What Are Everyone's RPG Connections?
ScottA
Surveyor
I frequently see posters mention making a map for their games, so I was curious what fellow forum users played? Any designers/artists/authors in the ranks?
For my own part, I started playing AD&D waaaaayyyy back in 1979! Have since played many, many different systems. In 1985 I began to write/design for Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu game and have had dozens of books and scenarios published for the system since (and last year wrote the script for a forthcoming Lovecraftian video game). After 30+ years I have returned to fantasy and am running a D&D5E campaign for a small group. It is a playtest for a new book I'm writing (for either Pathfinder or 5E -- haven't decided on the system yet for publication).
Incidentally, I became interested in cartography and ultimately CC3+ when I saw how gorgeous the maps in the Pathfinder books were. It was love at first sight!
For my own part, I started playing AD&D waaaaayyyy back in 1979! Have since played many, many different systems. In 1985 I began to write/design for Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu game and have had dozens of books and scenarios published for the system since (and last year wrote the script for a forthcoming Lovecraftian video game). After 30+ years I have returned to fantasy and am running a D&D5E campaign for a small group. It is a playtest for a new book I'm writing (for either Pathfinder or 5E -- haven't decided on the system yet for publication).
Incidentally, I became interested in cartography and ultimately CC3+ when I saw how gorgeous the maps in the Pathfinder books were. It was love at first sight!
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We ran that, we enjoyed it. I realized I had much to learn. So we gamed form January 1980 to November 1985. Trillolara, Crestar is where we started, a small military district town called Fondfield. I added some game stores to my ways, and created a southern hemisphere set of maps using 5mm hexagon paper. I have run a few TOON ! games as well. At one point I was gaming one day a week at the house, two days a week at one game store and one day a week at another game store. Since some of the game stores came and went, i gamed at about 4 stores over that 5 year period. I have run one shot games at a convention.
I currently have about 3,000 dice, about 100 or so miniatures, reference books besides the ones mentioned above, paper and digital modules i use for ideas.
I recently bought EpicTable. I hope to start running either a 1E AD&D game session or a Traveller game session. When ? No idea. Hopefully this year.
edit: Oh, maps. My received a world atlas about 1958 for Christmas. I spent hours, then days, going over those maps.
I jumped ship at the top of this year to the Savage Worlds RPG system. Savage Worlds is a rule set that gets extended by the setting you choose, but is otherwise fairly generic. I am currently using Deadlands Reloaded as a setting and have a lot of setting specific rules and equipment to manage. Next year I hope to use a custom space opera setting though it will take a lot of prep to get it up and running because I will need to gen up the setting background, setting specific rules and gear, and otherwise do all of the grunt work.
As mapping and the Deadland Reloaded setting, I am making most of my mapping efforts freely downloadable with the focus being primarily on battlemaps. Very few Deadlands products have usable graphic resources, so I am posting every map that I find myself needing to make. Giving back is a little bit good karma building, a touch of reputation building, but mostly it just doesn't make any sense to stockpile/hoard my work.
Industry work-wise, I made a couple of contributions of B&W line art to Judges Guild that were published. Here is some that I drew from 1980...
Tim
Started gaming in 93/94 and have been a dungeon master for most of the games (regardless of system) with my group since the start. We still play AD&D 2nd ed today, preferring it over the newer versions. We have tried a few different systems over the years, but in the end, AD&D 2nd Ed is what resonates best with the group.
I can't draw even if my life depended on it, so Campaign Cartographer was a real boon to my gaming.
In the early days, we mostly played D&D (heavily house ruled, of course), but ranged at times to almost anything: Top Secret, Traveller, Call of Cthulu, almost anything. The fantasy games eventually switched to Chivalry & Sorcery, mostly because D&D didn't provide enough structure to keep the power levels manageable. (It turned more into Turrets & Magic Items, with characters being little more than hard points to mount weapons on.)
These days, I'm running a (1st edition) C&S game, and an occasional Covert Ops (which is what 2nd edition Top Secret should have been) game. I play in a Western Hero game.
