Hitch a Ride to Arcturus

 This weekend, I wrote up a more detailed description of my (very silly, not likely possible, but plausible enough) faster than light travel system for Bughunts & Bedlam. In addition, I came up with some technobabble to explain FTL communication as well, cribbing a bit from Star Frontiers. 

Star Frontiers has FTL at a speed of 1 light year per day, so I went with that for military or "elite" ships, and one light year per week for freighters, colony ships, or other pleb options. The one light year per week rate was suggestive of Alien, where they had a 10 month trip from Zeta Reticuli (40ish light years from Earth) to get home. 

And of course, FTL can warp your brain unless you're in hypersleep. There are now rules for space madness and how to treat it. 

 I had already made a blurb about the setting, where humans have 23 active colonies and 5 failed attempts, and had explored out about 100 light years from Earth. A bit of Google/Wikipedia work gave me a bunch of potential systems with exoplanets that could be colonized. Plus, I remembered that I had a couple of alien species in Cryptids & Conspiracy that have nearby home worlds. 

So I made a big chart of about 30 systems and the distance in light years (rounded up if a decimal of 0.1 or more due to the way the FTL drive works in 1 light year-ish jumps). This took some time. After a lot of slow Googling and math, and a webpage that said it had distances that most turned out to be inaccurate, I gave in and turned to AI. I asked it to generate distances from one target system to all of the other systems. I found discrepancies with that webpage. Then I found discrepancies within the AI output. 

Eventually, I asked AI to make me a spreadsheet with all of the systems. Then I found a game on Steam called SpaceEngine that shows distances from system to system. I went in and did a bit of random checks, and found the final AI numbers to be close enough of a match. So assuming the SpaceEngine people know what they're doing, and that the AI did the math more or less correctly, I've got my travel/communication chart. 

A subspace message (one way only) takes 1 hour per light year. 

A military or high end ship crosses 1 light year per day (no relativity effects for reasons, but you're probably in cryosleep anyway). 

A blue collar working ship crosses 1 light year per week. The chart just has rounded up light year numbers, so it works for all three purposes. 

I'm not proud that I turned to AI for help. I'm usually against it. But it did save me MANY hours of boring labor. And I am NOT using it for text (rules or flavor), or art. 

 Now that the FTL rules are done, I'll add a few options for GMs that want warp drive, hyperdrive, orbital jump gates, or terrestrial stargates in their games.  

 ________

Oh, and an update on the cover art. The artist sent me the first sketch of the two characters that will be front and center on the cover. It looks really good. No notes. I'd given her pretty specific art direction and reference pictures of what I wanted. Now, we wait to see how she fills in the background!  

 

Serendipity (III)

 At the beginning of the year, my wife started learning Korean calligraphy. Then, a few months back, she found an art teacher to teach her watercolor painting to decorate the calligraphy designs. My wife came home from her art class the other day and said she mentioned to the teacher that I was writing an RPG book. The art teacher offered to do some art for the book. 

So we messaged a bit, and then went to talk to her a couple of days ago. 

She's now working on a design for cover art for Missions & Mayhem. It will be a full color acrylic painting, if we do commission her for it. Her work that I've seen is very good, and we shared some concept art, other modern-ish RPG cover art, etc. along with some reference art for the characters that will grace the cover. 

She said she can also do black and white line art fairly easily, so I'll probably commission some more interior art pieces from her later. 

Another artist in Seoul, Jeff Witty, has been doing a lot of art for Dungeon Crawl Classics lately. We've also talked, and he likes my concept for art to highlight the character classes, but he's pretty busy with commissions already. Hopefully, I'll be able to snag a few pictures from him as well.

There's no monsters in the core book, but I'll of course be commissioning some monster art from my buddy Jeremy Hart for the campaign module books. I want to support him as much as possible, too.

I'm pretty excited to see what the art teacher does with the concept I gave her. And once I've got the cover art, it will be a lot easier to start promoting the books. Other than revising some "how to play" and "how to run the game" sections, the main Missions & Mayhem core rules book is done. I'm pretty happy with how it plays, and I don't expect to make more than tweaks to the game from here on out.  

Gearing Up for a Play Test

 I've got the Flying Swordsmen 2E rules in what I think are playable condition. So, after today's Star Wars d6 game, I asked the guys if they'd be willing to try out these rules next time. They said OK, although Flynn, my older son, still wants to play more Star Wars while he's here for the summer. I can manage both of those things. 

 This evening, I copy/pasted the player facing rules into a new document, and edited it a little. I saved it as a PDF, but now I'm thinking, even though it's just a play test document, maybe I should add some art to it. Not all of my players have a lot of experience watching wuxia movies. Art could help. 

This will be mostly art taken from movies, because this document shouldn't be seen by anyone but my players. When I am closer to ready to publish, I'll have to make the decision to stick with public domain art like in 1E (probably recycle a lot of the art I did use there), or maybe try to run a Kickstarter or IndieGoGo campaign to fund some original art. I suck at self-promotion, so I'll probably save myself the stress and just use the PD art again. But we'll see. 

