Artificial | Bestial | Chimeric | Dungeonesque | Ethereal | Fay | Grubby | Haunting | Inflamed | Moist | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Artificial | Robot | Manbeast | Owlbear | Shoggoth | Modron | Candy Critter | Fake Egg | Zombie | Tarbeast | Submarine |
Bestial | Stichthing | Bear | Snallygaster | Orcgre | Eternal Bird | Ball of Fur | Big Rat | Lycanthrope | Rakshasha | Shark |
Chimeric | Gargoyle | Bigfoot | Panther | Cerberus | Ziz | Reptilian | Basilisk | Pumpkinking | Firefox | Kraken |
Dungeonesque | Ooze | Dino | Gorgon | Eyebeast | Throne | Gnome | Spider | Shadow | Cherufe | Urchin |
Ethereal | Meme | Bird of Prey | Pegacorn | Starspawn | Wingaling | Fairy | Bat | Ghost | Djinn | Flying Fish |
Fay | Clone | Turtle Queen | Dryad | Mimic | Sylph | Li'l Elf | Ball of Teeth | Vampire | Will o Wisp | Jelly |
Grubby | Golem | Beastman | Cyclops | Sewercrawler | Locus | Goblin | Wormlord | Mummy | Firebug | Eel |
Haunting | Frankenstoid | Wolfpack | Mothman | False Hydra | Guardian Angel | Bogeyman | Lemur | Skeleton | Hellhound | Angler |
Inflamed | Steam Punk | Rampager | Drake | Plaguehurler | Phoenix | Imp | Compostling | Devil | Flamespren | Fishstick |
Moist | Snowman | Leviathan | Merfolk | Deep One | Nimbus | Lake Lady | Serpent | Swampheap | Salamander | Trout |
Tuesday, April 27, 2021
10x10 Table of Monster Names, Presented Without Comment
Thursday, April 22, 2021
Making Scrabble Tiles Into Cheap RPG "Minis"
Snail wizard modified from Twitter Emoji; Modron modified from AD&D Monster Manual II; plastic minis from Battlelore 2e. |
Instructions:
- Get some Scrabble-style letter tiles.
- Here's an example search query on Amazon, but you can find similar tiles pretty much anywhere for around 0.04 USD per tile.
- For a bit of extra money, you can buy them pre-painted in a variety of colors. I bought the pink ones up above to make a gift for a family member, and had a bunch left over.
- Glue pairs of tiles face to face to make a thicker wooden block.
- (A single Scrabble tile can be balanced on it's end, but it's not very stable.)
- A simple pva gluestick will do the trick. The resulting bond holds up to normal handling, but can be twisted apart.
- A stronger bond can be made by scoring the surfaces and using a bit of wood glue, but I personally don't think it's worth the extra effort and mess.
- Optionally: give them a couple quick coats of acrylic color.
- Print out some little images of critters.
- To avoid peeling, make the images slightly smaller than the size of the tiles.
- For example, the scrabble tiles I bought are about 18x20mm, so I should have printed the images at about 17x19mm.
- I print two images per block. One for the front, and a mirror-image for the back.
- Make or select images with sharp lines and bold colors. Texture and fine detail gets washed out at this scale.
- I used GIMP to crop my images and Inkscape to scale and arrange them for printing. These are both free software.
- In Inkscape, you can change the default display units to mm under File > Document Properties.
- In this same menu, make sure the correct page size is selected. A4 is the default.
- Leave a bit of space around the edges of the page for printing margins.
- Once all your images are arranged, export the file as a pdf by choosing File > Save a Copy, and changing the file type to pdf.
- Print this pdf at 100% size. Don't shrink to fit it on the page.
- Color printing services usually cost less than 1 USD per page; my local library charges 0.50 USD per page. You can easily fit 50 blocks worth of images onto a page, making the printing costs no more than 0.02 USD per block.
- Cut out and glue the images onto the blocks.
Now you have some nice little game pieces . They're not as fancy looking as molded plastic minis, but the advantages are:
- They're significantly cheaper, and easier to replace.
- They are much more durable than painted minis or paper standees. You can just throw a handful of these in a box or bag without concern.
- They stack nicely for compact storage.
- They're pleasant and easy to handle.
Formatted Example Downloads:
Wednesday, April 14, 2021
Wandering Titans, part III - Making Things Personal
Here's another batch of titans as weather. See part 1 for explanation. The unifying factor with this batch is that these titans interact more directly with people. The first stretches the concept of "weather" a bit.
The Hard-hearted King of Dragons
Logan Feliciano The artist's description is also pretty good RPG brainfuel. |
On the horizon (visible in neighboring hexes)
: Gargantuan dragon with impenetrable scales. Wings held wide, blocking out the sun.
Behavior / Desires
: The King of Dragons hoards peace and stability. In a conflict between two states, it will rush to decimate the attacking armies. It will use its breath to turn revolters into glass. And there is nothing it finds more beautiful than a tyrant on their throne.
- Sharp nailed dragon cultists on ineffable missions of political espionage.
- Piles of wicked stones, once merely gravel, now made impassibly dangerous by the Dragon King's presence.
- Woodland creatures impaled on supernaturally sharp brambles and branches.
