Next 52: Demihuman Options

"Elves in AD&D are unbalanced!"

"Well, that just goes to show ..." Something about the literary influences Gygax denied, which I'll explain next time. 

In the meantime, here are some expansion rules for my balanced elves, dwarves, and gnomes who obey the 52 Pages' Race-As-Class logic. Much easier to balance C options than (C x R) options. 

As usual, sober Isotype game design involves but a few meaningful points of pizzazz. Color magic makes all the elves special; the night elf can be a drow, a word or a purple long-eared galoot. Most of the fighter's powers in 52PP are extra attack granting (chop till you drop, extra attack on low roll) and the standard dwarf doesn't have them, which makes this little berserker guy fun but dangerous.

Oh, and have the silhouettes that aren't from Telecanter. Candle redacted because gnomes have dark vision. 

How I Do Silhouettes

So, let's say I want to do one of my public domain silhouettes (see latest zip file, to the right.)

I took some "snapshots" of the process along the way as I was doing one for a weretiger recently. I'll take the lesson about halfway to where I have a decent tiger silhouette, but not go into what I did to "humanize" the tiger outline.

First, I do a Google search for "public domain tiger" and get this fairly clean black & white illustration. This part of the hunt is the most difficult but also the most fun. I check that it's actually in the public domain (the source site, wpclipart.com, is pretty trustworthy).

The graphics software I use is GIMP 2, which is freeware. I'm still not fully conversant with its use of layers, but know some tricks to get around the annoying aspect of them.

First I copy the tiger from the image, then paste the tiger directly in a new GIMP window from the clipboard, using control-shift-V.

The next step is to clear away the background lines around the tiger. We want to get it to where the tiger outline floats free of the rest.

Next, a little darkening and reduction to plain black-and-white needs to be done, or the silhouette will have gray edges that interfere with the clean black line of the final transparent image. I usually accomplish this by turning the image's "brightness" down and "contrast" up using "Brightness/Contrast" in the Colors menu. Make sure the picture is in RGB format (Image > Mode menu) or this won't work.

 

We now have a darker-lined tiger with more complete lines. For extra assurance that the image is only black and white use the Posterize command under Colors and ask for only 2 colors. If you get weird colors, the image is not a true monochrome; use "Desaturate" under Colors to get it that way. 

Using the "fuzzy select" tool to the right of the lasso, I select the tiger, cut it out, select all, delete, and paste the tiger back in. There may be some trouble with layers here, but a control-H (to anchor the image) and control-A (to select the whole area) usually solves that. I then do some additional removal of extraneous lines and adding in dark spots to complete the outline, until the tiger is pretty solid:

Notice that this isn't the greatest stand-alone silhouette because the tiger's front legs overlap each other. You'll see that this will look a little weird in the final version. I don't mind because I want to edit out the legs and add in some human-like arms for the weretiger continuation, but having well-defined limbs is something to keep in mind when picking pictures for silhouettes.

Now here's the trick that saves a lot of work. Making sure that the tiger outline is complete, get the bucket fill tool and choose some color neither black nor white to fill the outside area. If there are spaces inside the silhouette, like the gap between an arm and body, those need to be filled too.

Now use the "Select By color" option from the Select menu to grab the red part. Cut it, select all, delete the screen (after returning the color picker to black foreground/white background) and paste it back in, finishing with control-h control-a:

And bucket fill the white with black, then go to Layer > Transparency > Color to Alpha:

Alpha is the channel that makes your image transparent, usually a good feature in a silhouette. Here, you should pick the same color that you used to fill around the outline - in this case, red. That will give you a final silhouette that has a transparent background and can go anywhere.

And so, there you go. Not too bad in spite of the weirdness with the front legs, and by the time I've turned it into a weretiger it looks like this:

Caught mid-transformation, with a little shear applied for weirdness, and a couple of ape arms glued on ... anyway, this is how I do 'em!

On the Resolution of Tropical Beasts

The big silhouette .zip file expands yet again with a bunch of beasts for the Warm/Natural table.

I have to give fair warning - all these silhouettes are done at a scale with 250 pixels as their maximum dimension, so they can fit into Hexographer. They are also all-black - no grays for smoothed pixel edges, because when made transparent those just halo the image. So, at larger resolutions they may look grainy.

To be fair, some of Telecanter's original silhouettes have the same problem, as you can see from Adventurer Conqueror King where they were used as spot illustrations. Now there's a daunting task - to go back through my collection, sometimes revisiting the source files, to try and reconstruct every silhouette at a higher res!

