Dungeon Painter Experiment - Treasure of Tarmin

So I picked up Dungeon Painter Studio on Steam. It's easy to use, that's good. I'm not 100% sold on it, for some reason, but there's not much to NOT like. It does just what it says on the package, and it was only 15 bucks or something. A lot of restrictions from the content makers about what you can/can't sell, which is fine - I probably wouldn't use their art in something I was going to sell as a #diy thing

So, like here is a couple of geomorphs, as close as I think I am able to discern to the tiles used in the game Treasure of Tarmin for the Intellivision, which was one that my young brain was not fully able to comprehend and also I had to give it back before I fully grokked it. It was not great, I think, although it was gameable and terrifically "roguelike" before that was even a thing...

So here's the geomorphs, hack 'em, peel 'em, fuck 'em up. I don't care. Believe it or not I did these in Illustrator CS4 a couple of years back but they weren't ever the right size. As much as I dig photoshop, the vectorness of Illustrator still eludes me. I think I might try to get them included in some fancy random dungeon makers, just for a kick.

Interstingly, the four bonus tiles I made were chopped off the bottom of the PNG, so I don't know. Still sorting out the doohickeys and thingamawhatsits

That's a little better. Getting there. The top 16 are original, bottom 4 are bonus

The Irritating Problem of Shared-Walls Dungeon Maps

When I was a wee lad, let us say in the summer of '83 or '84, maybe, it was at that time in my life that I had been introduced to D&D and found in it a very useful tool for avoiding the tedium of day-to-day earthly life. Also, the Atari 2600 and my favorite game Adventure. Maybe a couple of others.

I also discovered graph paper, almost accidentally, and since I'd had a couple of modules in my collection my brain lit up like a Christmas tree! AHA I could make some dungeons, too, but what really happened was that I - maybe in an unhealthy way - would just draw mazes on the graph paper OVER AND OVER AND OVER and then give them to my grandparents who (godsblessum) were like non-plussed but cooperative. And they solved them, agreeably, and so I had to escalate the process, and I would put in rooms with treasure, and then traps, and the occasional monster and so what you would get is a lot like what we would call a dungeon these days, but pretty MAZE-y. I recall hours upon hours of sweaty NW Florida afternoons laboring over whether the squares were too similar, or maybe the paths were too linear, or whatever a young guy would have gotten into before he'd discovered other kinds of masturbatory exercises. Pretty soon, I burned out the pad of graph paper or found myself stymied or maybe I discovered the piano in the clubhouse room near the pool and tried to figure out how to play LET ME CALL YOU SWEETHEART. Maudlin.

Literally the same cover as the one I toiled at. You can find anything.

Anyways, maybe a year or two later, the Gold Box adventures (pool of radiance etc) and another favorite of mine TELENGARD came out on the c64 and we - my buddies and me - were into these day long affairs of maze-maze-maze-kill-kill-kill-maze-maze-maze and hey! who's to say it wasn't great? Not me, that's for sure! But I think I'd learned my lesson in terms of tedious mazes and I got to be irritated by the "Shared Wall" phenomenon. That is, when you use graph paper to make mazes the way I did, and you make them dense, the way I did, naturally your Grandad is gonna be like "Oh Man I just Drill Through This and Head For The Exit". The cheater.

Now - you cannot pull this sort of trick on a C64 - the in-game physics don't allow for Passwall or Dimension Door or whathave-you. So - always you're going to be presented with the spooky anxiety of SHIT MAYBE THEY WILL JUST CHOOSE TO DIG, OR HACK, OR ZAP THEIR WAY THROUGH THIS B

So, I drifted away to the more "moderner" way of doing it, which is to say I separate, now, my hallways and my walls so that there are no shared walls in there to dig through, or maybe a Xorn could do it or Purple Worm or something but not a hard-scrabble group of murderhobos.

But, Like, Why, Man? My grandpa is D-E-D (godsblessum) and I would applaud any party of miners who could pull of a feat like I've described. These little pencil lines on the graph paper in no way represent a adamantine/plascrete/duralloy surface. I guess they could. They're walls in the Mythic Underworld, bro! My old penchant for doodling twisty little passages (all alike) in between special treasure filled rooms is retrospectively LEGIT

Let us consider that on a piece of graph paper wherein one square = 10', then the line that represents a wall if you draw it that way is like perfect for your average interior wall in an office building which may really be like 8 inches thick but if an office was a dungeon (it kinda really is a DUNGEON comrades!) then any able-bodied murder hobo would skip all the traps and locks and stuck doors and just break those fucking walls the eff down. And you should let them! And all the monsters will come running and then the PCs will be eaten and maybe the next batch of PCs is not quite as dense.

I been noodling around with a system I stole from some OSR-type guys to make a long stretch of maze more logistically doable at the table. Frankly, a pen n paper tracing of the route is anticlimactic and further allows the viewing of my TOP SEKRIT MAP and so that's a no-no. This procedure uses a deck of cards and the players using PC skill or player knowledge to get through a set number of cards in order to exit the labyrinth. It's pretty clever (sadly I dint think of it) and ripe for hacking... Make a couple of awesome stretches of geomorphs interspersed with some procedural-simulated mazes which get easier with travelling and cost light/food/water/etc.? Now we're talking some Mythic Underworld.

