Thank You for Making The Hex Pack My Most Popular Product!

Wow! I can believe all the interest in this Hex Pack. 

I like hex paper, but it's kind of a pain in the butt. A full page of hexes boggles the eyes and really isn't a full page unless you mess with the hex size. You need to go smaller than a page to get a manageable workspace. I jumped into Worldographer and knocked something together:

Hexes... like so. 

As I was doing this, I hopped over to Steamtunnel's The Hydra's Grotto to read up on 6 mile hexes. It really is the best size for hexes. Don't trust me, click that link to see all the mathy wonders that can be done with a 6 mile hex.

As I was working, I eliminated all of the stuff that bothers me. Text on the page, hex numbers, etc. I ended up doing 9 different styles: red, grey and black lines then dotted, dashed, solid lines. Once I was done, I threw them in a template. Since I was working from the ground up, I made a set of templates for 8.5 by 11 and A4.

A little consumer copy later, and I had my next DrivethruRPG document. This thing is PWYW, with a suggested price of $0.99. It's available via the Creative Commons 4.0, share and share alike with attribution for private and commercial use.

I honestly didn't know what to do with the price. For home use, there are 9 zillion websites you can download templates from for free. The main difference on this product is, there is a booklet for 8.5x11 and A4 pages, plus a file with just the hex in JPG and PNG at 1400x1299 pixels. Ninety-nine cents is probably too much for home use, but far too little for commercial use.

I don't know... I'm just hanging it here for all of you. I'm going back to my game now.

Enjoy!

Ads of Six - Dunromin University Press

I like doing these posts of ads, which is unfortunate for my readers. Lol. 

Today's Ad of Six are from Dunromin University Press on DriveThruRPG. These modules, gazetters and guides are great. If I get a chance to play D&D after quarantine, I'm gonna run a few of these. 

As a general rule, I think I'll be placing these Ads of Six in the left column from now on and save a post. 

SM03 Cityguide to the City of Karan SM03 Cityguide to the City of Karan

SM00 A Traveller's Atlas of Drunromin and the Land of the Young SM00 A Traveller's Atlas of Dunromin and the Land of the Young

SM12 The Trials of a Young Wizard SM12 The Trials of a Young Wizard

SM06 The Warren SM06 The Warren

SM04 Gazeteer of the Land of the Young SM04 Gazeteer of the Land of the Young

SM01 A Players' Guide to Dunromin SM01 A Players' Guide to Dunromin

Products by These Old Games - The Ad Post

I've finally hit six products DriveThruRPG. Yesterday, I launched The Hex Pack and already have dozens of downloads. I think that's the strongest launch ever. I'm on the front page too, under Newest Free and PWYW heading. It's silly, but feels good.

 

You can find all of my products on DriveThruRPG under PWYW. Check them out.

Swashbuckler Character Class for D&D and AD&D Swashbucklers for D&D and AD&D

Zero to Hero: Uncommon Heroes Zero to Hero

Character Sheet for AD&D Character Sheet for AD&D

Kobold’s Folly Mini Setting Kobold’s Folly

Compass Rose Inn Mini Setting Compass Rose Inn

The Hex Pack The Hex Pack

And another thing... 6 Mile Hex pack.

Edit 5-29-2020 - Wow! The response to this tiny pack of Hex Paper has been outstanding! Thank you so much. 

I am hooked on Gemstone IV, a MUD. Yeah, I know it's 2020 but damn am I addicted. Anyway, being a MUD, you have to make your own maps. Other people have happily charted all the lands but I find that most fonts and images are far too small for me to read without my glasses. Ah, the joys of being a gamer for X decades.

I make my own maps which are much larger than normal so I can read them without my glasses. Here is an example, all maps print on a 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper:

Standard Marshkeep Map	My Map, Part 1	My Map, Part 2

As I do these things, sometimes I notice that the person that created the area was working on grid paper. The other day, I noticed someone must have used hex paper, because the small size and the arrangement of rooms. Hex paper can produce tighter maps as opposed to grids.

