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Shadows of the Ruinous Powers – Intro
For the last year I’ve been running a Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (1e) campaign running through the classic “The Enemy Within” series (with a little bit added or subtracted here and there).
We play almost every second week, and are almost 30 sessions into the campaign now (and our math indicates we’re looking at another 46 sessions to get to the end).
Some time (18 months?) ago, Cubicle 7 had the full Warhammer FRP 2e collection up on Humble Bundle, and it came with the 1e rulebook too. And they announced that they would be releasing the Enemy Within in PDF also. Excited by the chance to pick them up, I decided I would run it finally (after being part of a botched playthrough once as a player). So I started shopping around online and somehow now I have just about the whole 1e collection in print.
One thing with the Enemy Within – it is a pretty open-ended campaign where the players can easily “go off the rails” and stop running through the campaign as written and run off and do their own things instead. This is something I love as a GM – but I also really want to run the campaign in its entirety. So that was the deal when I put out the call for players. We would be playing WHFRP1e as written, and we would try to keep things on track to stick to the adventures in order to play through them all.
With that social contract in place, we’ve only had one occasion where we’ve actually had to stop play for me to tell the group that I love their plan, and I would run with it and have a great time, but it would mean ditching the adventures as written and moving into running whatever the party gets into at that point. So the party took it as a “if we lose now, we know that we really survived this already with our main plan”, and then metagamed a few ideas as to why they would stick it out instead of skipping town that night. A few other times we had a bit of metagaming regarding their next step (I’ve never had such a hard time getting a group to take a free vehicle to segue into the next adventure!)
I’ve been taking a lot of notes during the progress of the campaign, and instead of keeping them locked away for the players and I to read, I figured I would start posting the game reports here to the blog. The actual play reports the players get are also stuffed full of maps and illustrations from the adventures we are playing, but those are all copyright by their respective owners, so they won’t be appearing in the blog formatted play reports.
(Source: Dyson’s Dodecahedron)
Hero Kids
Hero Forge Games – null. Envie d’incarner des enfants héroïques qui vont explorer de sombres souterrains ? C’est désormais possible de le faire en VF grâce à ce jeu fait pour les joueurs âgés de 4 à 10 ans.
(Source: Guide du Rôliste Galactique : les dernières news du jeu de rôles)
Slaughter in the Halfling Village [NGR Play Report]
In our weekly Neoclassical Geek Revival game I had to make a new character because last session ended in what I think was the most perfect TPK I’ve had in ages. We actually almost succeeded at our mission (we run about a 25% success rate currently), got home, and then succumbed to our wounds – dying from disease and mutation and injury in the end-of-session “downtime”.
So I made a new character to join our brave guild of adventurers – Gerold Taskooveras (Jerry). Jerry’s background had him start as a beggar, become a pickpocket, and then spend a few years locked away for his crimes. He’s just been released from jail and has travelled into the hinterlands to make an “honest” living. He’s two parts rogue, one part fool.
Instead of going back (once again) into Elfbreaker Mountain to try to reclaim the dwarven ancestor’s corpse for her clan, we chased after a halfling who had been through town a couple of hours before trying to post a notice on the town notice board, but who left when he couldn’t reach it and no one in town would stop laughing at him long enough to help.
Next thing we know (after a quick NPC death at a “one of us lies, one of us tells the truth” riddle at a pair of bridges), we are setting up the defenses for a small halfling village (think Willow) against barbarian raiders. Thirty barbarian raiders. My foolish thief and a moderately high level elven warrior (who was not at the last session, so he didn’t die). Guerrilla defenses, tower defenses, and a lot of fighting later and we manage to hold off the raiders for two nights… but on the third night we end up in a duel between the elf and their leader. Except they also brought their three wise women to banish the foul elf from the land.
So… we can assume that the halfling village doesn’t exist anymore. We kind of hope the raiders wiped it out completely because otherwise stories might come back of how I picked up the elf and ran for the hills instead of standing to fight.
Remember that 25% mission success rate up there? Yeah, this was another one in the 75%.
