Showing posts with label PDF. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PDF. Show all posts

Wednesday 26 February 2014

99 Problems but the Pole ain't One

My regular gaming group are currently experiencing the Liberation of the Demon Slayer an old school gonzo module by Venger Satanis with maps by Dyson Logos.

Liberation of the Demon Slayer cover image
Liberation of the Demon Slayer
The beginning of the module has them preparing to delve into the caverns outside the village of Clear Meadow in search of a fabled magic sword, the villagers kindly provide 3 days rations, 30 foot of rope and a 10 foot pole to each brave soul willing to enter.  My players are unfamiliar with old school dungeoneering so I've taken the liberty of preparing a short list of things they can do with their pole in the style of popular urban troubadour Jay Z...

99 Uses for a 10ft pole

  1. Poke things that are ten feet away.
  2. An improvised measuring stick for things like the depth of water or the width of a crevasse.
  3. Tie two together with a sack in the middle and you have a stretcher.
  4. Tie two together at one end and you have a travois, you can drag your loot behind you.
  5. Use it to carry your pack on the end like some kind of hobo.
  6. Tie a white flag to the end and you can surrender to those bandits.
  7. Trigger a trap from a safe distance.
  8. Tie two together at one end and you have an A-frame (That's half a crane to you and me).
  9. Cut it into sections and you have several improvised clubs.
  10. Cut off sections can be used to wedge doors closed if you don't have spikes.
  11. Jam the end into a doorway to keep it open.
  12. Use it to improve your balance when making those tightrope walking checks.
  13. It's a lever.
  14. It's a great punt pole when rafting. 
  15. It's an improvised tent or pole.
  16. Tie a noose to one end and you have a snare for handling wild dogs. 
  17. It's a walking pole. 
  18. Use it to testing the snow for hidden crevasses in the arctic north.
  19. Tie two together (at both ends) and you have an improvised bridge. 
  20. Stick a mirror on the end and you can see out of trenches or around corners. 
  21. It's one third of a ladder. 
  22. Stick two in the ground with string or rope between them and you can hang your wares at market. 
  23. Jam it into the mouth or eye of a Tyrannosaur / Rancor / Kraken / Terrasque.
  24. Wedge it between the floor and the descending ceiling.
  25. Add some ribbons and you've got a may pole. 
  26. Knock down that wasps nest.
  27. Use two or three to make a tiger trap, just cover them with big leaves. 
  28. Cut them up and sharpen the ends, hey presto… vampire stakes! 
  29. Tie the stakes to a springy tree limb, instant punji stick trap. 
  30. Tie a knife to the end, go spear fishing. 
  31. Trim it to 6ft and use it as a fighting staff. 
  32. It's an improvised lance. 
  33. Make a pair of garrotte handles. 
  34. Jam 2 halves in the ground on either side of a track with a wire between them it's a nasty trap. 
  35. Use it to complete your staff of Ra and find the burial site of the Ark of the Covenant.
  36. It's something to lean against when on guard duty. 
  37. It's for dancing around, apparently. 
  38. It's a fishing pole. 
  39. Use two as improvised stilts.
  40. Use it to push prisoners (or animals) about with.
  41. It's a yoke for carrying two heavy things.
  42. It's a truss rod for two people to carry one really heavy thing.
  43. It's a balance beam for weighing things.
  44. Tie three together at one end to make a tripod to suspend your cooking pot.
  45. Chop it up for fire wood.
  46. Stick to snake spell needs a stick.
  47. It's a wizards staff if the wizard loses one.
  48. It's a bunch of torches when you run out.
  49. It's a stirring stick for really big cauldrons. 
  50. Test the water to see if it's really acid. 
  51. Tie two short lengths together, it's improvised nunchucks.
  52. Tie three together in a triangle it's a coat hanger.
  53. Stick meat on the end and feed your pet tiger or other ravenous beastie. 
  54. Use it as a trail or claim marker. 
  55. If you have enough you can stick them in the ground a make a temporary fence or cage.
  56. Cut notches on it to keep count of your conquests (or kills).
  57. Whittle on it around the camp fire to pass the time. 
  58. Cut a few in half and sharpen the ends, stick them in the ground at 45 degrees, you've got a horse proof barrier. 
  59. Tie helmets onto it at regular intervals and you've got an instant army of friends. 
  60. Make a scarecrow.
  61. With a little craft and string you have improvised snow shoes.
  62. Tie a shield to it and stick it in the ground, instant archery target. 
  63. If your shields big enough, hide behind it for that all important cover bonus. 
  64. Bang it on the ground to call attention to yourself. 
  65. Tie a torch to the end to ward off really dangerous animals.
  66. Tie a sling to the end and use it as a catapult arm. 
  67. Use it to push away siege ladders.
  68. Capture several prisoners, tie their hands and feet to the pole. 
  69. A stake to tie the virgin/witch to. 
  70. A limbo pole.
  71. A replacement axle for your wheelbarrow. 
  72. A handle for a windlass.
  73. Use it to break out jail Jackie Chan style (it also involve weeing on your shirt though).  
  74. Tie some rushes to the end and make a broom to sweep away your tracks. 
  75. Use it to spin plates or bowls and entertain the tribal chief. 
  76. Chop it up into lengths and jam in the walls to make improvised steps.  
  77. Wood to metal spell needs some wood.
  78. Make a yoke for your oxen.
  79. Use it to spit roast a pig.
  80. Make foucault's pendulum and test the Coriolis Effect.
  81. It's a makeshift pull-up bar.
  82. Add weight's It's a weightlifting bar.
  83. Add rope, It's a trapeze handle. 
  84. It's a lightweight caber.
  85. Spin around it when your drunk its a party game.
  86. You can hang tapestries, or curtains with it.
  87. It's a flag pole.
  88. It's a sundial.
  89. It's for knocking down fruit or coconuts.
  90. Charge a line of enemies and knock them over clothes line style.
  91. It's for jamming in the wheels of Nazi motorbikes.
  92. You can tie your horses together with one. 
  93. For rescuing people from quick sand.
  94. An improvised holy symbol.
  95. Tie a pigs bladder to the end and go wassailing.
  96. It's several baseball bats.
  97. Use it to make a corracle.
  98. It's one third of a poor man's bass guitar (add wire and a box).
  99. Add a hook it's a fisherman's gaff (for landing big fish).