I like hex paper, but it's kind of a pain in the butt. A full page of hexes boggles the eyes and really isn't a full page unless you mess with the hex size. You need to go smaller than a page to get a manageable workspace. I jumped into Worldographer and knocked something together:

Hexes... like so. 

As I was doing this, I hopped over to Steamtunnel's The Hydra's Grotto to read up on 6 mile hexes. It really is the best size for hexes. Don't trust me, click that link to see all the mathy wonders that can be done with a 6 mile hex.

As I was working, I eliminated all of the stuff that bothers me. Text on the page, hex numbers, etc. I ended up doing 9 different styles: red, grey and black lines then dotted, dashed, solid lines. Once I was done, I threw them in a template. Since I was working from the ground up, I made a set of templates for 8.5 by 11 and A4.

A little consumer copy later, and I had my next DrivethruRPG document. This thing is PWYW, with a suggested price of $0.99. It's available via the Creative Commons 4.0, share and share alike with attribution for private and commercial use.

I honestly didn't know what to do with the price. For home use, there are 9 zillion websites you can download templates from for free. The main difference on this product is, there is a booklet for 8.5x11 and A4 pages, plus a file with just the hex in JPG and PNG at 1400x1299 pixels. Ninety-nine cents is probably too much for home use, but far too little for commercial use.

I don't know... I'm just hanging it here for all of you. I'm going back to my game now.

Enjoy!

Here is a link to go play GSIV. It's free to play or you can purchase a subscription.

Rare Find! Giac My

Title: Giac My: The Game of Tactical Combat in Vietnam
Author: F. MacCrae, B. Lutz, and M. Ratner
Illustrator: F. MacCrae, and R Foerster
Rule Set: Unique
Year: 1978
Pages: 48
Number of Players: 2+
Rating: Not Yet Read.

Today, someone asked me to look at my comicbooks for an old ad. I couldn't find it, but I did find this: Giac My.

Excuse my thumb. This little treasure is from way back in 1978 and is clearly a mix of handwritten, hand drawn images and a typewriter. I have no idea how I came by it. It was stuck in the center pages of X-Factor Annual 1.

I can't wait to read this one. Required equipment are a way of generating numbers between 1 and 20, several 6 side dice, a tape measure, figures or paper counters. That's old school.

On the back page, there is an ad for other games by FanTac for Space Marines, Orbit War, Space Assault and Space Force.

Never do I ever... Roll for Random Encounters at Night

There you have it. Page 47 of the Dungeon Master's Guide, Encounters. My copy is stained with the blood of a thousand characters. But hardly any of the blood came from a nighttime encounter. And certainly not a random nighttime encounter.

Back in the day... and when I say "day", I mean from time immemorial to present day... people hunker down at night. Night is not fun unless you are up to something that can only happen at night. Typically, to have a good time at night, you need a plan, not "random". A dinner party, a star watching party, New Year's Eve and so on. Many people would be hard pressed to name a "random nighttime event" that went well for them. 

The same goes for RPG's. Don't waste time on a nighttime encounter roll. It makes the players nervous and edgy, which is sometimes fun. But not once a day, every day. Night time IS fearful, but the playing field is level when everyone fears. Not much moves at night. (Vampires are a story for another time).  

Many epic things happen in the light of the moon. You can't trust your dice to tell you what that is. You make it so. And make it good. 

One of my favorite stories about night adventures isn't even mine. It's the story of the Seventh Galbiana. This was a legion that declared for Otho against Vitellius for the Purple. Otho was coming north to head off Vitellius who was racing south for Rome. Both armies turned to meet, Vitellius' forces facing west and Otho's to the east. They met at dusk at Bedriacum and the Second Battle of Bedriacum was on. It was one of the rare cases where the Romans fought through the night. The Seventh's eagle fell to the enemy in the dead of night, but was saved by one centurion who sacrificed himself for honor. The fighting was chaotic, ferocious and exhausting. 