For now, I'm excited to share these rules with the group, see what sorts of PCs they come up with, and then form some adventures and test the rules in play.  

Gnomish Tarot

Dean, who has been a good friend and fellow gamer for many years now, has always produced some gorgeous art derived from our games, dating back to Justin's Vaults of Ur campaign (see the labels to this post). Through Ur, Chanbara play tests, various games run by Jeremy, and into West Marches, he's consistently drawn a lot of amazingly detailed pieces that illustrate our games. I've posted some of it here before. He also ran a pretty amazing campaign himself, that started as 4E and migrated to 5E along the way. The campaign was a bizarre mix of Oz, Spencer's Faerie Queene, Narnia, Pellucidar, Dr. Who... and tons of fun. 

He's back in Canada now, and producing a webtoon based on his campaign. You can check it out here: 

Tales from the Gnomish Tarot

Dean actually gifted me a lot of his original work that he produced while he lived here in Busan. Here's a couple of illos I have on my hard drive (the originals are in my office, I'm at home right now):

From my Megadungeon games

From Vaults of Ur

Chanbara Play Test Art!

Last night was another (in my opinion, at least) successful Chanbara play test session. The big bad boss fight at the end went MUCH faster than I thought it would, and more decisively in the players' favor, but they did do a few things "right" and had a few tactics that I didn't anticipate that went well for them (which is not a complaint at all, I'm not in love with my NPCS, and I'm happy to see the players defeat them when they can).

Anyway, just before the session, Jeff submitted this graphic novel-ish recap of the previous session a couple weeks ago, and I thought I'd share them (with his permission).

Need some art?

Jeremy, who plays Noctis the Orc (and formerly Ripper the Orc) in Vaults of Ur, has been working on a trans-gender...

...I mean trans-GENRE campaign using TriStat dX.  He's been trying to get this campaign off the ground for a long time, and it's gone from D&D to Marvel Superheroes/4C to one of his homebrew kludge games to TriStat.  Hopefully it stays put in that system, as I'm working on a Gunslinger from Mid-World (Stephen King's Dark Tower series) to journey across the veil to his technomage assimilation empire Dyson Sphere.

He's also revamped his blog, Omegapointilist Studios, to show off his artwork. 

He's also started selling licenses to use his work as stock art in your RPG product.  I've posted a few of his pictures here before, and I'll post a few more as teasers.  But seriously, help a brother out and go visit his shop on DriveThru RPG.  If you're putting together your own fantasy RPG, he may well have some inexpensive art you can use.

More Megadungeon Art

Dean posted this to our FB group, and I just gotta share it.  It's a scene from our last outing in my megadungeon.  They found a talking painting covering a secret door, and tricked it into giving up the password.  Unfortunately, the vault was already plundered...but by whom? 

The ogre was in the next room, counting out his money.
The mage with wispy mustache was eating bread and honey. (or running away from the larger party of adventurers...)

Satori! (Eureka!)

I just spent the last hour downloading public domain Ukiyo-e images by Kuniyoshi, Yoshitoshi, Hokusai, and a few other less well known artists.  I used quite a few of their images in Flying Swordsmen, even though they're Japanese rather than Chinese.

I blame Mao Zedong and his Cultural Revolution.  There's just more Japanese art from the 18th-19th centuries out there.

Anyway, while downloading lots of pictures of samurai, some of ninja and yamabushi and monks and what-not, there were plenty of pictures of fantastic stories of monster battles.  And since my chanbara rules will be based on D&D, I figured out where I want the rules to "go."  In other words, what will the game be about?

There are enough feudal/fantastic Japanese role-playing games with a historical or semi-historical background.  Mine will be more D&D (and I need to finally get around to checking out Ruins and Ronin, as from what I remember Mike D. posting when he was developing it, this is similar to the route he took).

Humans are at war with the bakemono/yokai.  A few (the demi-human classes) are on the side of humanity, but it will be heroes vs. monsters.  Sure, there can and should be rival daimyo, enemy ninja clans, rival duelist ronin, all that.  But the main action will be about protecting commoners from monsters.  Or more likely, as is the case in D&D, taking the fight to the monsters in their lairs, killing them, and taking their stuff.

So a much more mystical "pseudo-Japan" setting, but not the attempts at comic book horror that is the L5R Shadowlands. 

The updated Flying Swordsmen, when I finally get around to it, will also likely get a more "Wuxia Ghostbusters" tone to the rules.

Now, back to rules related thought.  How do I want to implement firearms?  Hmmm...

Horray for the Public Domain!

I'll say it again.  Flying Swordsmen was illustrated almost completely with PD images.  I'm thankful for the art donated by Dylan of Digital Orc and of course Daxiong for donating that awesome cover image.  I did a couple things myself (the frontispiece and map).  Most of the images came from PD sources, though.  And I love the Public Domain. 

So here's a lazy-ish post of some cool PD images from my hard drive.  Just because.