Wednesday 29 May 2013

Outrider: My First Print On Demand Experience

I've been buying PDFs from the likes of RPGNow / DriveThruRPG and printing them at home for a few years now, but recently I took the plunge and decided to order my first Print on Demand (PoD) product.  Being based in the UK, I've always been reticent to use the PoD option as the costs have been quite high to have things printed in the US and shipped to the UK, but a couple of things made made me take the plunge.
  • I had an interesting conversation with the CEO of OBS, Steve Wieck, via his blog OneBlogShelf, which re-energised my passion for making games.  I've had a few ideas for card games in the past and so this was a great opportunity to try out the PoD option particularly with respect to cards.
  •  Another advantage of OBS was that I could convert some of the proceeds from my own product sales into credit with which to purchase the PoD copy of the Outrider cards
  • Following the recent launch of DriveThruCards, a One Book Shelf (OBS) site which specialises in printing card games, I discovered Outrider, an auto duelling tabletop game by Dice Fest Games which featutures an innovative movement/manoeuvre mechanism using cards.  I'm a sucker for post apocalyptic road racing games and sook took advantage of the Launch Discount and got the whole PDF + POD Cards for £17.04 including delivery.

What Makes Playing Cards so Special?

I've made my own cards in the past for things like my DM's Decision Deck and My Item Cards and whilst I'm really happy with the results from my own prints there are a few things unique to playing card printing which are pretty insurmountable for the Print-at-Home (PaH) user.

Double Sided Printing - The major advantage of PoD over PaH is that you get access to commercial grade print technology Yes with a little lot of trial and error you can get pretty good results, but you will never match commercial printers which use registration marks for alignment.

Print / Paper Quality - Home printers have come on in leaps and bounds but there is no escaping that with every incremental increase in quality you have an exponential increase in cost.  High grade papers are really pricey and tend to drink ink like a vampires drink blood.  If you want a photo quality result you have to suffer that slightly tacky feel which as you can imagine does not make for good playing cards.  Casino's are very particular about their casino quality cardstock which has a very high opacity preventing stopping people seeing the card values through the substrate.

Cutting - Several cards are usually printed on a single sheet and unlike books are not bound together before guillotining.  I've had some great results at home, but inevitably you do end up with cards either not having precisely the same dimensions or being gaffed in some way.

What You Get

The Outrider download consists of 8 files; the rules, a scenario booklet, a series of optional Terrain Tiles and 5 files of cards, counters and dashboards.  The printed cards which will be delivered to you from the printer consist of:
  • 18 x Manouevre cards.
  • 8 x Vehicle cards (double sided 16 vehicles in total).
  • 8 x Dashboards (double sided 1 for each vehicle).
  • 15 x Counter cards (require cutting up before use).
  • 3 x Range Cards (double sided single/double fire lanes).
  • 1 x Turn Order/Control Loss Reference Card.
  • 1 x Lucky/Second Wind car.

A sample of the 54 different cards contained in the deck

I would have preferred to have multiple sets of the manoeuvre cards included in the PoD element rather than the included tokens.  Personally, I find thicker cardstock counters are easier to pick up during play and would have been happy to do a little bit of DIY before being able to play.  Similarly the included Dashboards and Vehicle cards are double sided meaning that you can only play one of each style of vehicle unless you print your own duplicates.  At the end of the day you have all the files necessary in the PDF element so it's not too much of a hassle to print additional cards.

