OSR Blog Roll Call

Dyvers, a blog writen by Charles Akins, has an interesting post called The Great Blog Roll Call, which has a listing of OSR and OSR related blogs, and importantly, has a bit that sumerizes each blog with a listing of how frequently it updates.

A "randomly selected" example:

• Lasgunpacker A war gaming blog that focuses mostly on Games Workshop materials. Well written and often filled with valuable advice on painting and game play. Updates: About six times a month

Which reminds me, I really need to post about the Pathfinder game I have been playing in, and about the Roll20 platform we have been using to play it.

Anyway, you should look over this list, and read some new blogs, and recomend those that you like that are not on the list to improve its value as a tool.

Otherworld Adventurers

For those of you who are not burnt out on crowd funding following the very successful Reaper Bones kickstarter, old school miniatures favorite Otherworld has entered the arena with an appeal for funds to launch a new line.

First figures are already sculpted

Instead of more monsters to fill out their excellent range inspired by the Monster Manual, they are now turning to adventurers, and rather than dribble them out over years, they want to launch a complete range all at once.  Which is where the crowd funding bit comes in. Using Indiegogo, they want to raise a paltry $5,000 to hasten the release of the various boxed sets they have planned. 

I personally like the look of some of these, and am eager for their success.

Character Sheet

Building from my one page character generation, I have been working on a character sheet.  The concept is to have everything that a player needs on one sheet, and further, all the "core" data needed to play in a single quadrant of the page.

I still need to work on the "fluff" quadrant, which is pretty basic right now (and fairly unattractive) .

Other design choices:
Silver pennies are the main coinage used in the Deepest Sea, so instead of a box to track GP, we have S/d/cp
Retainers are placed on the character sheet
Encumbrances are handled by lines in the item list, so that a character loses one move (5 feet) for every two lines filled.  Heavier items take up more lines.
Spells, skills, and such like are in KSAs

Anyway, here is what it currently looks like:

Let me know what you think.  Any suggested refinements?  Improvements?  Something I forgot?  Would it be useful for new players?

Also, welcome to new follower Lum. Hope you see some stuff you like here!

Character Generation

I have been toying with the idea of running a Deepest Sea game over the holidays (Christmas and New Years, not this upcoming holiday weekend).  Doing so would entail creating a packet of material suitable for gaming neophytes and those with a ton of D&D experience, although mostly from newer editions.  The handout packet would be the players' guide for setting and would be ~20 pages long in total.  Character generation would be one of the pages in the handout, and would have a matching character sheet to make things easy.

Above, for your consideration is a draft Character Generation sheet that I have created in MS Publisher. [click to enlarge]  Please note that it uses the wonderful silhouettes created by Telecanter for a little atmosphere.

What do you think? Is this sufficiently useful for both newcomers and those with significant experience in newer editions?  Suggestions for improvement? (aside from cleaning up the statblocks)  Any obviously missing items?

Post

Last week, I got some great stuff in the afternoon mail.

The first was a sprue of Mantic Ghouls sent courtesy of Wayland games. For a while at least, they had a program where by you registered for their newsletter, and then they sent you a sprue of Ghouls. I registered some time in April, and was not expecting to get them anymore. Most interestingly, the packet was post marked April 27th, so it took nearly 7 months to get here.



Here is a picture of the sprue, and another with a standard 2nd edition Space Marine (which, considering how long ago 2nd edition was in print, might not be considered standard any more!). These are the first Mantic figures I have seen in person, and they seem quite nice. I could certainly see getting a few more sprues of these to use for a variety of purposes; however, they seem somewhat limited in that they have only three heads for two torsos.

The second was the flyer that I mentioned in the last post, which Tony of Dampf's Modeling page kindly sent to me. Opening that packet was a thrill. My wife and I paged through it together, and she said "They used to have so many games". So true. GW went from having, and promoting, ten games, to just the three "main" games of today. Just looking at the wackiness that used to be part of the hobby makes one feel sad for the blander current games (which to be fair also have better sculpted figures and more complete ranges).

Front cover:


Back Cover:

40k pages:


Ah, look at all that red.

In other hobby news, I managed to put brush to a figure for the first time in many months, and also started thinking about getting going on the Baneblade again... we will see how that works out.