Accessories

Choose your Clan; Choose your Family; Defend your honor and gain fame while serving for the glory of your Family, Clan and for the Empire. Welcome to the Legend of the Five Rings. An Oriental-themed Role-playing Game set in the fantasy world of Rokugan. This is a world of subtlety and honor where you might spend your time negotiating with neighboring clans or serving on the wall defending the Empire of Rokugan from invasion by creatures of the Shadowlands.

I've been using the previous dice tower that I built off and on in various games. It has proven to be very useful for randomizing the dice and keeping them in a nice, confined space rather than bouncing across the gaming table. A new idea came to me recently that if I had more of the LEGO Technic bricks that I could build a dice tower that shook the dice up even more and could even have several exits, much like some of the cardboard or wooden dice towers have.

Nostalgia: a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition; also: something that evokes nostalgia

Remember those days when getting together with friends and running the latest adventure meant brightly colored maps in nice, neat hexagons? You know the ones. A few bright colors, with each terrain type fitting so nicely into each little area. Well, I stumbled across a site, Mystara.thorf.co.uk that resurrected or recreated quite a few of the old maps from the old D&D modules and campaigns.

On top of the color maps, the site also has a FAQ on the various fonts that were used to produce the modules and boxed sets from the TSR days. So, if you’ve ever wanted to produce your own adventures in a similar looking fashion to the old TSR modules, check out the fonts section to mimic the look of the old settings.

A recent posting by another Savage player brought me back to the idea of using GraphViz in gaming. This particular example was in mapping player characters with their in game relationships to people, places, things and ideas to help a GM visualize how they are all interconnected. I went through the post and created several .gv files that have presets setup to make doing more of these easier should I continue down this path with my own games.

Updated Dec. 6 It's been a while since I last had something to write. Part of that is because I've been busy in a few new games. One of those is a campaign that is taking us through a very old module for D&D, The Temple of Elemental Evil. We're not even halfway through the Temple and our party has already suffered major losses and replacements within the party. I've been taking advantage of the shear scope of this dungeon to slowly improve my minuscule Lightwave Modeling skills.

Now this is an interesting find, especially given the current playtesting our gaming group is currently running through. The Pathfinder Random Treasure Generator V3.0. It offers lots of options for controlling the kinds of treasure given out. Magic can be set to low to reduce the appearance of magical treasures, or increased to make them more common. Do you want to give out more coins? or would you rather the party found gems and other items instead? How hard was the fight the party faced? What is the average level?

Updated Aug. 7

After doing the data collection for the D6 Probabilities with the presence of the Wild Die I thought I'd take a look at the Savage Worlds system and see how the probabilities show up for the open rolling of a D6 with a second die worked out.

No surprise, the results show a fairly linear falloff for the initial values (up to around 10 or 12 depending on the size of the second die rolled with the D6) with a lessening of the slope after that point (almost a sharp turning inflection point).

Another "Blast From the Past" that I recently ran across thanks to some gamer forums I read. Wildspace - A TSR Ad for something that looks like either a predecessor to Spelljammer.

One interesting problem I’ve occasionally encountered when doing stuff for various games is visualizing the paths through the game. The simplest one would be the path from one adventure to another for a party. A more complicated one would be an entire campaign with various adventures broken down by either level or some other gauge of experience for the game system.
One good example of the latter was posted to the Triple Ace Games site about the game setting Sundered Skies (a Savage Worlds setting). This graph was laid out in something like Visio by hand. Each of the adventures was clustered and linked to the next adventure in the series or Plot Point.