Any interest in a silhouette tutorial? I've developed my chops in the freeware paint program GIMP to the point where, once I grab an image with good edge definition, it's a pretty quick road to the finished silhouette.

Menagerie Almost Done

Another update to the Menagerie zip file of 250 pixel public domain silhouettes (link on the right) and the last of the Savage outdoor encounter table.

Su-monster: What the hell, right? Has anyone ever used a su-monster, ever? Anyway, some kind of monkey man from Phylopic did nicely.

White ape: Lots of people want these Burroughs stalwarts in their game; my reference is Joe Bloch's version in Castle of the Mad Archmage.

Tar pit: Homage to the Aurora model kit.

Fossil: A favorite from the Hamsterish Hoard.

Wind walker: Hard to illustrate. I ended up drawing a human shape around some wind lines from an old engraving.

Island Fish, Island Turtle, Ape Men: Guess I'll have to stat those up at some point.

Grimlock: Gold star to anyone who can identify the source image.

Minotaur lizard: Monitor, minotaur, let's call the whole thing off.

Does that mean the outdoor encounter tables are finished? Hell no! There's still a tropical and an arctic table, and I've started work on those.

Savages

Announcing yet another expansion of the silhouette file on the right, for the "savage" encounter table that simulates a lost world/Heavy Metal magazine esthetic. The ettin is being a good sport and going on this table because neither Legend nor Evil would have him. I think he makes a good caveman giant.

Evil

Once I stopped trying to fit the different monsters of the "Evil" category into terrain types, doing the encounter table became a lot easier. Roll d4 to find the row, or d6 if with a water feature, where 5 or 6 means you look up the appropriate water row.

Again, this is one of six categories that's placed into a higher-level encounter table at different frequencies depending on the nature of the area. Here are a couple of rows of the higher-order table to illustrate. 3 and 18 are special encounters, detailed elsewhere.

And, the new silhouettes, together with an update of the download file on the right.

I can hardly believe that I've done 5 out of 6 of these, although there is still some clean-up work to do on the whole project ... for example, special Natural and Savage tables for arctic and tropical regions, plus the full table system, explanations, notes on some of the civilized encounters and possibly silhouettes rather than the generic "settlement" symbol for those.

The Decadent Vargouille

Doing a page full of evil monster silhouettes has me dipping into Decadent art. It took me a while to get the Eureka moment for the vargouille, but when it came, it was glorious.

Vargouille, chonchon, penanggal - call it what you will, there's a clear niche for the flying head monster in the box of horrors. Is the vargouille based on the Iroquois flying head monster legend? Probably no more so than the others, but it's clear that the idea is strong enough to resurface among many peoples and times.

The severed head is the seat of human identity, a decisive trophy, proof of death. The expressions and thoughts of the head after death have incited ghoulish folklore in societies with customs of decapitation. So, the unforgettable manga Lone Wolf and Cub has a scene where the samurai hero classifies the expression on a severed head, sent as proof of a disgraced retainer's seppuku. In France, the guillotine inspired researches into the head's ability to see, think and even speak while detached.

Not many people are fans of the implementation in AD&D's Monster Manual 2, with hit point drain as junior-league level drain. But the concept of the monster is strong, even with the beefed-up (if cliched) horror-movie infection power in 3rd edition. It could do anything - or just something completely unexpected - and still be a most unnerving foe.

For this particular silhouette I used Aubrey Beardsley's illustration from Oscar Wilde's Salome, yet another exhibit of the unwholesome fascination with decapitation. Wilde's play was banned in London as blasphemous. Its finale unchains a perverse sensuality as Salome, at great length, kisses and fawns over the severed head of John the Baptist. The whole Biblical story has been through so many layers of decadence by the time it gets to Beardsley's pen that it hardly seems impious to use the image of the head as the basis for the vargouille. With its snaky hair, it's halfway a demon already.

More Menagerie Monsters

The silhouette menagerie file, in Rules and Tools on the right, has been updated again with these 24 mythical creatures:

And with that, we conclude the fourth of six pages of the ultimate illustrated wilderness encounter table; click, as always, to enlarge:

These are all heavy hitters and the table shouldn't be used as the only source of monsters for an area - unless, of course, the place is truly Olympian in stature!

Silhouettes From Arcadia

Another silhouette post, now getting into the fourth page of the outdoor encounter table - "legendary" monsters - along with a few Weird leftovers like the mussels. This table isn't really meant to be the most frequent option, unless you are running some crazy sylvan-Olympian kind of region.

