The Pink Dice Chronicles

So, things are coming together for my Pathfinder cyberpunk campaign.  I've gotten 2 documents out so far to my players, and the third goes out to players this week.  Here's what my players are getting for the campaign: Setting Guide for Port Wayne (51 pages) History Culture Geography Locations Groups People of Interest Cyberpunk Path Rules (171 pages) 5 New Races 2 New Classes 18 New Archetypes 3+ New Skills plus New Interpretations of Old Skills 41 New Feats and Traits Rules extensions for Cyberpunk Almost 20 pages of new Equipment Rules for building, equipping, and upgrading robots, vehicles, and android bodies New Computer building rules 29 New Spells Sheets for building Cyborgs, Vehicles, Robots, and Androids Cyberpunk Prebuilds (59 pages) 35 prebuilt vehicles with full stats 18 prebuilt NPC contacts with stat blocks Since the rules are an extension to Pathfinder, they can also use everything in the PRD except the Technology Guide and ...

September has been a long month, but I have gotten a few things done.  Here's my status update. Port Wayne Cyberpunk Setting  -- I successfully completed a release of the Port Wayne Cyberpunk setting and have already started adding a few new pieces of content that will appear in the next version.   STATUS:  Complete Dead Channel Sky  -- I've done a lot of work on this here and there.  The NPC and Premade Vehicle sections have been split out as a separate book.  I also recently found a quote from William Gibson, indicating he really didn't like Shadowrun and its mixing of Elves and cyberpunk, so I'll probably change the name and direction a bit.  I've also looked into appropriate licenses for release.  For now, I am just trying to get it to a playable state for a single game.   STATUS: 90 %  Complete The Pink Dice Chronicles Blog   -- My stats are down in September, mostly because I haven't been posting as much. ...

These days I am getting maybe 2 segments of 3 hours a day where I am in relatively little pain, assuming I keep my activity limited.  Driving my wife to the store or going to the doctor pretty much knocks out the entire day for me, so I lose quite a few days a week.  Hopefully soon I will get this issue all resolved. In the meantime, with no weekly game set up yet, I have turned my attention to using some of these little segments of times to work on gaming projects when I am not spending time with my family or handling other household things to do.  A little time scattered here in there can make at least some progress on getting things done. So here is my list of gaming projects currently underway: Port Wayne Cyberpunk Setting -- Originally this was a Shadowrun setting made up of a series of handouts and built off of the Shadowrun world and history.  I am revamping it into a single book that is all setting and no rules.  The world I am building it on is p...

As always, click to see larger versions of the pictures.

Just needs woodburnt to add some detail and it will be ready to mount into place.

Here are a couple of pictures of a project I am building for my next campaign. Can anyone figure out what this piece is?  The one section can swivel inside the other.

I just read this great article by Dungeon Fantastic on "Has that problem come up in actual play?" , which looks at the difference in game design between rules that break in theory versus rules that break in play.  I've designed plenty of games in my time, most of them as a kid who wanted to play D&D but couldn't afford any of the books.  Even comparing my attempts as an adult to my successes as a kid, I can see the very obvious wisdom, that a game is designed best by playing it. As a kid, this was very odd, because many of my test session were, in fact, me with my box of D6 dice taken out of every board game in the house, rolling merrily away by myself trying to kill the monsters I had created.  As GM and player and game writer, I knew the strengths and weaknesses and I could push and pull at every aspect.  The end product worked, though it wasn't nearly as elegant as systems I've seen since. As an adult, I've written some RPG system stuff, extensi...

I thought I would share my secret are the keep I recently made.  Here's a picture of it here: I built this keep out of castle birdhouses I got for $5 at our local Michael's craft store.  Here's the picture of them on the shelf: The other trick I used was Rustoleum "Stone" spray paint which gave the keep a nice speckled color and texture.  It took two cans, but it was worth it.