From the point of order it took about 12 days for my order to arrive, which is pretty good considering that it has to be processed, printed and delivered to the UK.  I suspect that if a UK printer/distributer  could be sourced this time lag would be greatly reduced.


A really nice poker style plastic card box was supplied for free (sadly, mine had a little crack in the lid)


The cards come cellophane wrapped, with a nice plastic poker style protective case.  Print quality is superb with a nice glossy finish.  Although the cardstock used was nice enough, it is slightly thinner in weight to regular playing cards.  This may become an issue in the future as I'm not confidentt it will stand up to normal gaming wear and tear from a bunch of hamfisted boardgamers.

How did the costs stack up


As I mentioned before, the discounted price for the PDF and POD Cards was £17.04 (which includes USPS First Class postage to the UK at £6.73) which compares favourably with say a Fantasy Flight Silverline game such as Bruno Faidutti's Citadels.  The cost of postage from the US to the UK is a significant proportion of the price (almost 40%).  This is of course largely out of the hands of either the printer or OBS and is the one issue which needs to be overcome if PoD as a concept will become generally accepted.

Final Thoughts


For me although the cost was comparable to a mass printed card game, the quality of the cardstock was a little dissapointing.  I also hope that the guys at OBS can source some UK based printing companies to add to their cadre of US ones.  This would certainly go a long way to making me choose PoD as a viable alternative to just buying from one of the big games manufacturers.  At the moment it's a bit of a 50/50 choice, which will most likely be decided by how much I lust after a particular game or not.

I have yet to actually play the game, so stay tuned for a follow up review.

Tuesday 10 April 2012

Two Birds, One Stone

Toon the Cartoon Roleplaying Game
Buy it on eBay
On Good Friday I stepped into the breach to run a filler game whilst our regular DM was absent, and I used the opportunity to complete two firsts.

One was to run a game of TOON RPG, which I enjoyed playing for the first time a few months back, at Dragonmeet 2011 and the other was to attempt to GM my first session using an iPad.

TOON

Having only played TOON was no real barrier to GMing, but I did kind of struggle with writing the scenario until I found THE TOON ADVENTURE GENERATOR in my copy of TOON SILLY STUFF

Clearly, I was overthinking this whole thing and as I recalled the game I played, the players pretty much drove the whole plot with their character choices and actions. 

With this in mind I just came up with the plot synopsis:

Save The Cows Save The World



The PCs are all farmyard animals who have to save the cows on their farm from being rustled by an invading Martian with a penchant for strawberry milk shakes.  - Download it Today


I grabbed an image of a farmyard from googleimages and drew a rough map in inkscape to give the players an idea of what was on the farm.  This then gave me enough to start fleshing out some of the zones to give the players enough ammunition (literally) to see off the bad guys.  This was then converted into a PDF and loaded onto the ipad. 

A quick search of the interweb rustled up MP3s of the opening and closing credits for Looney Tunes which would help get my players into the mood.  I also stumbled on a great site with some free sound effects (http://www.freesfx.co.uk/) which I hoped to use during play and these were installed in the usual way via iTunes.

Using the iPAD

I've been trialling a few RPG apps on the iPad (which I'll cover in another post), but the most useful ability is to read and annotate PDFs and after a few false starts I found eDocReader Multiple PDF.  As the name suggests this app allows you to open multiple PDFs at the same time as tabs in the same application, allowing you to have a copy of the rules open as well as your scenario.  The simple annotation tools enable you to make notes directly onto your scenario by either typing or writing with a finger or stylus.

The Experience

The game ran very smoothly which was surprising as all my players were TOON newbies, but from the opening credits to the "that's all folks" they let their imaginations run riot.  The PCs were a duck billed platypus in search of a mate, a dumb but incredibly fast guard dog whose kennel sat atop a subterranean hi-tech lair, a machinating pig who had been ordering ACME products for years and last but not least a bull whose sole mission was to impress the 5 dairy cows with his muscle poses.

All the classic cartoon capers occurred; the pig dressed up as a female Martian to woo the bad guy into eating strawberry looking grenades, the bull became enraged by anything red and broke open the yellow barn to reveal an Indiana Jones style warehouse full of ACME crates, the platypus dropped a gigantic fake bomb on the pond squishing the piranha and the dog and his Martian double ended up having one of those cloud fist fights.

However, the playback of MP3s in the Music app was troublesome, particularly having to stop the iPad from playing the entire playlist.  There are lots (and I mean lots) of SFX pad apps in the appstore but no free ones that allow you to allocate your own custom sounds to buttons as triggers (please correct me if I'm wrong).  I am also on the hunt for ways of embedding sounds into my scenario PDFs so I can play them back from within the PDF Reader as I read out the relevant description text.