(Source: Dyson’s Dodecahedron)
Return to Dyson’s Delve!
It’s been almost nine years since Dyson’s Delve was released piecemeal on this blog. I labeled it my “mini mega dungeon” – an eleven level dungeon where each level’s map fit nicely within my small graph paper pad (nothing over 17 x 17 squares in total area).
There were a few places where I stretched the standard adventure design parameters a bit (while treasure is within the bounds of the treasure type tables of the game, they are significantly weighted towards the rich end of play in order to provide the XP needed for a party to level up at a rate of roughly 1 character level per 2 dungeon levels completed).
Over those nine years my cartography has seen a slight improvement and I’ve been redrawing the various levels of the Delve this year and posting them here two at a time.
Towards the end of this month, I’ll be posting the last three levels of the Delve’s new maps, as well as a never-before-posted map of the surface area where the delve is located.
What I’m doing right now though is collecting all those maps and redoing the layout of the adventure into a coherent whole to be reissued as this month’s Patreon-Exclusive release. Aside from the new surface area there will be a minimum of changes from the original adventure. I’m adding some development notes, and I’m working on a two-page appendix for running it using the most current edition of D&D – but the heart of this is still an 11-level B/X D&D dungeon adventure designed to take characters from level 1 to 6.
All patrons of the Patreon Campaign will receive a free PDF of this exclusive reissue – and it will remain exclusive to patrons for roughly a year before it becomes a commercial release.
(Source: Dyson’s Dodecahedron)
Forthright
Room 209 Gaming – Forthright. Un jeu générique mettant l’accent sur la placedes PJ dans la société qui les entoure.
(Source: Guide du Rôliste Galactique : les dernières news du jeu de rôles)
New Easy To Master Dungeons & Dragons Game (The) (Donjons et Dragons)
…
(Source: Guide du Rôliste Galactique : le jeu de rôle, l’univers, et le reste…)
Adventure Story Game (The)
Studio 9 Publishing – Treasures & Traps. Il y avait le jeu de cartes, voilà la version pour faire du jeu de rôle.
(Source: Guide du Rôliste Galactique : les dernières news du jeu de rôles)
Stage Game Design
Après une première session annoncée dans nos actualités, l’association toulousaine Dé à Une Face relance ses stages de game design spécial JDR. Parmi les participants à la première session, plusieurs ont pu faire le saut du professionalisme, soit chez un éditeur soit en arrivant à finançer leur jeu, et plusieurs se sont lancés dans le développement amateur.Cette nouvelle session est organisée avec le soutien de l’université Toulouse 2 Jean Jaurés et se déroulera du 1 au 5 juillet. Les stages sont gratuits et réservés aux étudiants.
Pour les personnes intéressées, il reste quelques places disponibles, sur lesquelles se rensiegner grace au facebook de l’association ou à leur page Genialy.
(Source: Guide du Rôliste Galactique : les dernières news du jeu de rôles)
Dysons & Doodles Compiled
A few years ago I tried to take on #Inktober (or was it #Drawlloween?) with sharpies and pens and managed to get partway through the month before other things interfered. Last year I decided to map my way through Inktober & Mapvember (61 maps in 61 days – that’s a hefty chunk of the 150-170 maps I draw every year!).
So I bought some new sharpie markers (because I really like the freedom that comes with a fat black free-flowing marker) and decided I’d try drawing something, ANYTHING, every day. It started simple, with elements from the various games I was playing in.
It didn’t take long (four days?) before I was adding detail work with my usual felt-tipped technical pens and exploring elements from a variety of games I am or have been involved in.
And from that it wasn’t much of a leap into drawing stuff meant to go INTO those games and books. To try to work on a style that could be used for illustrations for games. Hell, to establish a “style” at all instead of a continued series of doodles and drawings.
So now I look back and I’ve got 113 days of these daily drawings. I started posting them to the blog in batches, but never finished the set. So here’s a post that collects most of them – many of these appear in the Dyson Logos edition of Neoclassical Geek Revival.
Unfortunately, the streak of daily drawings was broken when my schedule took a beating last fall while working on the maps for Ghosts of Saltmarsh for Wizards of the Coast.
A number of these illustrations made it into the two waves of Tshirts and similar merchandise I have up on RedBubble. At some point I’ll add to that collection with some of the works on this page, but also a number of design ideas I’ve still got rolling around in my head…
It turns out that writing notes to go with 100 illustrations starts to be harder than drawing the illustrations in question. Around this point my rough version of this post starts just having the word “stuff” between the mini-galleries of illos.
As we roll into the later illustrations in the series, they become very RPG-book oriented as by this point I had agreed to illustrate an edition of Neoclassical Geek Revival, so the vast majority of my daily drawings are specifically to accomplish this task.
I also start moving away from heavy use of the Sharpie marker as we progress through the series – moving more and more to technical pens using the Sharpies only for large black fills like the witch’s breath in the series below.
Here we reach the last of the drawings that made it into the NGR book. I had to pick a point at which to say “all right, that’s it – here’s a pile of illustrations for the book, go wild!” instead of a constant “well, here’s one more… and one more…”
And then suddenly we are in Inktober again – the project that first inspired this whole attempt at a daily drawing back in 2014.
But Inktober, unsurprisingly, was my downfall. As we hit the series of prompt words I found myself more and more strained to draw something that fit (or to try and subvert the more obvious concept pieces), and then the contract workload cranked up and I found myself without the time to keep at it.
So here we are a full year after I started this project, and I’m cramming the time in to draw something new every few days. Maybe in time I’ll get it back to daily. 
(Source: Dyson’s Dodecahedron)
Dysons & Doodles Compiled
A few years ago I tried to take on #Inktober (or was it #Drawlloween?) with sharpies and pens and managed to get partway through the month before other things interfered. Last year I decided to map my way through Inktober & Mapvember (61 maps in 61 days – that’s a hefty chunk of the 150-170 maps I draw every year!).
So I bought some new sharpie markers (because I really like the freedom that comes with a fat black free-flowing marker) and decided I’d try drawing something, ANYTHING, every day. It started simple, with elements from the various games I was playing in.
It didn’t take long (four days?) before I was adding detail work with my usual felt-tipped technical pens and exploring elements from a variety of games I am or have been involved in.
And from that it wasn’t much of a leap into drawing stuff meant to go INTO those games and books. To try to work on a style that could be used for illustrations for games. Hell, to establish a “style” at all instead of a continued series of doodles and drawings.
So now I look back and I’ve got 113 days of these daily drawings. I started posting them to the blog in batches, but never finished the set. So here’s a post that collects most of them – many of these appear in the Dyson Logos edition of Neoclassical Geek Revival.
Unfortunately, the streak of daily drawings was broken when my schedule took a beating last fall while working on the maps for Ghosts of Saltmarsh for Wizards of the Coast.
A number of these illustrations made it into the two waves of Tshirts and similar merchandise I have up on RedBubble. At some point I’ll add to that collection with some of the works on this page, but also a number of design ideas I’ve still got rolling around in my head…
It turns out that writing notes to go with 100 illustrations starts to be harder than drawing the illustrations in question. Around this point my rough version of this post starts just having the word “stuff” between the mini-galleries of illos.
As we roll into the later illustrations in the series, they become very RPG-book oriented as by this point I had agreed to illustrate an edition of Neoclassical Geek Revival, so the vast majority of my daily drawings are specifically to accomplish this task.
I also start moving away from heavy use of the Sharpie marker as we progress through the series – moving more and more to technical pens using the Sharpies only for large black fills like the witch’s breath in the series below.
Here we reach the last of the drawings that made it into the NGR book. I had to pick a point at which to say “all right, that’s it – here’s a pile of illustrations for the book, go wild!” instead of a constant “well, here’s one more… and one more…”
And then suddenly we are in Inktober again – the project that first inspired this whole attempt at a daily drawing back in 2014.
