Posts Tagged ‘ravenloft’

I’ve just spent the evening messing around with Vue 7. Nothing really to show from tonight but I made the yet to be titled picture above last night. I’ve resized it for the web from a larger, print quality render and cropped it a little too. The ship is from Cornucopia 3D and the Water Dragon from Daz. Vaguely inspired by my long since finished nautical Ravenloft campaign.

Since I seem to be back to more regular blogging a quick post for tonight…

Put the finishing touches to the second in a series of article for Ragnarok earlier tonight. One of those times when looking over some old stuff you get a fresh look at it and realise what it was lacking. In this case it needed more villains, more humour and less high powered good guys. Hence why one 20 page article has spawned two eight page articles and left material for at least three more articles of a similar length.

Also knocked out a two page first draft of some Ravenloft ideas and sent them off to the Fraternity of Shadows.

I’m having one of those weeks where I just seem to be constantly juggling projects…

I’ve almost finished Dirk Dangerous and the Giant Balls of Doom. I’ve been retooling some of my old Ravenloft adventures for a more recent version of D&D. I’ve been answering questions about Vue 6 Tutorial: Cloud Layer Sculpting. I completely failed to put a lighting rig together for Monday night. I’ve the first interview for the Vue News blog down to final edits. I was trying to make some materials for Vue that simulate a heat haze effect. I picked up a book on Shanghai to help me research the real world parts of NitS. Oh and to top it all off I’m back to learning C# development at work. I’m just glad it’s a bank holiday this week end – maybe I’ll catch up a bit.

… He won’t be expecting us then.

A line from one character when friends of mine when playing the original Ravenloft adventure. I wasn’t actually there but I’ve heard it so often it almost feels like community property. I’d played the same scenario back in college so it made sense to me. Back on the 1st I said that I’d been tinkering with my old Ravenloft notes for no good reason. Except now it may not be so frivolous as I may have a couple of players for a game of D&D. Trust me to set that up a couple of months before 4th Edition hits the shops but at least I’ve plenty of material to fall back on and its not like 3rd Edition is a bad system.

So tonight I’ve been picking out a set of appropriate monsters I may use. Like picking a colour pallet for an illustration or a web site I find having a small set of monsters to work with gives a more satisying feel to a campaign than using any old monsters that take my fancy. The adventures end up with a stronger linking theme and can take on a more personal feel for the players. Not to say I won’t throw a monster from out of left field if I think the players have gotten into a habbit of dealing with a particular way. I think of it as the Boromir strategy after Shaun Beans’ great line in Lord of the Rings "They have a cave troll".

I’ve also been devising outlines for four villains. I always like to have four villains on hand. One will be thrown away pretty quickly when either I don’t like them or the players just don’t act like they are scary or villainous. One will probably be defeated early on to give them a false sense of hope and progress. One will appear to be bad but will get munched on by the other remaining villain. Which will leave the last one standing of the four: in Buffy Speak the Big Bad.

After a couple of years of writing more fiction than gaming I’d forgotten how much easier it is to put stuff for a game together. Anyway it looks like I’m going back to the castle and there is every chance it’s night.

I was doing some tidying up and sorting out over the weekend when I came across the files of notes from my old gaming campaigns I ran at University. Leafing through them was a bad idea as I found the Ravenloft campaigns I ran for several years as introductory games for freshers. Some would say Ravenloft wasn’t the best setting for new role players to start with but I always found it worked. Its low magic level and focus on humans rather than a polyglot of fantasy races made it easier to get new players of AD&D 2nd Ed started without a lot of the clutter and confusion. Best of all though it was easy to tell them what the world was like: think of a Hammer Horror film.

Anyway back then access to computers for frivolous, none academic work, was difficult to get so pretty much everything except the odd hand out is hand written. All of my maps and diagrams are hand drawn on tracing paper with ink mostly with my Rotering 0.2mm pen which was my favourite for design work because I didn’t tend to end up having a sheet covered in nasty ink marks.

I came across my reworking of the Ravenloft world and for no good reason started redrawing it on the computer. I’ve no really good reason for doing this other than finally I can have the whole map visible at once and I can see how some of the bit it was hard to draw or change by hand go together. My swapping round of some of the domains not for thematic reasons but to put similar ecosystems and climates together. Replacing the shadow rift. Increasing most of the areas by a factor of ten, although keeping some domains almost at their original size. Bringing more of the domains in to the core to add new regions and make the sustainability of the whole world more believable. Anyway two evenings and most of Sunday later I’m pleased to say the old hand drawn version seems to have held up to the passage of time.

The down side is I didn’t write the lighting tutorial I ment to or work on any fiction and since I don’t expect to run a game any time soon its pretty much lost time… like when you take a 10 minute shower and when you get out an hour has past.