Making Crates for your 3d Dungeon or Wargame

I'm currently working on an adventure and realized I need a bunch of crates and furniture for this one.

I could just cut out a bunch of squares and rectangles out of card but I thought I'd go all out for these ones since they'll get used a lot.

Crates are super easy to make once you know how.

First get yourself a couple of bags of these....

You can get 42 wooden cubes for a dollar at the dollar store! You're already halfway there!

Next paint them all black.

Now you need to make yourself a stamper. You can find out all about making stampers in issue 1 of sword of sorcery, download all the issues here.

This is a fairly simple stamper, just a thin rectangle on each edge, a diagonal crossbar and some more planks on the inside.

Now load up your stamper with a light beige to represent your wood color and stamp every side of the crates. 

Here's what you get!

I undercoated the cubes, made the stamper and got all the sides stamped while watching a movie so they really don't take long at all. If you do enough of them at a time the first ones are dry by the time you loop back around to them to do their second side.

As you can see they look just fine and are a lot quicker and cheaper than printing off cardstock printables and cutting, folding and gluing them all.

I hope you all can find a use for these guys.

~Ripley

"Wooden Blocks" and super multilevel encounters on the Demonbaord

And what fresh wonders do I have for you all? Witness below, the power of "Wooden Blocks".

Only $3 at dollar stores when you can find them. You can usually find more expensive sets fairly easily but these ones are perfectly suited to Lair.

Just look at the front of that box. Just imagine some weird monsters all over that thing and it's already some forgotten ancient city.

I've shown you the jenga blocks before but these are something much much bettter

Ramps and Multilevel Lairs with a Demonboard

Hail hearty adventurers and Demonlords!

Above we see a major problem which occurs while designing your Lairs. On your map you have a tunnel which goes above or below another tunnel. But since our Demonboards are flat what you get when you try to lay it out on the Demonboard is shown above. A tunnel apparently going through another tunnel. 

Well we can't have that, so this series is to show you all how to make ramps, so that your tunnels may pass each other without intersecting.

"Jenga" blocks and the Demonboard

Some of you may have been using the standard Demonboard for some a little while now. You may be using it with your games of LoSS (The Lair of Sword and Sorcery Adventure game) or perhaps as a 3d dungeon in your own fantasy roleplaying games. 

Giant Ants!

It's still Halloweeny time and still finding all sorts of great things at the dollar store. This package above is one of them.

100 ants! It's hard to tell from the pic but they are regular size ants to you and me. and look pretty good.

But to our intrepid heroes they are...

Friday updates!

With the release of issue 4 we are finally nearing the end. All the rules for Lair are now in your hands. Go forth be free, make up some silly monsters, make up some evil wizards. Me I've got a lot of Villains in mind to populate the Winterlands.
Time to fill in all those little labels and cities on the map, figure just what exactly does lurk in this hole or that one.
The real fun of the game.
And also some personalities, the people of the Witnerlands, the great names on everyones tongue, the names in all the stories and songs. Time to find all those heroes and Villains.

And what then?

Oh so much more The Autumnlands are calling! The steamy Hunzar jungles, and the ragged coasts of the Summerlands, the throne of the Black Emperor, the time of magic and the fall of the Wizards. The great device and the lure of Platinum. All this and more to explore.

I hope you'll all come along with me on that adventure.

Me? I'll be spending the rest of the night with comic books and a spiral notebook, watching monster movies under a blanket. There may be beer, but other than that life doesn't change much when you grow up.

On to adventure my Blood Reavers!

~Ripley

Lair of Sword & Sorcery on Roll20

Took a break from all the Wizard and Demon art to finally get Lair set up on Roll20.

Here's a screenshot from Roill20

What you see is the actual scan of my Demonboard and blocks. I just copy and paste them to set up the boards on the fly.

No fog of war and setting up ahead of time for me, I prefer to just wing it.

That black box is the "staging area" next to the demon board where I keep my stash of minis and blocks and just drag them over as necessary.

I really need to get a scan of the dragon to keep there to torment the players, just like real life!

The minis are actual scans of my DFC wizards and demons as well as my Haat historical minis.

I think the game is finally good to go!

And now back to the Art Boards, that Sorcery issue aint gonna fill itself with art!

~Ripley

Cheap clay modeling for 3d dungeons

For all of you who really get behind clay, here's something very special.

My local dollar store has the usual "basic" clay molding and carving tools. For those in the know this means pPopsiclesticks, dental picks and regular craft knives. There are such things as "specialized" miniature clay modelling tools but I can tell you from experience that they don't accomplish anything you can't do with x-acto knives toothpicks and other home made tools.

But I found something exceptionally cool today.

Above you can see a picture of "cupcake decoration tools", for $1.50.

With some amazing round moulders, rakes, fine points and star points as well as a nice half round tool (far right on the picture below) that I haven't seen before.

What a great score. I think I might get around to finally making some clay doors for my demon board today.
Thank you gods of cheapness for awesome dolllar store stuff.

Busy Busy!

Busy Week!
Just getting everything prepped up for the summer season of Lair.
The next few publications will be Scenarios and campaigns since I'm going to be focusing on my own game for the next little while.
I'm sure many rules additions will crop up while I'm working on those so those will be compiled into a single issue once enough of them have built up in the scenarios.

Sorcery!

The biggest change will be in the Sorcery part of the game.

I was going to put out a double issue for Sorcery with one for the players and one for the Demonlord.

I decided that I just didn't like the idea.

I wanted Sorcery to be far more fluid, mysterious and conducive to any given scenario.

So in my own game I will be introducing Sorcery (someone found some scrolls!) piece by piece.

Sorcery in Lair should be unpredictable so each "spell", demon, item, or other things will all have their own rules.  During play I'm sure that these will soon settle into a more standardized form and will publish a sorcery issue of guidelines once I have a large enough mass of material.

Music!

I was deadly serious about a Kartharka album. Stymied only by some linux issues on the computer that should be worked out shortly. I'll probably be posting the seperate songs here before the album is complete, or videos will go up on the Youtubes. Anyone who wants to throw a track on the album feel free to send it along. I'm in the process of building a new synthesizer which may or may not appear on this album but the guitar and the S612 sampler are raring to go. 

Videos!

Yes indeed, promotional videos for Lair will be going up on the Youtubes, again linux software stymied this for a bit but some good alternatives were found, the moving pictures will arrive soon!

Toys!

Those of you who know me in real life know that this has been in the works for the last couple of years, well I finally broke down and got me an arc welder. There may be a line of Kartharka toys born yet.

So keep your eyes peeled lots of free content is on it's way and if I can sort out the camera finally more pics than ever.

Thank the gods the main rules are all finished up so that we can all get down to playing!

~Ripley