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Vaesen Solo Play Aid

I’ve been dabbling with Vaesen by Free League Publishing for a bit now.
It’s nice investigative driven RPG set in an alternative Nordic 19th century, along with an expansion which covers Ireland and Britain during the same time period.

So as a forever DM, I was pleased to see a set of rules for solo play has been released.
It utilities a series of random tables to drive the story and encounters, making use of both dice and standard playing cards.

It was the later, the playing cards which I found rather cumbersome in use, so to that end I knocked up a simple web-page to simplify that part of the process.

You’ll still need the solo-rules, but image below (showing a sample card) takes you to web-page.

Pressing “Deal Card” will deal a new card from the deck of 52, creating and shuffling a new card deck as required.

Pressing “NPC State” will deal two cards, which are used to determine an NPC state to the players.

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AI for RPG Art

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.

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Wizards walks back OGL changes.

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.

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Paizo announces Open RPG License

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.

Paizo Open RPG License Announcement

https://paizo.com/community/blog/v5748dyo6si7v?Paizo-Announces-SystemNeutral-Open-RPG-License

  • Their site is currently getting overwhelmed by the interest for the license.
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DnD Carnage – Open Games License 1.1

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.

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Keep on the Borderlands – Maps

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.

The Stone Hovel – A mysterious hut in the forest.
The Forgotten Portal – An ancient inactive(?) portal.
Pit of Demise – A place of evil in the woods.

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Humble Bundle – Pathfinder

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

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Lord of the Rings – Dogs and Cats

Here’s a re-imagining of the principle characters from Lord of the Rings as Dogs and Cats.

Gandalf the gray
Frodo the ring-bearer
Sam the faithful companion
Merry
Pippin
Legolas the Elf
Gimli the Dwarf
Boromir of Gondor
Aragorn the ranger
Saraman the White
Nazgul, Servant of Sauron
Sauron at Barad-dûr
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Generating RPG Character Assets

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: