Sweet. I love the grids you gave me...makes my life soooo simple
Kruelaid, I like the little body chalk outlines on your dead reckoning map of the hookah bar looking joint with the rugs and all.
he he
That's the demon possession game. Tobus bailing gave me a great recurring enemy.
Hmmmm, Fakey, I think you missed a spoiler in that game.
I miss ole Tobus. The whole flowers of the demogorgon temple thing.
I know, right?!?!
Wow. Sounds like i need to read a LOT more PbP's than I currently do!
I know, right?
I don't know. I'll look around; the MM wasn't too helpful on that count.
Oh, and that's okay; you could just as easily have me tarred and feathered for gross negligence of rules lawry.
I'm going to say this is kinda cheesy on one of the monster threads.
You should be able to stake the bastards; this is corny as getting swallowed whole by a t-rex then cutting yourself out as a tactical combat maneuver. Although.....I ended up using the gaseous form escape phenomenon as a deus ex machina...
"All Abooooooooooooard!!!"
Hey guys,
What programs/websites/etc do you all use when you make your maps?
I'd really like to learn how to do that, but the only programs I have are an old copy of Vectorworks, and the shareware Gimp2. (Which is really cool, and I know how to use it to make Spellfire cards, but not to make maps and such).
Little help here?
Kruelaid is the wizard at maps, but my crude ones are done in Photoshop Elements. I am used to the format, and GIMP kinda doesn't do it for me. For images of monsters and NPCs I just usually Google the monster I want, press the image filter and viola! Let's face it, the internet is clogged with D&D images to yoink. I also use my PDFs and snapshot images from there. I keep all my maps in PSD form, and take JPG 'snapshots' of them when updated and post on Photoshop. K has given out some nicely done PNG maps to use as a base.
Using Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, Photoshop, Elements, or GIMP are probably the best ways to go. They're for drawing andhey, that's what we're doing. (Photoshop is, strangely, the most powerful drawing program out there with maybe the exception of Adobe Illustrator - Ilustrator being vector based and Photoshop mostly pixel based.)
I use Adobe Illustrator and sometimes (occasionally) Photoshop. You need Photoshop to give stuff the realistic look seen in Lazaratti's or West's maps. Mine are designed with a mind to speed - I don't want to spend more than thirty minutes doing a map, preferably 15.
Both offer drop shadow and outer glow effects that help bring stuff out on the maps, or make things more visible.
The "about kruelaid" page has some filefactory links to grid/coordinate overlays that you can put on top of your maps, just like the one I made for Saltmarsh. Making them takes a few tricks. But doing your own walls and trees should be pretty easy.
Hey, guys; prolly be out and about the next 6 hours or so at least;
I'll check in this evening, but I have some stuff to take care of.
I don't know if this is old hat to y'all, but I stumbled on this lil' wiki gem this morning: D20 NPCs. Seems to have lists of statted NPCs to drop in a game, plus detailed lists of where statted NPCs are in the WotC splat books, all the named NPCs/Monsters ever published in canon D&D books (!!) and scads of other stuff. Thought you might like it Heathy, it looks like a kick @zz DM tool.
Cool; I'll check it later...
To avoid confusions,
Briefly, in another thread Gary Teter said our game thread of 8,500 post was causing website issues, so I said I would start a new thread, hence "Heathy's Isle of Dread Thread."
However, Gary said we should continue on with the original thread, because he wanted to see if he could handle a 20,000 post monster, so like Chuck Yeager, in the interest of science we shall continue on taking the website to maximum stress levels with the Heathy's Saltmarsh Campaign thread until he deems otherwise. Ergo, the "Isle of Dread Thread" will either sink to archives, or turn into the PBP section's "untitled" thread...;)
Sharoth is mercilessly spamming it even as we speak.
I don't know if this is old hat to y'all, but I stumbled on this lil' wiki gem this morning: D20 NPCs. Seems to have lists of statted NPCs to drop in a game, plus detailed lists of where statted NPCs are in the WotC splat books, all the named NPCs/Monsters ever published in canon D&D books (!!) and scads of other stuff. Thought you might like it Heathy, it looks like a kick @zz DM tool.
I wonder if Lilith has finished updating DMtools. She had lots of NPCs but last time I checked it was under construction.
Dayum. That's a lot of npc's.
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I don't know if this is old hat to y'all, but I stumbled on this lil' wiki gem this morning: D20 NPCs. Seems to have lists of statted NPCs to drop in a game, plus detailed lists of where statted NPCs are in the WotC splat books, all the named NPCs/Monsters ever published in canon D&D books (!!) and scads of other stuff. Thought you might like it Heathy, it looks like a kick @zz DM tool.
Wow. Haven't seen that one. Pretty cool.
I gotta crash...
Damn. Had to get ready for an inspection at work that didn't happen, then my wife had to go to a meeting and so I had to wrangle my kids.
I'll get the game going after a wee bit I reckon.
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It's cool man. Shit happens.
I had to go out yesterday (in blistering heat) to a meeting that I got called to at the 11th hour. Took half an hour to get down to the site, waited another half an hour for everyone to get there (including myself there were 10 people at this meeting).
Everyone introduced themselves, swapped cards, chatted for a bit, then got down to business. I was asked if I had brought along some information that I had never been told to bring. I hadn't. Meeting over.
Shit like that pisses me off.
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Hah! It was 30 deg. C here yesterday. Not sure how that translates to deg. F, but it’s pretty warm. Great if you’re at the beach, not so much when you’re catching the bus to a meeting (probably better than snow and ice though I guess).
Could be worse. It’s 43 C today in Melbourne, where they’re playing the Australia Open tennis.
43C...
Hehe. Poor bastards.
10C up here.
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Weather Report
Its grey, its cold and its raining. Its Britain.
Yesterday ended up taking son to A+E with a strange rash. Doctor spotted what it was and now we know, he has hand foot and mouth and while its not serious, it explains this week's lack of sleep and angry attitude from the little man.
The pbp games help...alot. Dice don't seem very hot this week though. Lots of failed saves and turning attempt off my PCs.
Let's hope the rain stops and we can hit the beach today. 40 degrees sounds good.
Cheers
Arizona's "cold" right now - we're at about 10 degrees C, and actually had a couple of nights below freezing. Summers are rough, though. It got up to 124 degrees F last year, which is about 48 degrees C. 40-42 degrees C are commonplace. Gack!
Nice deserts out Arizona way. I remember tooling across the whole state one vivarin-filled four-day weekend back in '98. Saw Pheonux, Tucson, Bisbee, Tombstone, Nogales (both sides), the petrified forest, the painted desert .... very pretty.
We here in the Northeast have been suffering with subzero (farenheit) temps. Considering 0 deg is 32 deg in Celsius, I would imagine that works out to -15? -20 C? Either way .... BRRRRRRR
My thought on staking live vampires in active combat.....
copy/pasted from the game thread;
Awwrite...
how about this....
A vampire's heart is a "diminutive" creature. As such, if you can hit a diminutive creature with it's base a.c. i.e.....+4 to it's normal a.c. you hit the heart.
Then, unless the fogger's at zero h.p., you're going to have to do above 10 h.p. in damage to affect him, unless it's silver AND magic.
If you stake him, though, doing damage thusly, he's toast.
ALZO, a stake is possibly a makeshift weapon I'm thinking...
I think this is a decent compromise between "Buffy the Vampire Slayer mows through Vampires like they were 1 lvl. goblin warriors" and "we kill him, he turns to mist, we kill him again ad nauseum."
Maybe that'll work.
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I like this. We used to have a house rule that if you couldn't stake a vampire during normal fighting. However, if you had the vampire grappled and it was effectively helpless, your buddy could stake it more or less automatically. While this wouldn't kill the vampire as such, it immobilised it so that we could drag it into the sunlight and finish it off that way. Your idea makes this a bit harder, which is probably a good thing.
So, my plan for the first fight was basically to have the giant Stig sit on the vampire while someone else impaled it and then drag it outside and wait for sunrise. It didn't quite work out, but few plans ever do...
I like it.
I set this thing up, then it felt like a railroad, and you guys are taking it away from total railroad (possibly) which only makes my game look better....
It also gives time for my equiv to U3: "The Final Enemy" or whatever it was called to mature in utero before that wild rumpus begins. I had a groovy brainstorm this very morning which made the whole thing almost make sense, which is nice for me anyway.
As an aside, I also have contrived a mechanism by which this information may actually be transmitted to you guys...
Yeah; I saw it a long time ago, so details are sketchy, except for Kate Beckinsale.
Yeah I enjoyed it for the yoinkable concepts, not the thrilling plot.
Yes, it was that movie that made me realise I must have Kate Beckinsale, and possess her utterly. That doesn't sound creepy, does it?
I too enjoyed Van Helsing, while acknowledging its general stupidity.
Lil bit, but....it's understandable.
Hey, I've never done a bard before, and I've never had a character with a chance at doing a PrC. Is there a good one somewhere for bards? I have plenty of resource books, but I can't seem to find anything good to shoot for.
I don't know offhand.
Do you have Complete Scoundrel? I have that one, though I've never done anything with it.
I do, and I looked thru it and nothing really leapt out. The bard really is a 'jack of all trades, master of none' character, and doesn't seem to lend itself to specialization.