Anyways, a paper-thin wall is not a barrier unless they agree it is. Or, unless it's made of very stern fantasy-type stuff.

Assets and Learning and Sharing Make for More Funs

1.  I'm not an artist.  I was lucky and cool-headed enough to purchase a copy of the CS4 suite back when I was in college - I justified it by saying I might make some money with photos one day.  For that 300 or 400 hundred dollar purchase, I will likely pay many thousands of dollars in interest and penalties to the student loan people, since I am dim and place too much faith in the premise of education and I sunk myself into needless debt thinking my career path would pay off in BIG MONEY

2.  I'm working out the kinks, and the little squirt of dopamine in my brain that happens when I figure shit out is way more than enough to keep me entertained, at least since I quit smoking.

3.  I like you kids out there.

4.  I want you to be happy.

5.  I was trying to figure out how to make little encounter icons for my scanned-in maps, exactly what I'm about to give out here.

6.  I figured it out.  Praise THE DARK GOD THAT LIVES IN THE WOODS BEHIND MY TRAILER for the handy dandy "hold down alt and drag to copy" thing that illustrator has

7.  This thing is for you to use, or not, if you like.  It's a .PNG file so it ought to be transparent around the bubbles so you could just copy and paste from my thing into your thing, if that kind of stuff might help you

8.  Hey, if one has riches, then what good are they if not for bringing joy to friends and loved ones?

The (to my mind gorgeous and sexy) font is IM Fell, that this amazing fellow puts out for nothing and for which you are not fit to touch the hem of his garments.  The whole package will give even your weakest and poorliest-edited documents the sexy grace of type-set musty English volume by Bishop J. Fell.  I can only grovel and aspire before the model set by Mr. Fell in his efforts to PUBLISH interesting things

But I am working on it.

Back to the presses I go

Ichorteat Grottoe - Community Map

A simple map - I was at a staff meeting last week and bristling against paperwork and little blue squares and such.  I went out of my way to make sure the angles mostly aren't square and rectilinear.    What an ugly word.  Parallel. That's a lot of L's

I envision some Runequest-style demonologists and a cult or three for the big hopping toad idol at the top. Came back to the whole thing and inked the first layer of walls after reading some of the stuff in the unofficial Fiend Folio II that +Greg Gorgonmilk posted onto the G+ thread

Lots of traps and maybe a few secret passages.  Gateway drugs into demon-toad worship and the bodies of a few dozen innocents.  Mugwumps, doelms, and bullywugs. Flooded passages (haven't decided which they ought to be, yet)

This is the basic version but maybe I'll do up a thing like Dyson does with all the hatching.  It's soothing and a stress thing  and good for goldbricking at meetings.  Or while waiting for clients to arrive or fill out paperwork. Writing the odd dissonant hymn or dirge to a toad demon while waiting for the coffee to brew

Update:

If I had used the scanner I could have cleaned up some of the pencil lines but then I'd have had to clean the back desk off and... Well, I will work it out later.

The Tomb of the Ssessarids (map doodling)

So, thanks to G+ and the hangout phenomenon, I have been lucky enough to find a semi-regular play group. Got me really thinking about DM'ing again, although I love play and have insight that my role-play has become very very rusty.  One thing I really dig is tossing dice and generating PCs and NPCs from random stats.  I find that DCC does this very well with the luck roll and occupation.  I'm off after this to purchase a thing from RPGNow.

Meantime, the other thing I like to do is mapping.  I no longer have reams of maps I made as a wee git, plunging ever downward with my Kayen Telva (lifted from A1 The Slavepits of the Undercity) and magic markers.  However, with my fancypants scanner I am able offer a thing I made last night in a couple of hours, namely the tomb of the Ssessarids, the hideous mercantile family prone to internecine warfare with other traders in the capital city of Thrax.  They were rumored to be snake worshipers who mingled licentiously with reptilian things that slithered up from the pits beneath the capital city.  They searched for long-life or perhaps immortality but instead turned into a degenerate pack of corpse-eaters, lead in the end by a blue-black scaled she-demon.

In the interests of digitizing the thing, I had made a key but chopped it out with PS and cleaned it up with threshold etc.  I intended to feed it into Illustrator as a LiveTrace thing to clean up the lines but, meh.  I ran out of steam.

The entrance is an underground dome with a basin, guarded by caryatid columns who will attack if the players do not cleanse themselves in the basin's waters, first (Although this carries a risk of disease).  Packs of ghouls crawl from the various holes in the structure and broke free to maraud when the hidden entrance was revealed in a rockslide.  The whole complex is highly trapped - the Ssessarids loved Blue Cobra poison and the disfiguring scars that remain should interlopers not die shortly after injection.  At the far end of the complex, 'asleep' on his bier, lies the body of the clan's founder, a ghul sorceror of some potency who does not hesitate to call upon his patron's representative - an elegant Naga with the face of a seductress.  She has ties to the Yuan-Ti, and the crafty Serpent Men who first taught the clan to use and distill poisons, and who coached them in the arts of subterfuge.  Since the geological event that re-opened the tomb, the ghul raiders have swept into the nearby town nightly to feast on children, the elderly, and local beggars.  They had much wealth in life, and are jealous of their gold.

Anyways, it's all there in the map.  As always, the ascent is treacherous so take heede