Somewhere where nothing happens. Ever.
Our group is currently bumbling their way through the “Lost Mines of Phandelver” in their usual unhinged manner. And as part of this they needed to visit a Banshee in the woods, for which unfortunately no map was available.
So here’s a quick one I knocked up in DungeonDraft, which I’m posting here since it might be of use to others.
If you’re looking for an affordable map-making tool for RPGs suitable for use with a VTT a good contender is DungeonDraft which comes for an affordable $19.99 which weighs in around €20.
While it doesn’t offer the same rich variety in terms of assets out of the box as say for example Inkarnate. There are many free assets available for it on CartographyAssets which closes the asset gap quite quickly.
The fact that it’s a once off payment rather than an ongoing subscription means it quickly pays for itself. Can recommend enough if you’re looking to create quick maps for VTT sessions. Added to which there is nice integration with Foundry VTT if that’s your thing.
Here’s two examples of maps I’ve recently used in RPG game made only using the default installed assets.
The Blacksmiths Shop
A section of a village the party recently visited showing the local Blacksmiths store and accommodation. The store having a open stall window at the front with the smithy to side and family quarters behind.
The Old Watchtower
A point of interest the adventures had to explore was a recently abandoned watchtower and the mysterious cavern linked to it below. Where the recent disappearances of villagers connected in some way to its sudden abandonment? Probably not.
One of the things I like about AI Art is the surreal images it can generate which make for great wallpapers and general backgrounds.
Here’s a selection of fantasy themed images I’ve used for wallpapers or visual aids for use in roleplaying games.
AI Art is such a godsend when it comes to generating images/art for role-playing game sessions. I’m using it constantly now to generate pictures for player characters and tokens.
The results are getting exponentially better as time goes on.
Here are a few I did a while back using Midjourney while not free, does have the edge out of the box over Stable Diffusion. That said Stable Diffusion is more than capable of generating useable images and tokens, added to which it is free.
Now this was an unexpected announcement, Wizards have walked back their talk of revoking the OGL 1.0a and even gone further than anyone imagined by putting the SRD 5.1 into the Creative Commons.
Things are moving apace in the RPG space, with multiple publishing companies announcing moves away from the Wizards owned OGL.
But the most significant development so far is the announcement today by Paizo of a new open license by them for use by the wider RPG community. The contents of the announcement is below.
https://paizo.com/community/blog/v5748dyo6si7v?Paizo-Announces-SystemNeutral-Open-RPG-License
Unless you have been living under a rock, you’ll have to be aware of the turmoil within role-playing games community over Hazbo/Wizards of the Coast attempting to revoke the OGL 1.0a license which has been used for 20 or so years.
And replace it with one which is closed (in spite of the name) and also performs a serious land-grab of third-party IP at the same time as looking to milk everyone they can.
Naturally this hasn’t gone down to well 🙂
The following video gives a good run-down on the situation along with providing a link to the revised license.
We’re currently playing through the Keep on the Borderlands on our weekly DnD sessions.
As such in preparation for some possible encounters which the party might have I’ve knocked up some simple maps we can use in the VTT we’re using.
These are shown below, maybe they’ll be of use to others.
If you’re new into role-playing games, then this is a pretty good deal.
The core rulebooks for both Pathfinder and Starfinder for around a fifteen euro.
Pathfinder itself comes from Dungeons and Dragons, being a port from DnD 3.5, though the second edition is move away from that original starting point.
The basic concepts remain similar between the two games with similar races, classes and mechanics.
https://www.humblebundle.com/books/give-gift-pathfinder-starfinder-paizo-books
I’ve recently been on a AI image generation role, primarily using MidJourney to create landscapes, but there is a cost to that service (It’s a processing expensive task, so I’m OK with that).
But for the job of creating character portraits, I’ve taken to using Stable Diffusion which is an open sourced implementation which can be run locally. It’s pretty heavy on the hardware requirements, needing a GPU with 6+gb of ram, but if you can meet that the results are pretty good.
The following are some character portraits I’ve used it to create:
