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!

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The Accursed Tomb of ∑

Here’s a clever AND nifty tutorial for making classic blue-grid dungeon maps using Microsoft Excel and Paint – Drawing Dungeon Maps in Excel – A Quick Tutorial.

While I personally would probably use a graphics program instead, this is a great alternative for those who don’t have the experience with them, or find them to be too “fussy.” (And I agree quite a bit with that latter opinion, sometimes…)

 

 

Classic AD&D modules & supps recovered!

(Yeah, it’s the second post in a day after an absence of over a month. Try to contain yourselves.)

About 10 years ago, Wizards of the Coast put PDFs of a lot of classic AD&D 2E modules and supplements up on their website. I can remember begging a (non-gamer) friend of mine to download all of them for me and burn them to disc, because I didn’t have a CD burner yet. Then, after I got a burner, I forgot I already had them, and downloaded them all and burned another copy.

Then a few years later, when backing up files from my old, ailing computer, I forgot I had already burned them to disc… and burned another copy.

But back to the point. Recently, Wizards took all of them down, sending lots of ten-year procrastinators into a panic. Thankfully, Michael Curtis at The Society of Torch, Pole, and Rope has discovered a way to still get them, through the Wayback Machine at archive.org.

Not only that. but this good gentleman has graciously supplied a list of links to every one of the classic AD&D products!

Now I can finally download them all and burn them to disc! And so can you!

(Thanks to David Shepheard for the link!)

 

Geomorphs!

Yeah, I warned you about the erratic posting, didn’t I?

Here’s a nifty gadget I discovered on StumbleUpon today – Dyson’s Random Morph Map! Just let it know how wide you’d like your dungeon to be and how many squares to fill, and you’ll get an instantly generated dungeon map, just waiting to be populated!