As the Sun rose, there was a collision of happenstance. The Seventh was on the left hand of the field, facing to the west. They were under command of Antonius, who served in the Legio III Gallica in Syria. When dawn broke, the men of the Seventh Galbiana followed Antonius' lead turned their backs to the enemy and gave a mighty cheer to something in the east. The Vitellian forces, the whole army, not just the ones facing the Seventh collapsed and retreated believing that Otho's reinforcements were taking the field. 

Nothing could be further from the true. All the Seventh was doing was emulating Antonius' Syria habit of saluting the Sun.  

Such thing are random, but not the sort of random that dice generate. If you want your players to enjoy their game, give them something to think about, not something the dice tell you.

If you like such stories, you can read more about this the book 69 A.D. by Gwyn Morgan.

Why The Tek on These Old Games?

Every month, I publish my stats on the blog and "download numbers*" from DriveThru RPG. Why?

When I started this, I did everything willy-nilly without much evaluation of what I was doing. Back in July of last year, I wondered how much money I was making. I got a number $314.

Ok.

How? No idea. It isn't terribly important how much or how without a record of how much time I put in on this. I started taking in an interest in my stats, which allowed me to appreciate how people were using my website and coming into contact with my 5 products on DriveThruRPG.

Back in August of 2018, I broke some ribs. I started selling books while all hopped up on pain pills and a lack of sleep. I got into this with zero consideration AND just in time for my main vehicle for contact with consumers to close (Rest in Peace, G+!).

Now that I doing research before taking action, I know a bit and would like to share with anyone who thinking about creating a blog or a product line.

Here is a little information about how I promote my stuff. I primarily use MeWe, and make efforts to promote on both Dice.Camp and Mastodon. I am also found on Old School RPG Planet. I have a presence on Facebook, but it is small.

Today, I had a chance to talk to Jon Salway, vb Wyrde and Wayne's Books on MeWe.com about Facebook stats. We all have Facebook pages, which don't seem to be working as we wish. (Those FB links are Wayne's Books, vb Wyrde, and These Old Games)

We were all noticing how much FB wanted us to pay money for contacts, and what contacts and interactions were small. I ran some stats and found out some data. First, FB was telling me that I had zero likes in the past 28 days, 6 pageviews, 11 people reached and 9 engagements, whatever any of those things are. Added together, it's "26 things".

My Google Analytics was telling me a different story. In the same 28 days, I had 74 sessions from Facebook. Hmm. 

Which is right? Google doesn't have a horse in the game when it comes to Facebook as a traffic source. If they did, they'd under report. So, "26 Things" happened on Facebook, but I got 74 people coming to my page from FB. That works out to 2.84 visits per "26 Things" on Facebook. I can also see that these "things from Facebook" were rather active. Most them dropped out, but many of them when on to click other stuff on my site. That's engagement. And it's engagement from people that Facebook told me didn't engage.

I suspect that someone finds my page on FB, clicks a link to my website, but after reading they don't go back to Facebook and comment or click like. That sounds about right.

So, it probably isn't in my best interest to ever pay to boost a post.

Another point about Facebook. You have three ways of having a presence. I have a page which people can follow. It holds content that is not shared with my friends and family. It isn't very effective. Second, you can create an account which is only about your business, you effectively don't have a personal account for friends and family. Everything you do is for business not for friends and family. This is effective, and at a guess I think Dyson Logos uses this method. I could be wrong, I am guessing based his activity and comments. Devon Rue took a different path. She has an account which seems to mix all of her business contacts with friends and family. Dyson and Devon's methods are super effective where as my is horrible.

