Official Canadian Old School Character Sheet

I had a bit of fun yesterday re-working a Old School Character sheet, this one is designed for use by Canadians.  Obviously anyone can use it, and may appreciate the silliness of it.  I did however neglect to add "Save VS Donuts, Hockey & Poutine".  It is bilingual for the most part, my keyboard would not allows me to put the correct egu's in unfortunately.  Enjoy!   Here's the link to download.

A little GM advice... make sure you check monster reactions when using this sheet.  We are after all Canadians.

Free Old School Character Sheet

 Here's a free Old School Character sheet, use it for any OSR game your playing.  It's a 2 pager, roll 3D6 in order and go start hacking some monsters!


Download here 

 

Finished editing Map M!

Just need to add all the numbers now.  I need to really do this with a mouse and not a track pad.  Damn hand hurts now.  This will probably be the last one that I put up for the time being.  I haven't quite mapped out exactly what's up in this cavern, but this is the map I posted early.

Here is the last one.  I just finished it up last night.  Big assed cavern with a very large lake, as well there's a cliff point with a higher cavern above.  The ruins are obviously not perfectly symmetrical and were not drawn on a grid.  The guys who built it didn't have access to decent geometry or T squares at the time.

Last map for enormity... so far

Here is the last one.  I just finished it up last night.  Big assed cavern with a very large lake, as well there's a cliff point with a higher cavern above.  The ruins are obviously not perfectly symmetrical and were not drawn on a grid.  The guys who built it didn't have access to decent geometry or T squares at the time.

Scanned!

Layout & GIMP Editing:  Just finished scanning all the maps, I now have 13 done.  I think I may yet draw 2 more, I guess we will see how it goes.  Now comes the process of cleanup!  Then I'll be adding a grey fill for all the background and the graph grid layers.  Basically take the scans & add an alpha channel, delete all the original white.  Funny note, some of the maps were drawn on very old paper, that was bleached a little off white from the sun.

What I am going to do, and hopefully it isn't met with resistance is the following:

The maps were drawn on 8.5 x 11.   I plan to scale all the maps to fit the graph paper example on the left.  As you can see there is a indent and the graph paper isn't full 8.5 x 11.  Part of the reason for scaling is that I want to make sure when the final product is done, it fits on the 8.5 x 11 paper properly, with nothing getting cut off.  I am hoping to release this as a softcover as well thru drivethrurpg.

Speaking of which, if you get a B&W softcover (which is basically the cheapest option) I am guessing that the cover also has to be b&w as well?

I personally like the old schoolness of B&W art and text.  however it would be nice to have a color cover & back.  It's obviously not the end of the world if its B&W only, but from a marketing stand point I think people like color on the front atleast, and sometimes glossy is nice.

Oh one thing I forgot to mention, I am also opening a doc file at the same time.  I finish a map and number it, then I got in create a page that says "map a" and then just add A1, A2, A3 and leave em blank, and so on.  That way I don't miss a room hahaha.

On Writing:  I've realized that some of my original ideas for this project were not vanilla per se, but typical?  After reading an article about mega dungeon design, I am going to take my original premise, expand on certain elements and then basically go thru a map at a time fill out all the encounter locations.  Once all of the basic writing is done, I'm going to read it all over find places where things can be tied in, etc.   Then do a mass edit!  My wife has kindly said that she'll edit it, of course she said she'd like to read an adventure first.  So I'm giving her Keep on the borderlands & Temple Of Elemental Evil.

So tonight it begins. #theenormityproject

Its a poor man who blames his tools

But damn, these new pens suck, that or I'm having a bad night.

Blackmarsh Review

I started working on a bunch of free, cheap & pay what you want OSR resources that are available on drivethru & rpgnow, etc.  Blackmarsh was one of them and then I realized that Blackmarsh is its own blog all by itself.  So here we go. 

Blackmarsh

drivethrurpg.com - FREE! 

Product Description

In the days when man knew only the working of stone and fought for their existence against the orc and the goblin, the sky turned to ash and down fell the fiery mountain onto the land. The world tore open and the grey waters rushed in. Those who survived the impact were lost as boiling clouds rushed out in all directions leaving a wasteland in its wake.

Blackmarsh is a complete, ready to run setting for your campaign. It can be run as its own setting or an expansion of your existing world. Contained in Blackmarsh are 17 geographical entries, 78 described locales, and one detailed town; Castle Blackmarsh. Each entry provide one or more adventure hooks to use in your campaigns.  Read more

I grabbed this pdf along time ago, and I'm at the point where I may order the softcover (its $5.70 CDN a steal).  From what I gather Blackmarsh was the original setting for OD&D, or atleast that's the rumor I've heard.  Reading it, it feels very war gammer, for use with Chain Mail possibly.  Example "hex number - 300 Orcs live here" that kinda thing makes me think that.  However its an awesome setting, and good enough to keep you busy for a long time.  Plug in a bunch of random dungeons & adventures and your off and running.  If you don't have a copy of "Keep On The Borderlands" don't worry,  Castle Blackmarsh is just as detailed!  The nice thing about Blackmarsh is its just detailed enough that it doesn't stay your hand as a GM.  You can toss stuff out, fix stuff up.  300 Orcs, lets make that 30.  At this point I think that Blackmarsh may just become my default setting for games.  

If your not great at drawing maps here is a few recommendations, you can grab FREE http://paratime.ca/cartography/bw_dungeons.html - all you gotta do is fill em with monsters, traps and treasure! 

You can also get some super sexy maps by +Dyson Logos over here - http://www.rpgnow.com/product/114976/Dysons-Delves?affiliate_id=470115