I notice also that myths have a lot of flying monsters, and they appear on this chart a lot more than the others. "Give it wings" is a natural, if trite, way to make a heraldic beast. Dragons also appear here; kind of rare, but the evil ones also appear on the Evil chart, number 5.

More thoughts about flying monsters, after a play report from one of my players.

One Page Dungeon (?) Entry Preview

I'm not really entering a "dungeon" in the OPD contest this year ... it's more of a hexcrawl, with an easier-to-understand version of the original hexcrawl rules, keys for each letter and icon, and a hexmap. Part of which currently looks like this:

 Between this effort and almost finishing the Weird encounter table page I've added 30+ icons to the Menagerie download, including several Fiend Folio, MM2, and Varlets & Vermin creations. Here they are on parade:

Click to enlarge.

Ultimate Wilderness Encounter Table 2

Continuing the series ... Here's the table you prioritize if nature's dominant in the area.

The humans and demi-humans should be primitive and isolated. Creatures without a lair/range are just ambient in the water, not really suitable for hex-based stocking. Speaking of that ... my entry for One Page Dungeon is going to be a hex-stocked wilderness with a mini version of the encounter system, some cool features, and a number of possible challenges and scenarios depending on level.

Yes, there will be versions of this for tropical and arctic climes ... eventually.

Menagerie 2

The public domain-based menagerie download zip (rules and tools, right) just got updated with a bunch more silhouettes. As fun as kitbashing miniatures and less messy ...

I had a hard time with the ankheg and bulette until another trawl through the Phylopic site found me some base images that just needed a little carving and filling to do. The Kenku is a mix of Hokusai and Kuniyoshi parts, and the pose is characteristic of those artists.

Yes, we're dipping into the Fiend Folio and Monster Manual 2. I'm putting the humanoids into the "Evil" encounter page and the giant invertebrates into a "Weird" encounter page, and the weirdos need company. Not even Basic D&D and Runequest will be safe from the monster raiding ... and maybe there's a post in that.

Ultimate Wilderness Encounter Table 1

Well, here is the first of six wilderness tables to be completed.

This is not everything you can encounter in a civilized area, but rather all the "civilized" themed encounters - humans, other friendly kindreds, and a raft of shapechangers and oddballs. The idea once more is to have a priority of types you can encounter (so that the priority 2/1/4  puts chart 1, civilized, in the middle) and then roll 3 or 4 d6 and take the highest die in the priority that comes up.

Working off that, you consult a chart that matches the terrain - for example, a road going through forest would give you:

1-2 Woodland
3-4 Woodland (or Road if civilized encounter)
5-6 Any

I'll have a set of terrain charts at some point.

Finally you roll 2d10 and take the lower, to give you an encounter. Here's how to use this on the fly.

The top entry in the encounter is the approximate distance in 5 mile hexes from lair (L = always in lair; 0 = 1d6-1 miles away; 1 = 1d10-1 miles away; 2 = 1d20-2 miles away) and time of day the encounter is active (ignore an inappropriate encounter unless you have found the creature's lair). This means you will almost never stumble across a creature's lair by chance.

An X here is a being without a lair; a T means the creature will only be encountered in its native terrain. This last one is more relevant for the hexmap stocking and encounter method I've described before.

The top bold number is the number of creatures in the lair, and the non-bolded number below it is the number of creatures in the encounter. Obviously the number encountered is a maximum for the number in lair. A roman numeral (III, V, X) refers to the number of standard beings you have to have for each higher-level leader-type to exist, and these go up in a pyramid of two (that is, with two basic leaders you get an even higher level leader and so forth).

A "Settle" lair means the beings can be traced to a settlement in range, or if you have not mapped any settlement, a small community of fewer than 100 people.

Some unusual encounters: Homesteaders are just farmers; Wanderers are gypsies, tramps, refugees, or your world's equivalent; Hermits are clerics of that level on a d20 roll of 1-10 and just eccentrics on 11-20; substitute froglings, rabbit people or whatever if you hate halflings; Trickster animals are from my Varlets and Vermin collection; Swanmays and Selkies are from Monster Manual 2 but quite traditional benevolent shapechangers.

I'll let you know when the new silhouettes are added to the zipped download file. Fairly pleased with my werewolf, werebear (based on some long-legged prehistoric bearoid), doppleganger (somewhat distorted from a public domain chupacabra) and swanmay.

Menagerie 1

Short break from the high-level combat series as I take the opportunity to share some of the silhouettes I've been making for the somewhat insane project of illustrating a 480 cell random outdoor encounters table. Trying not to overlap with Telecanter's ongoing efforts here ...