Dyson recently posted that he discovered that if made a post with a link, FB depreciated it. That's annoying, they want him to pay for interaction. He discovered that if he made a post without a link and added the link to the comments of that post, more people saw it. Interesting and annoying.

Anyway, this is getting long and I am almost out of knowledge to drop. I hope this helps.

*"Download numbers" are not sales. My sales are poor. 14 times as many people download for free vs. pay for a product at any price, including a penny.

The Tek - April 2020

There are a couple of months that are really bad for me. Usually they are May and November. This is owing to my finals at school. Typically, finals are pushed in to mid-May and pull back to late November. The administration is dancing the issues of Easter and Christmas, without actually using those names.


April 2020 Downloads via DriveThruRPG:
AD&D Character Sheet For Use with Unearthed Arcana - 3
Compass Rose Inn Minisetting - 1
Kobold Folly Minisetting - 3
Zero to Hero: Uncommon Commoners - 7
Swashbucklers Character Class - 2

I want to share my all time download stats as of May, because I did this last month.
AD&D Character Sheet For Use with Unearthed Arcana - 96
Compass Rose Inn Minisetting - 138
Kobold Folly Minisetting - 128
Zero to Hero: Uncommon Commoners - 255
Swashbucklers Character Class - 93

I'm really happy with those numbers. I am less happy with my April webstats as I pretty much stopped publishing content for half a month.

Google Analytics Pageviews - 957
Google Analytics Sessions - 669
Pageviews per Session - 1.43

Additionally, I started publishing a podcast called: "That's Not New". I probably shouldn't have made my first post on April Fool's Day, but that's what happened. I am still searching for my voice and my place, so these are pretty rough episodes. I intend for these to be biweekly podcast with a duration of 7-15 minutes. We shall see how that goes. I could really use some feedback.

Pre-Generated Characters - 2nd Level Monks 002

This is my second group of monks. Decima, Seneca the Swift and Segria are fairly typical monks for my campaign. They have temporal tasks, which takes them away from their homes in the monastery. They have a lot of money for monks, which probably indicates they are either transferring funds from one location to another or have taken in a donation Segria has small diamonds flecks, which are important to her order.

Each of these characters has probably been on an adventure or three. I like to give my pregenerated characters some flavor with their equipment. Each character has something either secular like an instrument or spiritual like intense or a book. One of them has a wooden sword, which could be an interesting reveal, sort of like Book's ability to use a shotgun on Firefly. 

If there is a call for it in the comments, I will make DOCX and Google Doc file available as I have the PDFs. The reason I have not done this from the get go is that I created every character of a class in one document and print each page as a PDF.

Pre-Generated Characters - 1st Level Assassins 002

This is my last batch of Assassin for a while. I meant to generate level 2 Assassins, but somehow reverted back to level 1. Oops. Anyway, Elvina, Arrius and Linus are more in line with classic AD&D assassins than the assassins in my campaign.

Each of these characters has probably been on an adventure or three. I like to give my pregenerated characters some flavor with their equipment. One of these assassins has a lute and two of them have books which touch on ethics which is an interesting spin on assassins.

If there is a call for it in the comments, I will make DOCX and Google Doc file available as I have the PDFs. The reason I have not done this from the get go is that I created every character of a class in one document and print each page as a PDF.

Episode 002 - I Chose Poorly and De Ut Des

This episode has a format change base on feedback I've received. I have a new sponsor, Anchor.FM and the format now supports the concept of sponsors. I also have some new music so let's all give thanks to Kevin MacLeod at incompetech.com for the following tracks:

Evening Fall (Piano) and
Starry
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

In this episode, I reminisce about 4 games: D&D, Star Frontiers, Gemstone IV and Traveller.  I cover 35+ years of gaming experiences in one podcast. Part of the reason I have been offline for so long was a mash up of getting my lesson plans online for students, my classes at Buffalo State suddenly switching to an online format and the associate PITA from taking finals online.

