Than receiving commissioned work for your DIY gaming project? Today I received my art pieces from Jeremy Hart for Deluxe USR Sword & Sorcery. This means I now have my artwork from Jeremy, and Michael Gibbons. Zak Smith, and Athan Kirk have submitted their written work (Mass Combat Rules and the adventure Race of Sorrows respectively), leaving only Gennifer Bone's surprise art pack and then me to put it all together (and Jens D to edit the mess!).
One of the assignments I gave to Jeremy Hart is to provide page treatments. This is a term I made up myself. I don't know what the official book publishing name for this is but I'm talking custom footers, chapter headings and column dividers. This is a blatant attempt to make my purchasing dollars go farther. Pay for an art image which can be used more than once. Here is a preview.
I'm hoping these repetitive images will help give the final book the brutal physicality I've always enjoyed in my Sword & Sorcery literature.
[EDIT] Corrected the embed settings so the video plays from the blog post. Enjoying
the ability to live-stream my regular game and I'm finding a replay
of the session a boon to memory and campaign consistency. This is
only the second session recorded, but I've already received fruits
from our labors. Specifically in today's session the players found
themselves at odds with each other and it was great to go back to the
"tape" and figure out where the group cohesion fell apart
and the PC's went at each other's throats. So that goes down two
thirds in of this nigh on three hour session, about 1:50:00 mark.
This is really interesting to me as a referee. For the players it all
seemed the frustration with each other was mounting as no easy
answer, no easy out, was forthcoming. When another player retorted
they didn't trust the other player either I wanted to hold up a
placard stating "Roleplaying gold being mined here!" This
was awesome sauce.
Playing
the session back I got a chance to see the arguments, opinions and
stratagems used by the PC's to try and resolve the situation. One of
the PC's used influence on NPC's (rather successfully) to try and
prevent bloodshed. Another PC wanted to try influence on a fellow PC.
Here I said no, no. Between PC's you need to not really on rolls to
work things out you have to, you know, role play it. And by no means
has the issue been resolved. The repercussions and outcomes from
everyone's actions will linger until next game session! Aaand the
players didn't take any course of action I anticipated so I was
painfully scrambling to put together adventure material as they
zigged against my zag. Not to give any spoilers here for my players,
but I had an awesome referee moment when I said to myself, "Fuck
it, this is where the game is heading!" so I strapped in let the
trans-arcana clock tick ever closer to midnight, because this is the
OSR baby. We did it all wrong it was so right; split party,
threatening and violancing on each other's PC's, the pleading,
arguing and fuming. A great way to enjoy morning coffee and get more
mileage out of my game material. The game literally runs itself when
the PC's are all doing the talking.
I've created a separate page for all these buttons and random generators. It is here on this blog. The link is on the right. This page will continue to grow as I add more and more random generators.
