After about five years of playing, my 4E Ptolus campaign has reached it's finale. This post has SPOILERS so if you're playing in a Ptolus campaign, or are going to, you better not read this post. The campaign has a lot of elements from the book, but also many elements created by myself.

The final session I had initially planned to run on one night become one 6-hour session and one 10-hour session. This last 10-hour session had just 3 combats, and while it had also good amount of non-combat playing, combats were really long, even if a lot of the opponents were minions. 

The medieval buildings you'll see below have seen a lot of use in my rpg's. I love running games in cities, so it's no wonder - and the campaign I'm just about to finish is Ptolus, a huge book having a complete urban setting for D&D 3E. 

The buildings are built almost completely from cardboard + surface materials - that's same old filler powder/PVA glue mixture I've used in so many of my models. 

My Beasts & Barbarians campaign starts soon, and I wanted to take a few inspirational photos while waiting for the game. These diorama-like photos have only few pieces of terrain, but represent situations that might well be epic moments in a Sword & Sorcery game.

While browsing through old photos, I found a few modelling/WIP photos of perhaps the most popular content of this site - miniature -scale Scratchbuilt Star Wars starships collection. I uploaded them here and at the same time, separated WIP pics and tutorials from the original Star Wars scratchbuilt starship models post to reduce the size and put them here to create one separate WIP/tutorial post.

This post is meant for the players in my own upcoming Beasts & Barbarians campaign, but you can freely use it for your own campaign.

Links: Beasts & Barbarians Quick Start guide, Savage Worlds Test drive. You REALLY should read the quick start & it's recommendable to read the later parts (rules) of the Test drive too.

Shaper and Maker has large amounts of popular content that is currently accessed mainly via google, so I felt that having Drupal's default 'River of news' front page is actually really bad thing for the site.

I'm developing the website, and some features of the site - mainly categorized browsing - may suffer from this. Sorry for any inconvenience, the site will be soon organized in a LOT better way!

If you have been buying Beasts & Barbarians pdf's, you know the quality of these products. If you haven't, and you're interested in Conan-like games or setting, you definitely should check them out. You can also find several of B&B freebies from Drivethrurpg.

I've spent a lot of time to prepare some big changes for the site, but it's already some time from my previous post and I wanted to post something new on the site. I started digging my materials and found some photos of Star Wars interior terrain pieces I had traded away, very similar to those I'm using myself. I realized that I had't made article showing my Star Wars interior terrains in detail, so now you'll see better pictures of these terrains, as well as get some insight about how these terrains were built.

 

...or any other of the numerous contents of my site, please vote Shaper & Maker for RPG Site of the Year 2012! The voting has just opened and is open for 24 hours.

If I win, I'll try publish even more useful stuff for everyone! Well, at least to those enjoying terrain tutorials, miniature introductions, paper terrains/miniatures, gamemastery and Savage Worlds. I'm also currently trying to organize my site's browsing and article promotion better. Oh what the heck, I'm trying to do those things anyway!

Here's a paper model of a chemical container train car I've used as a prop in my Savage Cyberworld -campaign. Print it on two A4/Letter sheets, on cardstock, 120g paper or something else strudier than standard paper. I haven't added instructions as the model is quite simple, and I didn't see it necessary to add the parts that attach train cars to each other (whatever they are called in English), model worked quite well without them.

I know social media applications have been used in gaming more or less, but before now, I haven't found one that really is to my liking. Well, I liked Google Wave a lot, but it had it's issues and is now being shut down. But the new rising star among social media sites is Pinterest, which is extremely useful for roleplayers, terrain builders and miniature collectors as well. And as I'm verfy visually oriented person, it's quite natural I enjoy this new toy. But as a gamer, I wanted to think of using this toy also in gaming.

As my Sword & Sorcery miniature collection grows, both the available selection goes down and my treshold for choosing miniatures goes up. In my last two orders, I've got several miniatures that are great additions to my selection of S&S minis. 

This simple modelling projects creates stunned/dazed/shaken -effects for miniatures, giving your games comic -style effect - stars whirling around characters heads. The markers can be done in a bit different ways, making the result more or less comic-like.

While this project was inspired by Savage Worlds and it's Shaken condition, it can be well used in other games where characters have different conditions; however, it works best for games where there's not many common different conditions. 

Below you can see marker in use - a shaken shaolin monk.

Did you assemble and paint WW2 military aircraft as a kid? I did, although I really didn't like much the glues and paints used in them, the ones I'm using currently in modelling and with miniatures are way easier to handle, an healthier too I guess. I also read Commando -comics and was generally fascinated about technology of The Great War. If you are also Plasticrack addict(tm), you'll be easily tempted to these.

When there came speak of Beasts & Barbarians quick start sheet with Piotr, he mentioned that GRAmel folk are currently very busy but hoped a fan could do it. Knowing that many of my player wouldn't read the player's guide, I decided to accept the challenge, and here you can see the result. Hopefully this will help many Beasts & Barbarians games to start better! 

Sorry for long delays in my posts series - even worse these pauses are made by the fact that many cool miniatures singles fly off the shelves very fast. Older clix and mage knights are being found again by roleplayers and are selling hot again. It's some time since I started writing this article too, and regrettably many of the items are out at T&T, possibly elsewhere too. It's worth it to look for them though - the ones I'm showing now are really excellent minis for modern/cyberpunk games!  

• Miniatures

• miniature collections
• cyberpunk
• modern

While the most stuff I'm posting here is created by myself, once in a while I find something I must share. Today, I stumbled upon a new list at boardgamegeek, one collecting together various products containing prepainted miniatures. While I knew most of them, there were many new ones on the list too. From Star Wars Starship battles and Mage Knight to Angels 20 and Shadows over Camelot: A Company of Knights, you'll find here info and pictures of prepainted miniatures of many different genres and flavor.

• Miniatures

• links

Session log entry (I'll order the entries later in a format where you can follow the whole story)

Spoiler alert! This log contains Ptolus spoilers, even if the storyline isn't identical to written adventures.

• Roleplaying

• Ptolus
• session log
• Dungeons & Dragons
• 4E
• Chronicles of Reilukerho

 

While I have little need for Pathfinder miniatures after collecting a large amount of D&D miniatures, I found one diamond from the collection that every DDM collector should be aware of - Medusa. D&D monster design decisions have moved away from classic themes since the late releases of 3E line, and I haven't been happy most of these changes. What I did like is what they did to Lamia. But medusa, just like dryad, were transformed into something that wasn't so main stream.

• Miniatures

• D&D miniatures
• ddm
• miniatures collections