I hope this format works better than Episode 001 and 000's. It was a pain to record, mostly owing to my new Podcat, Shinobu. She's cute even as she climbs the cables.

Now on to the episode!

Pre-Generated Characters - 2 Monks and Terry

These 1st level characters are monks, Miles and Laelia. Terry is a joke character. Click the link to download the PDF file. These characters are almost ready to go. In generating ability scores, I made sure the range was acceptable in both D&D and AD&D. To convert these characters to straight AD&D, simply add or subtract the racial modifiers and class abilities.

Terry is comic relief. As you read through his character sheet, you'll realize that he is every person you've met in a costume at a renaissance fair. I normally don't do joke characters on my blog, but Terry is exactly the type of shenanigans I engage in at the table.

If there is a call for it in the comments, I will make DOCX and Google Doc file available as I have the PDFs. The reason I have not done this from the get go is that I created every character of a class in one document and print each page as a PDF.

A Little Bit of Everything

This week, I plan to have at least one post a day on topics that cover every aspect of my nerdiness. The last post was on AD&D assassins, the next will be on models.

Anyway, Star Wars has become a large part of Disney World and while I can't quite wrap my head around Disney and Star Wars living under the same roof, I do love it. 

In 2016, Star Wars was plastered all over Hollywood Studios. My son Nathan and I picked up some little metal toys. I selected new X-Wing while Nathan went with the New Order's TIE. I keep mine on my desk while he has his on his dresser. My wife won't let me keep mine in the bedroom...

Anyway, I can't wait to get back there, except I can wait for this pandemic to cool down. It's a weird feeling. One of my favorite things to do in Disney is to take in the little museum like setups they do to absorb the crowds. It works and usually it's a relief to get out of the heat.  They had a whole area in Hollywood Studios for Star Wars.

I loved it!

I would be remiss if I didn't plug our most excellent travel planner, Jaime Nowicki. Her services are free and she does more than Disney packages. You can also follow her on Facebook.

Pre-Generated Characters - 3rd Level Assassins

These 3rd level characters are Assassins, Marcus, Mircea and Tulia. Click the link to download the PDF file. These characters are almost ready to go. In generating ability scores, I made sure the range was acceptable in both D&D and AD&D. To convert these characters to straight AD&D, simply add or subtract the racial modifiers and class abilities.

In my campaign, Assassins make up between 10-20% of the human Empire's Legionary. These characters have far more than a typical adventurer would have owing to the fact that they are professional soldiers. I will post again with a better explanation of their equipment.

If there is a call for it in the comments, I will make DOCX and Google Doc file available as I have the PDFs. The reason I have not done this from the get go is that I created every character of a class in one document and print each page as a PDF.

Assassin of the Empire

In my campaign, the Assassin in the Guild operate more as spies than killers. They are the secret police for the Emperor, persevering the peace through whispers and intimidation. Since the Human Empire is at war with dwarves and elves, assassins have a noticeable inability to infiltrate these societies. Sleep and height basically preclude it. Silly, but reasonable. They aren't sidelined by this lack, instead they keep the roads clear for the troops and citizens alike. They handle messages at all levels of government and even provide a private mail service. 

In this campaign assassins tend to work like urban and rural rangers, where the road between counts as a part of the creating town or village. Why not simply make them rangers? Because rangers operate completely without support in the wilderness, where as assassins and spies use and misuse resources already in place. Assassins require civilization to abuse, while rangers don't care about what everyone else is doing. Some of their skills collide, such as being knowledgeable about the lay of the land, habitation, trails, roads and alternate routes. But assassins can only work when they have the civil pact to violate. An assassin the woods is just as lost as a ranger in a church or temple.

Assassins will know the roads, the towns and the important places within the town. They are often attached to patrols to act as guides and reporters to civil agencies. They know the important people, and not just the people that think they are important. Assassins know the right scullery maids and court clerks. Rangers know different facts, which are clearly not in the same circle.