Mapping, I mostly dabble in, am slowly learning. Got into CC when one of my players moved 2,000 miles away, but wanted to keep playing, so I started digging into MapTool (after deciding I don't really like Roll20). (I use CorelDraw a bit even now, but CC is far, far better suited and has so much beautiful artwork.) It's also useful when somebody is not feeling up to traveling to a game, or is just stuck at home taking care of Mom, or whatever. Now, even if everyone were in the same room, anything involving maps or miniatures would still be digital. It's just way too easy.
(Including one book for Deadlands in which I blew up my hometown, Sacramento.
Regarding maps, my interest in those didn't strictly come from gaming: my degree is in History and I have a love for maps from the 15th to 18th centuries -- the Age of Exploration. But maps I'd see in fantasy books, such as Tolkien's Middle Earth or Howard's Hyborian Age, caught my imagination from an early age. I originally bought CC back in its DOS days, but never did much until finally, with the advent of CC3+, I thought I should really start using it. I've two finished maps under my belt so far, and have a third underway.
Maybe I'll actually finish it before "CC4" comes out. ;-)
EDIT: Scott A., if you are who I think you are, you wrote some great material for CoC.
For reasons I don't completely understand, almost all my inspiration comes from maps. I need to draw the map first, then I can begin inventing other stuff. And because anything worth doing is worth overdoing, I have folders full of hand-drawn maps on graph paper complete with contour lines. I just started using FT3 in hopes of coercing it to accept the bits of my world's geography that I care about and then fill in lots of reasonable, interesting detail that I can riff off of. I haven't really put serious effort into CC3+ yet. It looks like really stunning results are possible if you know what you are doing; I hope I can get good enough to do half as well.
I started playing Dungeons & Dragons in 1980 or somewhere around there. I was at a friends house when he pulled out the module B2, The Keep on the Borderlands. He showed it to me and my twin brother, then began telling us about the game. I've been playing D&D since then. I've also collected every version of D&D and Advanced D&D since then as well. My collection of gaming material is very large. I branched into other game systems over the years like Rifts, Rolemaster, Middle Earth Role Playing, Pathfinder, and too many others to name.
In 1995, my friends introduced me to a game called Epic Space Marine from the Warhammer 40,000 genre of games and I've collected much of that stuff as well. I expanded out to the specialist games from the Games Workshop company like Man o War, Adeptus Titanicus/Titan Legions, Warhammer Fantasy, Warhammer Quest, Necromunda, Gorkamorka, Battlefleet Gothic, Mordheim, and many others. Since then, I've collected roughly 50,000 miniatures or more for those game systems.
In 2005 a friend of mine introduced me to a game called Warmachine that is produced by a company called Privateer Press. This company began life as a role playing game publisher that produced its own Role Playing Game and then wanted to expand into many other markets such as video games and tabletop miniature games. By 2006 I found myself working in house for them as a miniatures caster. I worked in the production area making thousands of miniatures every day using molten metal in spin casting machines.
My only claim to fame is being listed as a miniatures caster for the company in the next game they made called Hordes. Hordes was a companion/expansion game to Warmachine and is sort of it's own game but is very much compatible with Warmachine.
I was the first winner of the medal for the Warmachine faction of Mercenaries in the very first in house Privateer Press tournament. Sadly, at that time, they did not consider Mercenaries as a proper faction in the game so they gave it no publicity in their coverage of the tournament.
Other than that, I really haven't been professionally involved in gaming at all.
Jaw. Drops.
And here I thought *I* was a minis addict...
To be fair I have been collecting miniatures since 1995...
After an "intermission" for about 20 years, i was lucky enough to meet to cool cats in my 30's who share my love of all things nerdy, fantasy and sci-fi and i managed to get them interested in play. I only just started DM'ing a few years ago, when we found ourselves without one for a long while....decided to pull out all my old stories i had written (i have NOTEBOOKS of journals and short stories from middle and high school) and create my own homebrew world, Namari. For the last year and a half i have been running a campaign in Forynth, a small island continent on the world of Namari.