These are formatted as transparent and 250 px maximum dimension to mesh with Hexographer. All are derived from public domain sources. Download link is "Menagerie 1" at the right. Stuffit Expander to expand.

Werecreatures are kind of challenging to do ... (one's a wererat and the other's a wereboar.)

Glimpse of the Big Encounter Chart

This is a peek at the big encounter chart I'm working on. There are 6 pages, mostly populated from the Monster Manual 1:

1.Civilized (humans, demi-humans)
2. Natural (animals, natural hazards and giant vertebrates)
3. Frontier (a few civilized folk in forts and towers, beset by humanoids, giant insects, and other vermin)
4. Legend (creatures of myth and, uh, legend, plus the weirdos like owlbears)
5. Evil (Mordor calling)
6. Savage (prehistoric and barbaric stuff)

Each page has eight rows: Flat lands, High lands, Wood lands, Wet lands, Dry lands, then salt and fresh water and a generic column.

Click to enlarge ... some columns left out

Your map is divided into areas. Each area  has an order of precedence that refers to the tables.

For example, if you wanted a standard "adventure county" with decent folk, a few wild animals, and some ordinary nasties sneaking in from the fringes, the code would be 1-2-3 (Civilized-Natural-Frontier).

If you wanted a wild, weird area where the normal fauna had vanished and a titanic struggle of good but mostly evil was underway as a few helpless human stragglers looked on then the code would be 4-5-3 (Legend-Evil-Frontier).

For each encounter you roll 3d6. You take the result that is highest up in the precedence. So if you rolled 1-2-6 for the first example you would use the 1 and consult the Civilized table  If none of them are in the precedence then use the table for the lowest number you rolled.

Then, each hex in each area has one or two land types. For example: Hills are Flat and High. Mountains are just High. A plain with a river would be Flat and Freshwater. On a 1-2 on d6 you use the row for the first land type, 3-4 you get the second (or the first if there's only one type), 5-6 you use the Any row.

And then roll d% and there's your encounter. The strange letters and numbers by each silhouette refer to the coding system for hexmaps I outlined earlier. In particular, the top two entries are helpful when stocking a map with monsters, giving the range, time of activity, and total number in lair.

So yeah ... I am going to need a lot of silhouettes ...

Wild Silhouettes

These are all Creative Commons licensed for general use (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/), adapted from public domain sources. They support a project that I'll be posting on soon (if not finishing any time soon): a graphic wilderness encounters table, with icons to support the use of Hexographer I mentioned before.

 

 

 

 

Dashing bandit

Lynx - "Whaddya mean we gotta talk to this cat?"

Mountain lion

Water hazard

Lamprey

Leech

Sand hazard

Yeti/Sasquatch

Classic "Andersonian" troll

Orc, Hobgoblin, Wilderness

There are a couple of pending things to do ... secret societies, equipment lists ... but for now I thought I'd share a couple of silhouettes I came up with on the weekend ...

Samurai-based hobgoblin

Legionary/boar-based orc

Not unrelatedly, I also bought the pro version of Hexographer. Remember my wilderness icons and encounters system? I'm finally getting around to assembling enough of a collection, from Telecanter's and other sources, to be able to share a Hexographer icon set. Being able to add numbers with the "decorations" feature helps enormously.

Here's an initial look.

The numbers and letters on the side are plainer (and I've given up on dice icons), but each one tells you at a glance its activity times (day, night or any), range in hexes, number encountered and total numbers (where it's not one or infinite).

Silhouette Jackpot

PhyloPic "stores free silhouette images of animals, plants, and other life forms. All images are available for reuse under a Public Domain or Creative Commons license." 

Telecanter, I think we just hit the motherlode.

Some choice picks:

Protoarchaeopteryx

Any old school game that has familiars should think seriously about the criminally neglected archaeopteryx.

Kelenken guillermoi

Prehistoric goblins are riding these guys.

Homo sapiens sapiens

RUN!

Silhouette Mania Spreads

I thought I'd give back to the community in the spirit of the commendable Telecanter with these two silhouettes - a two-handed axe man I ginned up for my One Page rules, and a female fighter-type I thought filled a gap in the available selection. These are from public domain art and free for use under a Creative Commons license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/). Incidentally, the reason it's taking me so long to get the One Page starter pdf up is that I'm taking some good advice and switching it to OGL - it uses way too many terms from the SRD to risk any other way. And of course, that means retroactively re-licensing everything SRD-derivative I put up on this blog, but I think I have a form of words that will allow me to do that. 

Anyway ...

And presto ... he's a frost giant!