- Beehives and waspnests grown to unreasonable size, their stingers empowered, and their queens driven mad with a lust for expansion.
Radiant Fowl
"The Dragon Prince" background by Michael MacRae, but I doodled a little bird on top. |
On the horizon (visible in neighboring hexes)
: Light on the horizon. Most noticeable during the night.
: A giant glowing phoenix, wispy tail trailing off towards the horizon. Or maybe its more of a glowing rooster. The details are hard to nail down because you can't really look directly at the thing.
Behavior / Desires
: Witness it! Witness its luminous glory! This titan wants to be seen, appreciated, and maybe even worshiped. It tends to gravitate towards areas with large populations of people or polished surfaces, where it perches and preens.
- Fluffy, arm-length, radiant feathers fallen on the ground. They glow so brightly it hurts to look at them. A single small barb casts light like a torch. Frequently leads to deadly conflict between rival feather-hunters.
- Cold-blooded monsters, standing still, eyes closed, basking in the ever-present glow.
- Travelling titan researchers bedecked in reflective protective suits. Despite its proclivity for precariously perching on buildings and blinding pedestrians, it's overall the safest titan to observe and study.
- Nomadic lycanthropes following the titan to avoid transformation, driven only a wee bit mad by lack of sleep.
- Basements and dungeons choked with new sprouted vegetation.
Desiccant Prowler
Nutchapol Thitinunthakorn |
On the horizon (visible in neighboring hexes)
: No clouds in the sky. No rain.
: A dusty striped pantherine thing, surrounded by a thin choking haze
Behavior / Desires
: Lazily tears apart magical protections, sabotages water reserves. It doesn't kill things directly, but its mere presence is hazardous, and it likes to watch things die. Stares down at entire villages or herds as the life drains out of them, and them laps up their souls like a cat drinking milk.
- Fanatical dust elementals and living stone statues, helping wage war on water-based life-forms. The titan is ignorant of their devotion.
- Arcanohazard disposal teams dragging wagonloads of janky cursed items and failed enchantments into the titan's zone of influence, hoping the beast will rip them apart for fun.
- The desiccated corpses sometimes begin to crawl around and gnaw. Don't let them get their teeth into you, or they'll steal your blood and soul. Outside of the titan's hex, they crumble into ash, which can be sold to wizards for its magic-suppressing and water-absorbent properties.
Kekai Kotaki |
Wednesday, April 7, 2021
Wandering Titans, part II - Fast and Slow
Giant monsters that are also weather phenomena.
The basic mechanism I suggested in the previous post is to roll 2d6 each day, and move the titan to a neighboring hex when doubles are rolled. Here's a pair of titans brainstormed while thinking about twists to those rules.
Stampeding Winds
Donato Giancola |
: A herd of charging ethereal stallions precipitating from the air. Clouds run through the sky, and smaller instantiations charge along the ground. Windward, the air speeds up, forming into visible near-tangible wind-creatures, and then slowly dissipate as they approach the leeward edge of the hex.
Behavior / Desires
: Wants to run. Wants to be free. Wants mortal creatures to charge alongside it without end.
- The smaller manifestations of the Stampede can be captured and used as a magical power source. Poacher-wizards try to do this with elaborate steel wind-traps. But it's dangerous work, as the winds speed up to impossible levels to batter down walls wherever a member of the herd gets trapped.
- Wind-dependent ecosystems of whirlibirds, tumbletrees, and lumbering strandbeests.
- Homes or even entire castles tumbling through the air.
- An encounter with an instance of the Stampeding Winds. If it likes you, there's a chance it will bless you with tailwinds for the rest of the day. Party travels twice as fast until the next time they sleep.
- Travelers hitching a ride on the winds
- Two blokes calmly rowing along in an airborne canoe.
- A gang of witches racing along on suped-up broomsticks.
- A village of people, rapidly evacuated, carrying as many possessions as they could grab from their now-destroyed homes.
- Bandits in a balloon with long hooks and nets, snatching up possessions that people left behind.
- 140-years-old woman, hunched over with age, slowly walking with the wind. Hasn't stopped or slept for the past 50 years. Barely kept alive by the sustaining force of the titanic winds.
- A whale which beached itself and just kept going.
The Ponderous Ox
: A massive buffalo, with fur like boulders and horns like mountains. Always faintly visible, far off in the distance, behind the next hill, shaded by the mists. You can always approach the titan, but can never reach it.
Behavior / Desires
: No one has ever seen it move, or do much of anything at all but slowly breathe titanic breathes. (But surely it must move, for how else can it travel from hex to hex?)
- Void monk meditating on a hilltop. No, they haven't been following the titan. They've been here in this spot as long as they can remember. The titan hasn't moved in all that time, they say.
- Small towns that don't exist, fiercely aggressive towards outsiders.
- Strange pillars, can be hacked apart (may trigger localized earthquakes) and sold to wizards to make immovable rods.
- Empty cabins, with a warm hearth and hot soup inside. If you sleep in the soft beds inside, you'll wake up on cold ground outside, weeks later, the titan having moved on.
- Incomprehensible alien geometries slipping through the gaps between moments in time. Probably nothing to worry about.