But Inktober, unsurprisingly, was my downfall. As we hit the series of prompt words I found myself more and more strained to draw something that fit (or to try and subvert the more obvious concept pieces), and then the contract workload cranked up and I found myself without the time to keep at it.
So here we are a full year after I started this project, and I’m cramming the time in to draw something new every few days. Maybe in time I’ll get it back to daily. 
(Source: Dyson’s Dodecahedron)
Release the Kraken on Control!
The second map chosen by our patrons this month to be re-released under the free commercial use license is Control – a map based on a joke that I drew as part of Mapvember in 2016. This re-release brings the original map up to 1200 dpi and pure black and white.
This tomb on the edge of the desert of the gods is the resting place of four Huecuvas of unusual intelligence for their ilk, as well as a few guardian mites that served them in life and still serve them now.
In life the four Huecuvas were warlocks dedicated to four spirit nagas, all children of the same night hag who rode their father (a paladin of great will) relentlessly through the years. While treated as typical huecuvas in most respects, they retain a typical human intelligence in death and still can cast two level 1 and one level 2 spell per day.
The huecuvas are entombed in their private tombs in the leftmost chamber. They generally remain somnolent unless something disturbs the complex or their tombs, although they occasionally wander the complex when awakened by foul dreams and premonitions.
Control
The chamber on the far right of the complex contains four pools each radiating a different colour of energy with swirling currents within the waters tracing out the shapes outlined on the map to those who inspect them closely. The circular rooms have lowered central areas filled with dirt and excrement from the mites (as well as the buried corpses of those mites that have died from the many diseases carried by the huecuvas). These night soil pits are watered occasionally from the magical pools and grow a number of edible mushrooms as well as a few less savoury fungal creatures.
Unlike most mites, the twenty or so living in the complex do not have their usual tiny complexes of secret tunnels and trap doors and thus operate pretty much in the open as caretakers and defenders of the complex – watching for invaders from the small arrow slits looking down onto the approaching path.
(Mites and Huecuvas are both from the AD&D1e Fiend Folio – if they don’t exist in the game system of your choice, treat Huecuvas pretty much as ghouls that can only be struck by magic & silver and carry disease instead of paralysis, and mites as 2′ tall extra-timid goblins with knives and sharp teeth.)
This map is made available to you under a free license for personal or commercial use under the “RELEASE THE KRAKEN” initiative thanks to the awesome supporters of my Patreon Campaign. Over 400 awesome patrons have come together to fund the site and these maps, making them free for your use.
Because of the incredible generosity of my patrons, I’m able to make this map free for commercial use also. Each month while funding is over the $400 mark, we choose a map from the blog’s extensive back catalog to retroactively release under this free commercial license. You can use, reuse, remix and/or modify the maps that are being published under the commercial license on a royalty-free basis as long as they include attribution (“Cartography by Dyson Logos” or “Maps by Dyson Logos”). For those that want/need a Creative Commons license, it would look something like this:
Cartography by Dyson Logos is licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
(Source: Dyson’s Dodecahedron)
Ecran et son livret
A.K.A. Games – Fragged Empire. Un écran pour cacher les horreurs de la guerre et un scénario pour les révéler. Est-ce bien raisonnable?
(Source: Guide du Rôliste Galactique : les dernières news du jeu de rôles)
Hex Selections – Patreon Exclusive
As announced in March, I’ve started releasing something exclusively to the patrons who support the Dodecahedron through my Patreon Campaign.
This month it is a selection of hand-drawn hex sheets that I put together. The primary launch point was wanting to have some 4′ x 3′ hex posters printed up to run The Fantasy Trip games on. Business Depot / Staples does these wonderfully affordable “Engineering Prints” at up to 4×3 on light 22lb paper in B&W for $3 per page (this varies from place to place, I pay $2.93 per page, and I’ve seen it as high as $4 per page).
So I sat down and drew up a full massive page of these hexes. Turns out, even with 1.5 inch hexes, it takes a LOT of hexes to fill a poster that size! As soon as I posted a photo of a piece of this poster, the requests started to pour in for copies of the “source file” that I used.
