The Devil's Workshop

The old saying goes, "Idle hands do the Devil's work." Well, in an effort to curtail anything untoward during my downtime, I like to engage in ridiculous and random acts of creation, and right now I'd like to share the forbidden fruits of some of my recent labors.

First off, as I mentioned recently, I have been seduced by the siren song of index cards as a game management tool. I have started creating NPC cards for each of the characters my players will encounter in a particular game session. I have started doing this for two reasons:

1. I have an obscene amount of blank 4x6 index cards that have been sitting in my office unused for untold eons. Where did they come from? Nobody knows! They're like the druids that way.
2. Creating frivolous things using office software is a past time I enjoy just about as much as D&D, and I don't need to convene a group to do it.

As a first step in my indexing efforts, I created a template, which presents a character's stats in an easily scanned* format and, which can adequately portray most NPCs or monsters. If you want to check out some examples cards completed using the template, you can see them here. I am now gradually converting many of the NPC stat blocks, which I had previously recorded in a myriad of mismatched ways into this single clean and compact format.

The second project I recently launched involves the barbarian dream house I got my players as a Christmas gift. Basically, I gave them an in-game present -a castle, which now serves as their base of operations, and which provides an opportunity for a different type of game experience. As part of the terms of ownership, my players are tasked with maintaining and managing their new base. They have taken to the task with gusto, and have already made numerous improvements. To help keep track of the structural renovations and modification projects they have launched, I decided to create a virtual 3D model of the keep in Google SketchUp... like ya' do.

Along with being a D&D nerd and an office software nerd, I am also a big ol' SketchUp nerd. You have not lived until you've moved into a new home having plotted out all your furniture placements in advance using SketchUp. When the gf and I moved into our current place, we did just that and had almost no fiddling with furniture on moving day. It all just fit. Perfectly.

Anyway, if you haven't heard of it, Google has a very robust free version of the program available for download. That was the version I used for a long time before I managed to finagle a copy of SketchUp Pro in exchange for providing an introductory seminar on the program at my old grad school. Yes, I am that level of leet SketchUp nerd.

Anyway, these are just a couple examples of the sort of trouble I get into when my hands get idle.

mmm... forbidden donut!

* scanned as in the DM frantically hunting for a stat in the midst of a combat encounter, not the thing which puts photos on the 'puter

He's Crafty!

So, I'm supposed to be preparing to launch the third act of my campaign this week, which meand I of course found it necessary to procrastinate and do nothing of the sort this weekend. Rather than prepping for my upcoming session, I launched into a crafting project that I have been itching to undertake for quite some time: I built my own custom GM screen.

During the two and a half years I have been running this game, I have never used a screen. This is partly because I used to run my game from a laptop, which served as a sort of screen in itself, and partly because I run an out-of-print version of the game, making appropriate screens difficult to come across. Well, recently I started looking at custom built screens and finally decided to take the plunge.

Here's what I used:

Materials:

• 3 pieces of foam core scrounged from work (approx 10" x 16" each)
• duct tape
• 12 mylar photo corners
• Elmer's Glue
• 3 binder clips
• Scrap-booking paper with Japanese dragons printed on it

Tools:

• Metal straight edge
• Matte knife
• Cutting mat
• Popsicle stick <-- Perfect for spreading glue
• Junk mail <-- Perfect as a drop cloth when spreading glue

Making the Screen:

1. I laid the foam core down end to end and joined it along the GM- facing side with duct tape.
2. I trimmed the two outside sheets of foam core to 10" x 12" to allow for a better fit on my table
3. I trimmed my scrap-book paper to fit the foam core.
4. I glued the sheets of paper to the foam core backing and used the metal straight edge to burnish it smooth. (I had to do this because the foam core had previously used museum signage on one side.)
5. I measured and marked the desired position for each stat sheet on the GM side of the screen and mounted each sheet with mylar photo corners. This will allow me to easily swap out stat sheets if I play a different system or have need of a special reference at some point.
6. I clipped the three binder clips to the top of the screen, which will allow me to display maps, visual aids or other references for the players.

I am quite pleased with the results of my afternoon's effort. While it may not be as professional looking as a store bought screen, the foam core makes for a much cleaner looking structure than cardboard, and the photo-corner system adds some excellent versatility not available in an off-the-shelf screen.

I am also once again toying with some modifications to my game management technique. There have been quite a few articles floating around lately that discuss ways to run games from index cards, and I just got run over by the bandwagon. During the last adventure I ran, I found myself being forced to choose between flipping back and forth in my notebook if an NPC or monster appeared in more than one encounter, or transcribing the same stat block multiple times. Well, in an effort to solve this particular inefficiency, I created an NPC card template that can be printed on a 4x6 index card and easily moved between encounters when running a game.