Roleplaying Games

7 October 20247 October 2024

DungeonDraft – An affordable map-maker

If you’re looking for an affordable map-making tool for RPGs suitable for use with a VTT a good contender is DungeonDraft which comes for an affordable $19.99 which weighs in around €20.

While it doesn’t offer the same rich variety in terms of assets out of the box as say for example Inkarnate. There are many free assets available for it on CartographyAssets which closes the asset gap quite quickly.

The fact that it’s a once off payment rather than an ongoing subscription means it quickly pays for itself. Can recommend enough if you’re looking to create quick maps for VTT sessions. Added to which there is nice integration with Foundry VTT if that’s your thing.

Here’s two examples of maps I’ve recently used in RPG game made only using the default installed assets.

The Blacksmiths Shop

A section of a village the party recently visited showing the local Blacksmiths store and accommodation. The store having a open stall window at the front with the smithy to side and family quarters behind.

The Old Watchtower

A point of interest the adventures had to explore was a recently abandoned watchtower and the mysterious cavern linked to it below. Where the recent disappearances of villagers connected in some way to its sudden abandonment? Probably not.

12 December 202312 December 2023

AI Art Wallpapers

One of the things I like about AI Art is the surreal images it can generate which make for great wallpapers and general backgrounds.

Here’s a selection of fantasy themed images I’ve used for wallpapers or visual aids for use in roleplaying games.

17 November 202317 November 2023

Vaesen Solo Play Aid

I’ve been dabbling with Vaesen by Free League Publishing for a bit now.
It’s nice investigative driven RPG set in an alternative Nordic 19th century, along with an expansion which covers Ireland and Britain during the same time period.

So as a forever DM, I was pleased to see a set of rules for solo play has been released.
It utilities a series of random tables to drive the story and encounters, making use of both dice and standard playing cards.

It was the later, the playing cards which I found rather cumbersome in use, so to that end I knocked up a simple web-page to simplify that part of the process.

You’ll still need the solo-rules, but image below (showing a sample card) takes you to web-page.

Pressing “Deal Card” will deal a new card from the deck of 52, creating and shuffling a new card deck as required.

Pressing “NPC State” will deal two cards, which are used to determine an NPC state to the players.

16 November 2023

AI for RPG Art

AI Art is such a godsend when it comes to generating images/art for role-playing game sessions. I’m using it constantly now to generate pictures for player characters and tokens.

The results are getting exponentially better as time goes on.

Here are a few I did a while back using Midjourney while not free, does have the edge out of the box over Stable Diffusion. That said Stable Diffusion is more than capable of generating useable images and tokens, added to which it is free.

13 January 202313 January 2023

Paizo announces Open RPG License

Things are moving apace in the RPG space, with multiple publishing companies announcing moves away from the Wizards owned OGL.

But the most significant development so far is the announcement today by Paizo of a new open license by them for use by the wider RPG community. The contents of the announcement is below.

https://paizo.com/community/blog/v5748dyo6si7v?Paizo-Announces-SystemNeutral-Open-RPG-License

Their site is currently getting overwhelmed by the interest for the license.

12 January 2023

DnD Carnage – Open Games License 1.1

Unless you have been living under a rock, you’ll have to be aware of the turmoil within role-playing games community over Hazbo/Wizards of the Coast attempting to revoke the OGL 1.0a license which has been used for 20 or so years.

And replace it with one which is closed (in spite of the name) and also performs a serious land-grab of third-party IP at the same time as looking to milk everyone they can.

Naturally this hasn’t gone down to well 🙂

The following video gives a good run-down on the situation along with providing a link to the revised license.

28 October 202228 October 2022

Humble Bundle – Pathfinder

If you’re new into role-playing games, then this is a pretty good deal.
The core rulebooks for both Pathfinder and Starfinder for around a fifteen euro.

Pathfinder itself comes from Dungeons and Dragons, being a port from DnD 3.5, though the second edition is move away from that original starting point.

The basic concepts remain similar between the two games with similar races, classes and mechanics.

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/give-gift-pathfinder-starfinder-paizo-books