#tabletoppin'

[ampersandworm]

Hey! i did a thing!

Sooooo, i made a boardgame! And THEN we entered it in a contest!

Along with my co-conspirator developer Steve Kaftanski, we've put together a little something named:

Ghost Pirates of ZOOZVE!

GPoZ is an asymmetrical 3-player space fightin' game that is hopefully fun and interesting and also pretty 'coz I did the graphics!

It's got Jolly Pirates! Marauders! Wildcatters! Space ships! Asteroids!Rogue Quasi-moons! Launch stations! Loot! A mysterious Ghost Fleet! And at least one chicken!

right now we're in the 'show-this-contest-to-all-your-friends so-they-can-vote-for-your-game' phase of things, so please click the contest linkydink here if you're so inclined:

if you've already got a Gamecrafter account, you can vote for your favorites (alongside our game there are some pretty fire entries - I confess, the Crab Surfer game got a vote from me. the competition is stiff!) , or you can poke around and see what other trouble there is to get into. The GameCrafters site is pretty neat!

This is the second boardgame I've published with Steve, and I think it's pretty great. Have a look!

Ghost Pirates of ZOOZVE

Ghost Pirates of ZOOZVE: 3 swashbuckling space pirates (& Ghost Fleet) destroy & salvage spaceships.

[ampersandworm]

Gamma World Artifacts

so after I made this post, I sat down and drew out all the artifacts on 3x5 notecards. Since I’m planning on handing these out to players (yes, the originals) I thought I’d scan them (for posterity, y’know) and what the heck, put them up here too. I’m not gonna label them so have fun matching them up with their descriptions if you like. >_>

[ampersandworm]

Back on the (mutant) horse

Welp. 

I’ve officially committed to running a 1st Edition* Gamma World campaign for Tuesday nights open gaming. First session is May...7th? I think? I wanted to run 2nd Edition, since that’s the one I had when I was a kid, but apparently it’s almost impossible to find a copy for less than $100 and it’s not on DTRPG (tho’ the unnecessarily complicated 3rd Edition is. Le sigh.) 

Anyway, my friend Victor, who runs Madison Traditional Gaming, made sad puppy noises about not having enough GMs this season and even though last time I did this I got burned out b/c of nuisance players and ended up not wanting to GM for, like, a year, I signed up again.

It’s kicked my brain wide open and i keep writing up creatures and artifacts and places, oh my. Huzzah! Now if i could only start drawing again, that’d be great.

well, i did attempt to draw an Obb. I guess that’s a start.

* House ruled all to hell and back, mind you; 1st ed. is, uh. I guess editing was one of the technologies lost in the Apocalypse, if you dig me.

TL:DR if u live around Madison, WI and would be interested in playing vintage GW on Tuesday nights, here’s the meetup page for Madison Traditional Gamers. Right now the listing is for last season’s games but my game should be up, er, soonish?

If peeps are interested, I’ll post some of the stuffs I wrote for my campaign here.

[ampersandworm]

Below Thraya

A map (well, two maps) from last week’s Tekumel game. A fun worldbuilding note: No one on Tekumel has (to my knowledge) invented the magnetic compass or, really, the cardinal directions. (It’s canon that the world is iron-poor, so maybe it doesn't even have a magnetosphere. Who knows?) Anyway, these two maps meet up, but one is rotated around 180 degrees b/c it was easier to draw that way (and in the Underworld you can’t tell where North is anyway. :P)  Maps on Tekumel use touch rather than vision as their guiding sense and look like little orbs, so this map is not particularly accurate for the setting. 

Eh. Still fun to do.

[ampersandworm]

A Map for my players

So I’m starting a new campaign this summer for some friends. The game is called WURM: Roleplaying in the Ice Age and it’s set in the Upper Paleolithic Era. 

Here’s a map I made for my players.

not, mind you, that I think modern cartography was a thing we had 35,000 years ago, but it’s a useful visual shorthand for “here’s the world as you know it”.

[ampersandworm]

Hrm.

So somebody went and reblogged one of the oldest posts I got on here, which is a collection of small D&D illos from 2016 and now it’s gotten in front of ludicrous numbers of people and I feel very self-conscious about the fact that I don’t post a lot of art on here. >_>

I’m still an artist and I still art (though its mostly maps and other player handouts), I just don’t post them much b/c I didn’t think anyone was interested.

Are peeps interested? 

[ampersandworm]

I ran Session 1 of my WURM: Role-playing in the Ice Age game and it went pretty great I think!

My players are a trio of punk kids young adults in a tribe of Bear Men (Neanderthals) living along the Garonne River during the upper Paleolithic. Their tribe’s had it easy for a few generations now, living peaceably with their neighbors in a big river valley full of food and game. There hasn’t been much sickness or hardship, the weather is nice (I mean, for Paleolithic Europe) and the local Spirits are quiet.

But, of course, all that’s about to change...

A few selected shenanigans:

PCS: *looks at map* WHAT’S ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE GLACIER? Me, the GM: NOthing. MORE GLACIER. CERTAIN DEATH. PCs: Soooo... we should go there...? Me: NO. NO U SHOULD NOT. Players: *loudly start discussing logistics*

Stealing fish out of a weir specifically to annoy Old Fisherman Guy

Sneaking out of Camp to avoid being put to work

Ahh, the old “small child follows Ye Players out of Camp and then is lost and has to be found” trope.

“Wow, this fog is really creepy. Do we know about any Spirits associated with Unnatural Fog?” GM: “I’unno, maybe you should read the Handout I made for you?” “OH. Right!  *read read* hmmm, ‘Mordak, the Spirit of Death, is often accompanied by freezing mist’... uh oh.”

Several sightings of a Spirit who only appears when the Tribe is in Danger (”Well, uh, maybe she just woke up and is hunting.” “Yeah. Hunting US.”)

Goja, guy-who’d-be-an-engineer-but-oh-no-it’s-the-Paleolithic-and-all-we-got-is-rocks, saw BOATS for the first time and now it’s all he can talk about.

PCs: *running into Camp* ARGH WE SAW A SPIRIT! NPCs: Haha, u crazy kids. Probably just saw a cave lion. PCs: ARGH WE SAW PEOPLE! NPCs: WHAT? PEOPLE!!?! OH NO SOUND THE ALARM

“Well the Spirit revealed itself to YOU THREE IDIOTS I guess we’d better send YOU on this mission. Try not to fuck up.” Goja: ‘Outwardly I nod meekly along, but inwardly I am going, “YESSSS!”*fistpump*

Good times, good times.