 Sandra and Don the Magnificent returned from Waterdeep with an army of defenders and many construction workers.  Construction was quickly underway to install the new gate and the firewurm.  Crews also assembled and placed the two new springals and the new cannon.  Felix scouted the region from the air.  Corrail scouted the region as well during hunting. A small caravan wagon train passed through on the road heading from Waterdeep to Luskan.  Don and Felix went out to try to negotiate trade with the familiar driver named Greenback.  Greenback seemed annoyed and nervous and insisted on moving on, promising to stop back if they weren't all killed by the time of his return trip. At dawn, assault on the Thornhold began with the blow of a Dwarven horn.  35 Dwarves appeared at the edge of the forest.  A group of 20 foot solders and their 4 commanders charged the hold directly with two gargantuan ladders and a gallery ram.  Several ranger...

Didn't somebody say something about a keep?

So we got together last night, and after a few character tweaks, the Pien Ridge Horror got back underway.  So here's roughly how the adventure went: Found gruesome stuff while hiking.  I fail my fear check. Set up camp.  Get frightenened by a bear escaping one of the sasquatch that we don't know about yet.  I fail my fear attempt.  The bear gets shot. Sasquatch grabs one of our rangers.  Pieces go flying and I fail my fear check. One of the other characters flies up to the ridge with the radio to call for help.  He gets rocks throw at him by the sasquatch, but isn't injured. We sleep overnight and I regain myself after being frightened so many times. We head up the trail and get attacked by a saquatch.  Several good shots protect us from getting mauled by the crazed creature. At this point one of the other guys take over as GM. We head up to a cabin lead by an Indian named Crowkiller. We fortify and prepare for sasquatch atta...

For Halloween, I hosted a special event of "Expedition to Castle Ravenloft" at my home for 6 select gamers from my groups and family.  Unfortunately, one of the players bailed at the last minute, but a party of 5 was sufficient to get going.  There was a plethora of food and drink (no Pinatas).  I tried out the prototype build of my new 'gaming extension table'.   The party spent over 3 hours building characters.  We used HeroLab for some and had to fight it a bit on the spell-less ranger build.  The group consisted of: Zephyr, a Kitsune Rogue / Druid Sam the axebeak J, a blind Oread Fighter / Cleric Kratos, a spell-less ranger Lloyd, a wolf Orflex, a half-orc barbarian who flex into a rage anytime anyone messed with his juice Berth, an Aasimar inquisitor During one of our breaks.  From left:  My sweetie, my GM assistant, the ranger, and the inqusitor. (What's up with black T-shirts and blue jeans -- nearly everyone was wearin...

Random Tables are hard to manage.  Either you have binders or books of paper, folders of files, or folders of links.  Once you search through these to find the table you want, there is still the matter of deciphering how to roll the table (imploding and exploding dice, rounding, complex dice formulas, cross references) and getting all the values recorded somewhere.  If you are recording things on a computer, this can mean a lot of typing.  All of this process goes against the basic premise of having a random result quickly when you need it. JTableRoller is an 'alpha' version of a Table Handling tool.  You record all your tables as text files using a simple format (suitable for being easily built from a copy and pasted table or manually using a text editor).  You stick these text files in a directory.  JTableRoller automagically ingests these files on startup and gives you a drop down list of tables.  Choose a table, hit the Roll button, and...

I am always looking for ways to make GM prep take less time and to make my game time job easier and quicker.  After all, a person has only so much time to put into game prep, and in game delays waiting on the GM are no fun.  Some of these I have found solutions for, and some of them I am still looking for. Creature Stat Mobility  -- There should be an easier way to bring creature stats into game plans.  Currently it means either copying creature stats into my GM notebook or scanning stat blocks out of books.  Why can't, for example, there be a common interchange format for Pathfinder stat blocks that come with all resources (including 3rd party ones) so I can drag and drops them into a plan. Tracking HP for Large Numbers of NPCs / Creatures  -- Tracking HP for a large number of NPCs/creatures can become problematic.  Stuffer Shack has a great set of markers for 'labeling' minis to keep track of them, but it still requires a separate sheet of pap...

