other is Amazonian Phyllo, the latter I prefer, but they both work, you could use a number of other leaf types.

The construction process is pretty simple (though I didn't photograph it, but you'll be able to figure out) cut between 4 and 6 wires around an equal length.  Bend about an inch of it with a pair of needle noses and keep a hold, then start twisting it all together in whatever pattern you'd like, it doesn't have to be perfect.  Make some branches up top by leaving some without merging and some in smaller groups.  Now grab your plant and start pulling the leaves off, leave a bit of stem behind as it will make it easier.  Grab your hot glue gun and go to town, try and make them pretty.  Now, I will admit, I could have gone a step farther and painted my hot glue gun blobs to hide them, but I don't really care as you'll likely never notice.

You can turn out a good quantity of these pretty easily and quickly and they are quite cheap if you do enough.







Till next time campers :D

Resin Rabites

So I finally manned up and bought casting supplies and started to make resin copies of my rabite figure.

It has been going fairly well, learned a lot so far, I'll have to make another mold in the future, however this one is working alright now that I've made some modification.  Here are some of the copies, all of them have some minor imperfection, their is a spot on the tail that is prone to getting a bubble.  I little liquid green stuff should fill it in nicely though. Some of my first casts had bad ears, I had to modify the mold to fix that.  I am going to attempt to reconstruct the ears on those myself. 



Now, I am certain I will have at least a few folks asking for these, if you want some cast for you, I can do that, I cannot however guarantee they will be free from defect, see the above about the tail.  This will likely be all that is wrong with them.  I am leaning towards $4 per figure (normally I'd say $5 but the tails bother me) 

Insulation Board Dungeon Tutorial Pt 2

I was holding off a bit till I got to painting, but I've not had the time to mess with it too much, so here is the chunk of designing the walls and detailing the floors.

Detailing Floors
To do the floor detail is really easy, get a ballpoint pen (Some people use a dead one, I like to see my lines and find it is easier when the ball still rolls) then have at it.  This is really easy actually.  If you want to roughen up your ground, you can use an aluminum foil ball as shown below. 



Wall Design
I am doing the walls in a variety of techniques at once here, so bear with me.  Sections 1 and 2 are both hewn rock walls, 3 and 4 are different types of cave walls.



Section 1 has blocks cut out like the floors are done, this creates an old block feeling which would be good for most dungeon style layouts.  It is mildly time consuming but looks nice.  Section 2 has blocks drawn in with a pen, this creates a new block wall style that would work well for a castle or an egyptian looking location.   Section 3 is done by taking the knife at an angle and ripping chunks of foam out.  It is fast easy, but does require a little bit of time to learn to do well, a few practice pieces will work well, try whatever tools you have around.  Section 4 is done with a wire cutter, this would make nice ice or water worn cave. 



I'm going to spend more time on 3 as it is what most of you have seen from me and seems to work best for Super Dungeon Explore (especially with Caverns of Roxor coming out soon) After cutting some chunks out with a knife, take your fingers and dig in with your nails pulling upwards, this makes a circular pocket pullout that works well, linking them together has a pleasing appearance.



Now, holding the knife perpendicular to the surface drag it across lightly, do this a bit till it starts to break apart.  Then rub with your finger tip.



Lastly, section 1 and 3 have had a ball of aluminum foil rolled across them, this makes a nice rough surface that works well for drybrushing, to be honest, I don't like this appearance and rarely use it. However, it does work well and can create a nice appearance.



Once again, break out the pen and draw cracks onto section 1, this gives the stone character, try and be random.  Evenly spaced is not random, have some clumps, have some clean sections, etc.  When painting, weather accordingly. 



Now, Section 2 is getting a special treatment.  I have a Silhouette SD paper cutter which is essentially a printer with a knife blade.  It cuts out paper for scrap booking and the like.  I designed some wall patterns and fed them through the cutter, you could do this by hand also, hence the inclusion.  As a point of interest, it took me 4 hours to do walls for a single tile using this technique, so migraine alert.  It takes that long to do an entire caves walls.



Comparison with figure.

Till next time.