So I’ve packaged up the poster design (with and without central dots), along with a bunch of pieces extracted from it (sets of 4 megahexes that print nicely on a letter-sized page, and a mix of ledger and letter sized pages with 1.5 inch hexes as well as ones where I’ve scaled down the original poster to make pages of half inch hexes and so on).
If you want a copy and are a supporter on Patreon, just head over to this Patreon post where you can download it. If you aren’t a supporter on Patreon, it costs as little as $1 a month and is what keeps the constant flow of free maps going on this blog.
(Source: Dyson’s Dodecahedron)
Libri Monstrorum
La gamme Cthulhu Hack s’enrichit des 3 nouveaux suppléments. Cette collection aborde les créatures du Mythe de Cthulhu.Le Volume I : Bestiaire est une création française qui contient des dizaines de créatures du Mythe de Cthulhu illustrées, leur description et les statistiques pour les mettre en jeu. Il inclut par ailleurs un scénario Cthulhu Hack.
Le Volume II : Nuées est une compilation de trois suppléments VO pour Cthulhu Hack reliés par un même thème : Shub-Niggurath. Un générateur de monstres pour créer ou modifier ceux déjà existants dans les livres ou l’univers du Mythe de Cthulhu, du contexte permettant de mettre en scène des sectes vénérant les différents aspects de Shub-Niggurath, ainsi qu’une compilation de plusieurs scénarios d’horreur.
Le Volume III : Wendigo est un recueil de quatre scénarios d’horreur (trois traduits du suppléments Three Faces of the Wendigo) et un scénario de création française : Des loups dans la montagne de Richard August, Charmants, sombres et profonds de John Almack, Souillure de Paul Baldowski et enfin Wendy de Nicolas Guérin.
Ces trois suppléments seront accompagnés d’un quatrième. Rouge Delaware, par Benoit Attinost est un supplément de contexte se déroulant à Philadelphie. Il offre un cadre urbain sombre, se vautrant dans le luxe et la violence, où les monstres ont plus d’influence qu’il n’y paraît.
La campagne court du 22 mai au 07 juin 2019 et vise un objectif initial de 8000€. Les ouvrages devraient être livrés pour la fin 2019. Les contreparties proposées sont :
- 0€ – Passage secret : accès aux options ;
- 18€ – Ceux qui chuchotent : Bestiaire en PDF ;
- 36€ – Ceux qui murmurent : Bestiaire en papier et PDF ;
- 75 € – Ceux qui rampent : Bestiaire et Nuées en papier et PDF ;
- 104€ – Ceux qui rôdent : Bestiaire, Nuées et Wendigo en papier et PDF ;
- 130/140€ – Ceux qui hurlent : Bestiaire, Nuées, Wendigo, Rouge Delaware et la pochette d’aides de jeux en papier et PDF.
(Source: Guide du Rôliste Galactique : les dernières news du jeu de rôles)
Fantasy Trip Colour Playmats
I finally got the opportunity to open up the massive Fantasy Trip box from Steve Jackson Games and pull out the playmats I drew for them. I’ve seen a bunch of shots of them in play with minis on them but it is hard to get the scale across.
The one on the left is 2 feet by 2 feet, and the blue one is two feet by 18 inches.
They are huge, floppy, colourful toys. Having them in hand now is incredibly cool.
The Fantasy Trip playmats
They’ve been brought back as add-ons in the Decks of Destiny Kickstarter going on now.
But there’s more. They’ve been joined by another original map design by Steve Jackson that I had the pleasure of drawing before handing the colouring off to Phil Reed.
Another 24″ x 24″ mat, this one is a hexagonal labyrinthine arena available in two different colour palettes.
Labyrinth Playmats
At first I preferred the “B” colour job, but honestly, A is incredibly weird and vibrant and just excellent – and it stands out from the existing playmats (and just about anything else you could put on the table with it).
Want cool Dyson mats with 1.5″ hexes? Head over to the Decks of Destiny Kickstarter to get them!
(Source: Dyson’s Dodecahedron)