The Battle of the Pit

Here's an illustration I did over the past couple days of the big battle in last Saturday's game.  I haven't done a lot of drawing since high school, but my style hasn't really changed that much.  I had just as much trouble with perspective and proportions then as I do now.  But I kinda like my amateur style anyway.  This is the point in the battle just before things go bad.  Thidrek's shield is being splintered.  Ripper is downing the croc-mercenary, but about to be taken down by the vulture.  Elder Karl and Maya are entering the fray.  Not exactly how things went down, but close enough.

Megadungeon Pictures

Dean drew a couple of pictures of his and Jeremy's expedition into my Megadungeon.

First, Elder Karl travels astrally between the ruined city of Ur and the strange land of elves, dwarves and non-ruined wattle-and-daub Silverwood, and explores the Great Dungeon of Yeffal the Cursed and Mad Wizard.  In those dungeons, he and Ripper the Orc encountered strange small dog-like men riding goats, and a trio of "elves" who were looking for hobgoblin thieves.

Another encounter the pair faced was that of a zombie mule.  Karl quickly turned the foul beast, only to be tormented by the sound of clinking coins in the saddlebags of the necrotic pack beast!

Some of you may have seen his pictures on G+ already.  I just wanted to get them up here on the blog.

Dean, 200 xp for Elder Karl!  And thanks for the pics!

The Last Rhagodessa

30 minute pencil sketch of a scene from our Vaults of Ur game last Saturday.  From left to right: Thidrek the Sleestak, Caradoc the Mumbler, Ripper, Rhagodessa, and Father Karl.

Thidrek Revealed!

Jeremy/Oxide did a pic of Thidrek the Sleestak, my character in Justin's Vaults of Ur game.

I like the blurry finish, and the sorta "caught unexpected" look on Thidrek's face. 

You can check out more of Oxide's character art at his blog (link above).

Eureka!

I re-scanned the Flying Swordsmen map this morning.  I gave up on trying to find a print shop that had a big enough scanner to digitize the whole thing at once, and settled on the fact that to get a good scan I'd need to fold the original and use my home scanner.

Which I did.  I spent about an hour piecing the two scans together and more or less removing the seem, which was much easier to do than last time.  Anyway, my netbooks' almost out of power, so I'd better upload it here to show it off before I run out of battery.

I see a little silhouette-o of a man...

Inspired by Telecanter, and needing some small graphics for space filler in Flying Swordsmen, here are a few kung fu silhouettes.

Updates

Woke up to find two emails, one from Daxiong, another from Lee, both about Flying Swordsmen.

Daxiong hadn't been on Deviant Art for a long time, so didn't see my message.  He finally checked it, and emailed me the picture with no watermark.  Which is good, because I'd already wasted a day trying to remove the watermark manually, and was not doing such a good job.

Lee has sent me a couple versions of cover designs he's created.  We're still working on them, but he's got some good ideas and the cover is going to look sharp.

What do you think, folks?

Cover Mockup Pt. 2

Here's a version taking into account some of the suggestions my first attempt landed.  Looking at it now, I'm thinking the Chinese should actually be above the English in the title.  And I'm not sure if the crimson-ish font works or not.  Suggestions, please!

Lee B, if you're interested in making a logo and need some more input - like stroke order for writing the characters or whatnot - email me. the_boy_from_illinois [at] yahoo [dot] com

Some art and calligraphy

Here's an inked composite image of the two kung fu dudes I presented earlier on the blog.  Toying around with coloring it in GIMP, but not too happy with the results.  I'll likely just keep it black and white.

And Lee B, here are the Chinese characters for Flying Swordsmen written big, in both thick marker and fine-tip marker.

I'm kinda excited to see what Lee might come up with for a logo. Of course, I'm going to have a professional looking cover and a very amateurish interior, but hey, you'll be getting more than what you pay for with Flying Swordsmen. Cause you'll be paying nothing and getting some pretty cool rules for making D&D into a wuxia-style game.

Cover Mockup

Instead of doing the work I needed to do on my grad school final project (procrastination - I can do it tomorrow...), I was messing around with OpenOffice's version of PowerPoint, with some touchups in GIMP, and mocked up a cover for Flying Swordsmen.

Still needs some work, and I need a version of the picture without the DeviantArt watermark.  Waiting to hear from Daxiong about that.

Anyway, opinions wanted.  And don't hold back if you don't like it.  I can take criticism and it could save me from releasing a game with a crappy cover.  :D

Edit: Lee reminded me that I had meant to use the Chinese characters in the cover somewhere.  I posted them in the comments, but they're small.  Here they are bigger:

翔剣客

Stop the Presses!!!

Just checked DeviantArt.  I'd sent messages a while back begging a few artists there for cover-worthy material for Flying Swordsman.

And I just got a "Yes" from Daxiong Guo.

Who is he?  Well, read about him here, and take a look at his work here.  In addition to a ton of books and comics when he was in China, he's been working for Dark Horse and DC Comics since coming to the U.S., among other things.  Top notch artwork here.

I am really happy right now.  But the little guy's asleep (so is the wife) so no jumping and yelling with joy.