I began realizing that i wanted to play on custom maps and certainly didn't want to pay anyone to make them for me....as i am creative in many ways, so i picked up Photoshop and began teaching myself when i came across CC3. I dropped PS like an old habit, took up CC3 last year. As far as game play, I print out my maps on poster paper and use minis (i've got a few hundred, maybe). Although, lately i have been using my flat screen and playing battles out on Roll20 to save $$ and trees (im a tree hugger, too. hahaha)
Professionally speaking, i've got a series of maps in production with WizKids, Inc that should be out this fall. And a project i've been working on for Simon at Pelgrane Press for a 13th Age battle map book (not sure on release date, yet)
As for publications, most of what little I've published down the decades was in short-run fanzines for RPGs, although I've used at least as many maps in my published wargaming articles overall. In recent years, I've turned more and more to CC3-generated maps to accompany those, chiefly in "Slingshot". In theory, I'm currently working on a homebrew variant of the northwestern part of the "official" D&D 5e game-world's main continent, complete with maps, although the actual mapping has stalled rather in recent months as other things in real-life have tended to take over. And I was rather "hijacked", if in a nice way, into CoC 7e thanks to a new friend this year, also new to RPGs, wanting advice on the Call of Cthulhu rules and literature. Took amazingly little persuasion, however... Once you're involved in RPGs, there's no escape, it seems!
Most of the games I play don't need (or even strongly discourage) the use of miniatures, and I favour a style of game without too many fights or dungeons. Therefore, I have little use for battlemaps, and spend most of my time with CC3 on world/regional maps. I've still to find a style that would suit my tastes (and my capabilities) when I want to draw 1 village and his surroundings. This is a scale that I really have trouble with, although I'd like to use it a lot.
Although I created countless scenarios & several game systems (including one I've played for several years), I always kept it to me & my players, and never published anything.
Barliman -- yes, I probably am who you think I am (or something like that...! LOL). I generally go by my initials SDA for brevity's sake and it's a sobriquet that seems to have stuck! So thank you for the kind words.
And Quenten & Lorelei, I am also a follower of a pagan path.
PS: That would be a cool update for one of the annuals. ;-)
I then wrote a program to keep track of amount of time on an adventure, local in-game town time, Sun rise and set, along with the dice roller and the to hit tables.
After my first ZX-81 smoke tested itself, I bought an A1000 Amiga computer with 1 meg of ram and 512 Kilobytes of video ram. To the above program I added moon rise and set, along with some other items.
Some of the programs are up on one of of Crestar sites, with proprietary things, like the to hit tables, left out.
Still love to write my own utilities today.
After my ham radio club meeting, one of the other hams had a Sinclair ZX-81 he was giving away, with the 16 kilobyte ram pack. So I asked for and received it. I don't have a 13" B&W tv to use with it, but it might work with my lcd monitor. I'll have to research that... if not, go to one of the 'help the poor' stores around here. I know some have old televisions.
*Ditto* to the above posts. Started war-gaming with Airfix Ho/oo scale soldiers & tanks when I was about 8.
I bought Avalon Squad's Panzerblitz & Panzer Leader from a 2nd hand shop with the money I got from my first few paper rounds (yep... they were cheap
We had about three gaming shops in my area.. that ALL stocked RPG's. However, only one stocked AH games. It was once I'd bought all the Avalon Hill games I wanted that the shop stocked (Mainly Squad Leader & it's supplements) that I *accidently* bought the Basic D&D set thinking it a war-game!
Soon after gravitated to AD&D, Role-master, Call of Cthuhlu, Traveller etc .... and my fate was sealed. I suppose that was about 1982. Been heavily into the hobby and RPG community since then, running an RPG club and helping organise RPG conventions.
Some people collect Miniatures.. and I admit I do have quite a *few"(mostly Fantasy and sci-fi) but ironically, I've never really got into figures war-gaming.
My real passion is that I collect (and hoard) RPG *systems*. I have far more than I will ever be able to play, and admit that many I've yet to actually read from cover to cover. The collection probably exceeds 500 RPG systems now, not including scenarios supplements and companions...
I started mapping on square paper (like I guess a lot of us did back then)... I invested in Campaign Cartographer about a couple of years after it's original release... brought most of the expansions. Masses of floppy disks. But, to be honest I struggled and quickly lost interest in it when I failed to even come close to producing something that was worth the investment of time and money.. I really haven't got the patience or technical skill... imagination in buckets.. but no skill
Upgraded to CC2, then 3, then 3+ (Profantasy must love me..). I'm beginning to get the hang of it!
And, if I might, a tip of the hat to your forum alias.
Cheers,
~Dogtag