1d12 Days of Christmas – The Yule Elf

Greetings, faithful quixotists! I know I’ve been away for the better part of the year, and I apologize. It seems my work on a completely unrelated project and our efforts to find a new place to live have eaten up any spare time I may have had to devote to the old gaming blog.

But I couldn’t let the holiday season sneak by without another installment of 1d12 Days of Christmas, now could I?

First up is an offering from Barrel Rider Games – the Yule Elf, a player character class for Labyrinth Lord or any OSR-style RPG. Yule Elves come from the Northern Kingdom, resemble halflings more than traditional elves, and are usually on a rare quest to determine who is naughty and nice, and report these findings back to their master.

This little class package includes two new Yule Elf abilities (Holiday Cheer and Winter Mischief) and character progression charts (I particularly like what happens when they reach 9th level!).

Best of all, it’s only a buck at DriveThruRPG!

 

A few post-Christmas freebies

Well the holiday season is mostly over – but I’ve spotted a couple of leftover goodies at the bottom of the ol’ bag of holding! Let’s drag them out and see what we’ve got.

– Floor tiles and fantasy buildings: Courtesy of Billiam Babble (who himself creates some excellent floor tiles of his own that are not all free but well worth what he’s charging) is a link to the Black Ronin Roleplaying Games website, which has a bunch of free dungeon floortiles, sci-fi floor tiles, and fantasy wargame buildings that are yours for a click.  If you like what you see and get some use out of it, consider buying some of their other products (only two are available at present – river tiles and street tiles – and they are very reasonably priced) and keeping an eye on them for upcoming releases.

– Character development: Someone on Google+ asked about tables that you can use to build backstory and life events for characters, and I mentioned the  Central Casting books which usually provide some very crazy results, but are a goldmine for ideas. While searching for a link for more info, I discovered that all three books in the series are available (legally) for free on scribd – Heroes of Legend, Heroes Now!, and Heroes for Tomorrow. You can read each online or download them as TXT or PDF files. Start rolling on tables and making notes the way Jacquays intended, or just leaf through them and see what catches your eye – either way, you’ll get a more colorful, interesting character in the end. (EDIT: My friend Marques asked if Central Casting: Dungeons was also available, and it is! I didn’t even know that one existed, and it looks like a pretty neat supplement for fleshing out a dungeon crawl. Grab it, too!)  (Sorry guys, looks like these aren’t legal after all. My apologies to the authors and publishers.)

– Lastly, there’s this marvelous thing – Dave’s Mapper, a widget that spits out random hand-drawn dungeons. You can make a dungeon from a mix of different artists, or narrow it down to a few or even just one, then export the result to PNG to print out and stock with monsters, traps, and treasure. It’s a lot of fun to play with.

Enjoy, and I’ll be back soon to talk about this year’s New Year, New Game project!