What I do on Sunday... Achieve!

I'm in cleaning mode. Well, my wife is in cleaning mode for the holidays. She is also a good photographer and has a nice camera. She has promised that I can borrow her camera, if I get all of the Christmas stuff upstairs and do some laundry.

Deal.

What do I need the camera for? Two semesters ago, I had to put together a video for a class project. I decided to cover the Battle of Rorke's Drift using minis I had on hand. Being me, I couldn't just do a PowerPoint, it was stop motion all the way.

Proof of concept video

Oh, but I couldn't stop there. I wanted actual students to participate. So I nervously packed up all of my figures and terrain and brought them into my 6:1:3 classroom. I have to say, my staff really didn't understand what was happening, but they did their best to help.

At the end of the day, I found that my lesson plans were wildly out of spec for 6 student with autism, so I brought in the NPC Players to help me out. The NPC Players are my children, Nathan, Catherine and Paul. I asked them to read the script which were based of social studies lesson plans I presented in my classroom. Since my children couldn't come into my classroom due to various privacy and safety concerns, I had to work backwards and sideways to create script based of adapted lesson plans for 10 year olds. Every evening for weeks, the NPC Players and I tried to make the script come to life in stop motion form.

I got an A on this assignment, but I honestly don't believe my professor had a good handle on how much I achieved. One teacher, one teaching assistant, 2 classroom aides (sometimes different people), 6 10 year old students, who happen have autism remotely working with 3 typical middle and high school students, all working together to produce an understandably scripted video and associated adapted lesson plans to meet my professor's college class standards. It was quite an achievement.

At the end of the day, it was a bridge to far. The audio we worked so hard to produce bombed big time. But I would totally do it again. I think my students and children gave a great grasp of the historical event.


One last task has remained undone since the end of the project. The clean up. 9 kids and 4+ adults made a hash of my models. A mess that remains to this day.

Over the Christmas break, I plan on reorganizing my models and post images of them here.

Here are some examples images of random figures from the jumbled hash.

What did I miss? The Blogosphere.

This is a second post in my series about podcasts. This is very much an unreview, because if it was a review it would be redundant. Jeremy's Thought Eater blog and associated Frothcast is a weekly roundup of everything important happening out there in the world of OSR.

Thought Eater is the blog, Frothcast is the podcast. 

See? See redundant. This is the one podcast you need to keep up to date on everything out there. It is super handy and informative, every Frothcast has an associated blog post with links to everything mentioned in the show. Released on Wednesdays, it's an hour or so of OSR goodness. Jeremy also has a Five Minute Friday episode to cap off the week. 

It's awesome, go subscribe. now.   

What did I miss? Handling NPCs

I love podcasts. Everything from history to Disney and everything in between. I haven't listed to commercial radio in years. Being that there are easily 2 dozen podcasts in my queue right now, I am way behind.

This series covers podcast episodes I missed when they came out. Being These Old Games, you know I'm not going review new stuff.

They Might Be Gazebos! Banner. One of my favorite images from the OSR,
because I think I used to have these dice myself.

Anyway, the podcast and episodes that have caught my ear this week is They Might Be Gazebos' Playing Wrong: NPCs. I love this 'cast and this episode stand out as useful advice on the care and use of NPCs. My campaign has a great variety of NPCs, which you can download from the Pregenerated Character tab above.

Back in the day, I'd have 7 to 12 players sitting at my table, so the idea of loads and loads of characters is fun to me. When I know I'm introducing a character I usually have a sheet for them. PDFs make them easy. When I don't have sheet, I probably have another sheet that is applicable to a random person I make up on the fly or to sub in for a character the players find interesting.

It isn't so much the numbers on the sheet that make a difference, it's the immersion. If the players believe that I have stats on everyone, then everyone is real. It's pure showmanship, plain and simple.

Not every named person is terribly important, but sometimes, as Chuck says in his podcast is that sometimes the dice and players get to choose who is important. While Playing It Wrong espouses having simple character stats, I go the other direction. To an extent. I am actually using a modified character sheet from BSOLO to keep myself sane. They look pretty and 3 characters per sheet is handy.

Go ahead and bookmark my Pregenerated characters for you campaign and don't forget to give Playing It Wrong a try.

Product Update! New, remastered maps for the Kobold's Folly Mini-Setting

Welcome to the Kobold's Folly. This map set is a mini-setting for your campaigns. It is rules agnostic, containing no references to rules or settings.

This set of maps is easily plugged into almost any campaign as a strange and wondrous location for your players to explore.

The Kobold's Folly is a small community of strange creatures, with an even stranger background and outlook on life. Explore the House of Minwan, the first civilized kingdom of kobolds.

An updated version of this title is now available as of Dec. 12, 2019. All images in the booklet are remastered to a higher quality as have all maps files. The Exterior file contains 18 pages of maps which can be printed as 1 inch equals 5 feet. The Interior is to the same scale. Additionally, a single page map is available for each floor plus the exterior, to no particular scale. Total page count is now 41, up from 13.

The images below are the small interior artwork from the book.

The exterior map of the Folly is 36" by 30" with 1" equaling 5 feet. While the interior is much smaller, it is to the same 1" to 5 foot scale.

Available as Pay What You Want with a suggested price of $3.99, it will make an excellent addition to many campaigns. While I envisioned this tribe of kobolds as the classic dog-reptiles of D&D, there are hints of the mine dwelling little men of legend.

If you have already downloaded this set, please go log into DriveThruRPG and download your newly updated product from the library. If you enjoy it, don't forget to throw some coppers in the tip jar.

Improved memory... Better Maps

Just in time for Christmas, I updated my computer and can now do better maps for some of my products. The first update is for The Kobold Folly, which might fall under the category of "most improved".

Newest Map, throne room created with Inkwell Ideas Worldographer

1st map of all three floors and surrounding orchard.

By updating my computer to Linux 18.04 and doubling the memory, I can get 1" = 5 feet scale maps. Before the update, I didn't have the horses to do that.

Check back later for updates as to when this change goes live.