Contact Information:

jay@vanishingtowerpress.com

Monday, August 12

The Rom'Myr Drawing pad

I've picked up the pen in an attempt to draw my way out of VTP paying for game art. Matter of fact my soon to be released first ever OSR module is stacked with my drawings. These are not them. Drawing practice consists of sketches from my online OSR Dying Earth Campaign. Here is a mix of PCs and NPCs, very few pictured worked so far considering the amount of NPC interaction the group has had in ten sessions.












Sunday, August 11

Don't use Camtasia and Review Opportunities for the Interested

AA03 Purging Woth Nrld Oekwn's Muddy Hole is now in the editors hands, the Lulu files completed, proof ordered to inspect layout and graphic design issues! When final draft is uploaded I will want to offer PDF copies for interested reviewers. Richard Leblanc gets his own copy obviously. I used his illo's and stats for several monsters from Big Dragon Games CC1 Creatures Companion. 

The inclusion of creatures from this OSR packed bestiary guarantees your players will have some surprises. Nothing chills a player more than confronting a brand new species of monster! 

So, if you see yourself actually using this short adventure for an upcoming crawl I am happy to distribute. Email me at jay-at-vanishingtowerpress.com.

In other news; 

The audio production of my last live game session is complete, at least as far as I intend to take it. I should have just stripped the audio like I did at first and be done with it. Time involved properly editing an audio project is a time sink like you wouldn't believe. Camtasia is nothing special except a two hundred fifty price tag! There are solid, free screen capture and video editing software choices. Search around and review. You will find something which suits your needs easily.

With AA03 mostly in the bag work can resume on Deluxe USR Sword & Sorcery. My work that is. Daniel Hernandez is still working on his fantastic line illo's but the previews he has sent me are amazing! Adventure drafting and setting guide drafting are the predominate work right now. Everything is now kind of assembled on a cork board of lines like a police investigation. Slowly you see parallel paths of work start to merge towards a finished product. Like driving a new road and suddenly finding yourself at your destination. 

Winter 2019-2020 looks to be a busy season for VTP releases, to see some of these long-simmering projects become adventure books for you to use!

Wednesday, August 7

YouTube/Hangouts Live Stream, What I did...

With the disconnect between Goggle Hangouts and YouTube's Live Event function I had to find another way to record my live sessions. I will miss the ability to Live Stream my sessions, but capturing the entire session on tape is my default DM notes I reference, establish canon with my players and use for verisimilitude in game session prep.  Much higher priority.




My first hit, and the only software I have used so far, was Camtasia. It sells for more than I want to spend, but with little time before the game I took advantage of the 30 day free trial and began to familiarize myself with its capabilities. It captures your computer screen and allows to edit this content and convert to video. This part of the software worked just fine. I hit record and did not hit stop until the three-hour session was over. Everything was there. Some spot editing and then I went for upload to YouTube. I believe the inevitable crash is due more to the capabilities of my laptop rather than Camtasia. Either way, it figures into Camtasia as a "no-buy" for me. Conversion from "project" to video file is expected to be slow, but it was going to be a ten-hour(?) process to upload. No way this works. But I tried a couple of times with a couple of different formats and unsurprisingly the process choked and "closed unexpectedly". I then stripped the audio from the video, added a title page, and then went for it. This time I had the format as avi. It went up rather quickly considering. Now I and the players can listen to the session replay at our leisure.

I really like the audio format. TTRPG's are theater of the mind anyways. As a fan of radio broadcasting it didn't take me long to warm up to the idea. I started dropping in images related to what was currently being described, but I'm not sold on that. Title Page, sure. If I do include images it will sparsely done.

So I get the original "tape", video and all, upload audio only. For now. And I still need to "cast" about for a more affordable option.


Thursday, July 25

DM’s, use your adventures again and again!


I’ve put together a “What can I use for this?”folder of published game stuff which slot seamlessly in current or possible future encounters in my active games. I do this for two reasons: One; I love sand-box play, but I don’t always like the on-the-heels feeling I can get when I’m out of material. Specifically, material which would be AWESOME in the current situation. I have a freakish belief if I had access to all current written adventure modules, properly indexed, there would be something just perfect needing only the most minor cosmetic changes. That is my idea of no-prep! So I get really jacked when these twin stars line up. Two, the real gems stand out. Old, new, retro, funny dice; its hard to know how a scenario will aid thee in the hot-seat. I have retracted blistering criticism I uttered upon reading an adventure only to humbly withdraw it after using in a game. Funny how my opinion from just reading adventure material is so off from the actual play experience. When it works when the material carries you, folded and safe in its hands, through multiple sessions of metal rpg’ing its like conducting an orchestra. The difference being, when you get off the hot-seat and bow, acknowledge the orchestra, you do this alone. It is truly a private and disconnected performance between writer and game master. I love this part of rpg’ing probably best of all.



So it isn’t a far leap to “What adventures do this for me? Pulling the book out started this whole thought project. Using it again to key another fantasy location. The book is Chaosium’s Black Sword for Stormbringer by Ken Rolston. It is a companion piece to Stealer of Souls; a champion in its own right. The only reason Stealer of Souls isn’t number one is because I like Black Sword better. The scenarios in the book depict a woman’s quest for vengeance against Elric himself. This sort of set-up is rarely going to be used in one of my games. If you are playing a game of Stormbringer with me, you most likely won’t be in the Young Kingdoms. I’m sure it can be epic, but I have a disinclination to use fictional characters found in the original prose. The fictional setting I’m using because it is cool. That is most likely why it is in use, the place is inspirational. Give people, places and things new names and done. With more than I need in the attending details of the location.

If I don’t like the script of of Black Sword why is it so good? Because Black Sword passes the acid test; it is extremely useful for play. Freyda Nikon, the “Patron” driving the plot, is a decent NPC. No reason she has to be married to the script. I prefer to have interesting NPCs met when circumstance, the game situation, demands nothing short of this character being used. The right person for the job, so to speak. Frieda is easy to place, in many different roles. She’s metal.

The scenario book includes the city of Nadsokar, the Kingdom of Org, the city of Karlaak, the Plains and the Badlands. Any one of these sections, these site locations, can be lifted wholesale out of the book and dropped into your campaign. With Nadsokar, city of beggars, the most useful part doesn’t even include stats! Two and a half pages of “in-the-day-in-the-life-of” and a portion of the streets of Nadsoker underground mapped out. With one of those slick city-crawling mechanics DIYOSR creators introduced and some kind of citizens stat block you can go for a while in Nadsoker, the City of Beggars. Good place to note, if you have read the fiction, cause all your game inspirations come from the source material, you already know what is cool about it.

The nuts of the book, the most metal part, is The Kingdom of Org. If you’ve read the source material you will know when you should use this location. And it is not just the degenerate, horribly pulpish vibe of the place. The Kingdom is found within the Forest of Troos. The heavy-metalist of magical woods. Details of a slave rebellion if you are inclined, but the daily life of Org has many options of grim encounter. Again, your favorite city-crawling method will have PCs dying for your pleasure in nigh poetic manners.

The rest of the book similarly works in this fashion for me. Again and again. Oh yeah Stealer of Souls has great city maps and material with the details of Bakashaan. It is a good clone of Messantia, and therefore squishy-pulpy city which include the ocean and sea travel and the scum it attracks.

These two books aren’t for everything. My experience relates using it for the genre intended.

Dropping modules into modules is a big kick of mine. This Matryoshka-doll method mixes up the presentation enough players stand a good chance of never recognizing it. Simple example of this with some 1e AD&D stuff. D3 Vault of the Drow is this psychedelic dark elf city underground. It is big and has room for many interesting locations. More than I want to come up with. What can I do, what can I do. Evil metal elves will have slaves. They have a whole industry of it in the Vault. May I present A2, Secret of the Slavers Stockade? I don’t care how you skin it, the “Stockade” will be useful. Its use multiple. The scope it adds to your location and any other published site-location, deep. Not in the “adventure” the authors packaged with the module. But the use you can put to the rooms and NPCs included.

And this isn’t “fixing” a module. Fixing a module is something else. This is leveraging the module. Surely this is what the early creators intended for their modules. They are heard to lament gamers mostly missing this point early in the hobby. But bills must be paid and if you don’t give a DM and PCs a “Story” to follow they are just so much deers in the headlights. “Why do I give a shit about slaver’s?” No one really knows what to do with this. But everyone knows what to do with a slaver’s stockade when they are in the middle of an insane underground acid city and what you need to survive, nay, triumph, is located there… that is another kettle of fish. Simple turn of perspective, but one I’ve never seen to fail me.