The Pink Dice Chronicles

It has been a slow bit here lately for posts.  Gaming has been a bit slow with both of my games being online, and with people missing, including myself, quite often. I did receive my Devils and Demons kickstarter miniatures which are slowly starting to take shape: In other news, the gaming room is pretty much now a collection of stuff.  I have a lot of stuff to put up on the walls still, but the basics are starting to appear. My maps have overflowed the map box, and my miniatures table is a bit of a mess until I get some pegboard storage put up. The countertop is still a mess with stuff to be mounted on the walls.  I also need to mount the countertop so it is nice and sturdy. I have 4 cabinents full of books, miniatures, games, and props now.  I still have some sorting to do, but at least it is all out of the boxes.

From Dale Norman over on Google+. The correct answer is apologize to your GM, and then bribe him/her with snacks and/or drive-thru RPG credits.

So my last online gaming session turned into a royal fiasco when my teamspeak server started dropping out random pieces of me speaking.  I had similar problems with intermittent bandwidth issues, streaming video stopping, and even my voice-over-internet phone dropping out. I dug in further with Wireshark and ping.  The results were scary.  I was getting a ton of TCP retransmits and about 10% packet loss.  Pings showed about every 10th ping with a time of anywhere from 300 ms to over 2000 ms, when all the packets in between were 20 to 30 ms times.  It was very bad, but mostly worked.  Mostly working is usually harder to get someone's attention with and is usually harder to fix. I talked to Comcast and they set up a ticket, but nothing really changed.  I suspect it resulted in a modem reboot and a verification of a few packets that the ping was fine.  These sorts of problems are hard to see and even harder to fix, especially without access to ma...

Here's a modern warehouse with living quarters that I've been working on for my Port Wayne game:

So for my first map with campaign cartographer, I needed to draw an underground Duergar city in the Darklands called Fellstrok.  The map itself would be used in Roll20, so I needed to keep the size reasonable.  I chose not to label it in CC, since I can overlay whatever info I want on the GM layer in Roll20.  By doing it there, I can plan out the layout on the fly, if needed. So here is a look at it, reduced in size for sanity's sake.

So the games I am running online these days are running out of maps.  The internet is a decent resource, but very shallow.  So, since I am focusing on online gaming for now, I figured it was time to try my hand at cartography. I looked around at various pieces of software and decided to go with ProFantasy's suite of tools:  Campaign Cartographer.  I got the bundle with the dungeon and city builders and picked up some extra symbols, in particular, for modern. Installation is taking a while, but I hope to have it done tonight.  Over the next couple of weeks I'll see what I can come up with.  More info to come...

Well the physical move of things is finishing up now.  Today I unpacked my first boxes which included, most importantly, a good portion of my desktop machine.  I haven't found the speakers yet, but I have my gaming headset.  There are no peripherals.  The network is also in a temporary configuration.  But overall things are up and running. A word of advise for anyone moving:  if you possibly can, divide your tools into "must-haves" and "optional" sets.  Things in the "must haves" should be a hammer, power drill, hammer chisel, nails, screws, studfinder, battery charger, vise grips, pliers, etc.  Keep the must-haves with you if at all possible. I learned this the hard way.  I can't mount my TV until I find my studfinder.  I spent over an hour today using my van to charge up the battery on my car.  *shrugs*  Things are moving forward, just as if I were wearing the boots of slow. In game, its the same way.  It sure woul...