My allergies/asthma is giving me fits right now, so I am cancelling my two Pathfinder games for a while, until I can get back to my old self again. *sigh*  In the meantime, I am going to be working on my game world, my book, and my background material for Shadowrun and such.  I might post some of the stuff on here.  I also am working on getting a macro photography setup, so maybe there will be some new miniature photos.  I'll stick to whatever I can do inside in the filtered air.  I need to probably find some video games to catch up on too.  Maybe I'll even get my Java Initiative Tracker code cleaned up for a release.

So here is version 2 of JINitTracker.  There is now a special circle token for keeping track of round.  A similar triangular token is used to keep track of turn.  The init scale has been aligned and ruled.  Icons now have pointers built in to point to the scale.  Alt-Click now toggles between 3 status indicators -- P for Prone, single slash for dying, and X for dead. So here combat has just begun (round 1).  River has taken her turn.  Zirule is prone and is currently delaying.  It is Corrail's turn.  There is a dead goblin enemy.  There is an enemy dragon.  There is also a neutral NPC guard who is dying.  Because the tokens are moved to cover the green scale, the red scale gives the approximate initiative of each player (within nonoverlapping). Ctrl-double-click on the background now not only piles the character tokens at the bottom for quit initiative sorting, but it also sends the round token and the turn tokens back to...

I've been slowly putting together a GM toolset for dual-monitor.  I currently run a 12" dual-core Atom Asus laptop with a 22" USB AOC Monitor.   Screenmonkey seems to be my favorite tool at the moment for displaying stuff like maps on the dual monitor set up.  The big thing I don't like is the various initiative trackers I've found thus far.  They all look like spreadsheets and seem to want to track everything.  I wanted something more like my combat pad , so I wrote a little Java app I call JInitTracker. I coded this in two nights with crappy Java code in Eclipse.   Most of the underlying code is AWT.  I haven't even gotten around to double-buffering to eliminate flicker yet.  So here it is: It starts with a single circle token you can drag around to indicate round. Double-click on the background to add one of the rectangular name tokens. Double-click on the token to change its text.  It pops up a text entry dialogue. Ctrl-click o...

I updated the Lilliput RPG 5 sheet packet to version 0.2 tonight.  It appeared during 1st level play that the game was too easy.  I ran the combat numbers (expected damage, expected survival in rounds, probability of hit) and with only a couple of minor changes, I was able to balance combat over all 20 levels. In general, it looks like magic will play a much larger role above level 15 or so.  I added a level 5 arcane attack spell to lessen the effect of spell block on arcane casters by giving them attacks over several levels. I also added a 'sneak attack' mechanic by allowing any stealthy creature to automatically hit on its first attack.  This should give the rogue and related classes some more combat oomph. I am changing Charisma to Chi, since it is the basis for number of spells per day.  Chi would better reflect the dual meaning of outgoing energy (charisma) and personal energy (mana).  Chi is defined as "vital energy or spirit".

So, to test Roll20, I wanted a really light RPG.  I looked a lot of them over, but none of them captured everything I wanted in a D&D 3.5 / Pathfinder kind of way, so I am writing my own.  I've picked the name Lilliput (because of its diminutive nature) and because it doesn't seem to be taken. My goal write now if to have the whole RPG in 5 pages: Character Sheet (1 page) Spells List (1 Page) Rules (1 Page) Bestiary (1 Page) All Items and Equipment (1 Page) So far I've dropped feats and skils, generalized all weapons into 4 classes, and converted all classes, races, and templates to operate only on attributes.  I eliminated 1 attribute (con).  I also made most forulas for spells, init, movement, attacks, damage be uniform, based on attributes, and fit them onto the character sheet. I have still got a lot of things up in the air, like what to do about backstab, and how to integrate perform. I hope to have a beta for testing by the weekend.