Although this first experience wasn't an unquallified success, the main advantage with the iPad is that you can GM with just an iPad and a few player handouts, so the days of carrying whole libraries of books around with you everytime you want to run a game are definitely over.  My new motto from now on will be "Have iPad... will GM".

Sunday 29 May 2011

COMPETITION: RGP Products - Tell me what you think and win a Decision Deck

I'd love to say that the life of a fledgling publisher is all good, but to tell you the truth I have no frame of reference.  Put simply I have sales (woot) but no reviews (sigh).  I have no idea what my customers think of my PDFs, how I could improve them, are they useful to you, is there anything missing that you'd expect? 

I need some user feedback.

So, If you've bought any of the first 3 sets of Item Cards; RGP001 - Adventurer's Gear, RGP002 - Potions or RGP003 - Animals or RGP004 Paper Minis Set 1: Animals please feel free to let me know what you think using the comments box below. 

As an incentive I'll send each one of you a complimentary copy of my new GM Aids Decision Deck courtesy of RPG Now/Drive Thru RPG.

Monday 23 May 2011

...Errata, Erata, I love you Eratta...

...You're only a fay say day away   


As you are by now aware I have started a little publishing venture, and proof reading has kept me away from blogging.  Today, was the first time I have had to publish an errata notice and this got me thinking.

I don't know of any other publishing genre which has so many errata which slip through the net.  Fiction certainly doesn't, magazines and newspapers print retractions, but that's a content matter and not typos or other cockups.   Do we the buyers seem to accept these errata more readily because we see ourselves as RPG fans first and consumers second?  Do we appreciate the publisher's hard work that goes into even the smallest $1 PDF download, rather than wail on their poor proofreading skills?  I'd like to think we're a better kind of people and we know how much love goes into the games we buy.

BTW if you've bought RGP001 - ITEM CARDS Set 1: Adventurer's Gear the errata have been corrected and you can download them in the FREE Item Card Sampler.

Mea Culpa, Mea Culpa, Mea Maxima Culpa...

Tuesday 10 May 2011

Roleplay Geek Publishing - New Product - Paper Minis Set 1 - Animals

RPG is proud to announce the first in a new line of Paper Miniatures with the release of RGP004 - Paper Minis - Set 1: Animals.

Do your PCs ever forget that they're on horseback? Do you need some mundane animals to populate that village scene? Do you want ink friendly disposable miniatures?  Then this is the product for you!!

Paper Minis Set 1: Animals includes over 112 paper miniatures depicting the 28 animals featured in our sister product RGP003 Item Cards - Set 3: Animals.  Each animal is based in 4 colours, 1 for each of your PCs, plus another 6 bonus animals, that's 136 miniatures in total all for the pocket money price of $1 dollar!!.

Animals featured include; Bear, Bull, 2 Types of Camels (Bactrian and Dromedary), Carrier Pigeon, Cart Horse, Cat, Cow, Dog, Donkey, Eagle, Elephant, Goat, Horse, Lion, Llama, Mule, Musk Ox, Ostrich, Pony, Reindeer, Rhinocerous, Tiger, 2 Types of Warhorse (Light and Heavy), Water Buffalo, Wolf and Zebra plus bonus animals; Ducks, Goose, Pig, Sheep, Boar and Chicken.

Friday 29 April 2011

Roleplay Geek Publishing - New Product - Item Cards Set 2 - Potions

Hot off the RGP press it's Item Cards Set 2 - Potions.

28 Potions in 3 Sizes (1, 2 & 3 Doses) and each potion has a blank 1 dose card, so you can surprise your players with the "Guess the mystery potion" game.

Like all the Item Card Series, Set 2 - Potions is priced at low, low price of 1 dollar.  Includes:
  • Aid
  • Blur
  • Cure Light Wounds
  • Cure Serious Wounds
  • Delay Poison
  • Fly
  • Gaseous Form
  • Haste
  • Protection from Evil/Good
  • Remove Blindness / Deafness
  • Water Breathing
  • Water Walk

and many more.

Thursday 28 April 2011

Roleplay Geek Publishing - New Product - Item Cards Set 1 - Adventurer's Gear

I know it's been a bit quiet here at Roleplay-Geek...

Coz I've been slaving away putting the finishing touches to the first of my item card PDF downloads which is now available on RPGNow/DriveThru RPG right now.

I've been playtesting these cards in my latest campaign and they've gone down a treat.  The first set contains 112, yes I'll say it again 112!! basic Adventurer's Gear item cards plus a full set of rules on how to use them in your game.  So show some RPG love for your players and buy a copy today, it's only a dollar!!