Brazen Wolfe Tabletop

Todays a “day off”, well apart from coming up with an adventure from the content worked on this week, it’s still something that I don’t really have something planned to upload today.

So today I will be looking through the things I used, all of which I’m not affiliated with… yet.. (a man can dream though hey?), and I will provide links where possible to what was used so you can experiment as you please.

I also want to talk about the process in future weeks for the weekend creation process and how the readers of this blog can get involved.

Tools used

Before we have a look at them in order I want to give a list of the tools I used.

• Own experience (Photos from your camera roll, pc, etc.)
  • Music
  • Books
• Hero Forge
• Gimp
• Inkarnate
• Tetra-cube
• D&D Beyond
• Kobold Fight Club
• Oh yeah. WordPress.com – for without you wouldn’t be reading this

Monday, plot inspiration.

Not really tools but it’s a “process” that has served me well for a number of years.

This week the concepts for the plots came from an photo I took of a ‘local’ rainforest – about 2 hours drive from where I live. It’s beautiful, wet, abundant in wildlife and houses some amazing animals – one of which (well two – but that’s a surprise for the adventure) is the inspiration for the Yooligo Worm. I find that real world places, things seen, experiences, err… experienced and heard can help solidify what the adventure is about and bring it from “high fantasy” into “plausible” adventures.

The forest and healing spring were inspired from the forest as well – a natural waterfall with steep embankments that house glowworms (Yooligo worms) was what triggered this week’s inspiration.

Other inspirations for campaigns or adventures comes from music, books, tabletop games (for example warhammer – age of sigmar) or aspects of cinema

Tuesdsay, NPCs

Who

Leading from the plot the NPCs were easy to think of.

• Who would live in the woods?
• Who would want to go to the woods?
  • Why would they want to go to the woods?
  • What stops them from going themselves?

Once that was established it was easy enough to go through imagining the reasons of the NPCs approaching the party.

In Xanathar’s guide to everything (DnD product) there is a handy NPC name list… My players will confirm that coming up with names on the fly is.. not my strength.. so having a list is great.

Images.

Hero forge. Yup, creating a 3d miniature and then taking a screenshot when happy with the pose , weapon etc is easy enough. They offer a premium service for what I have done, but I’m not super bad with the next tool I used.

Gimp. Using Gimp was pretty easy. I will have a future walkthrough on the process but through multiple layers to get the desired background effect, and desired effect onto the created NPC portrait is great. The other thing that hero forge could do for us is give a top down view to make tokens.. perhaps I will consider this for a future project.

Wednesday – Twists

Twists didn’t really use any tools this time around. D&D Beyond was used for the stat blocks and thinking of how to implement them for a D&D adventure but otherwise I thought of what could be exciting character revelations or changes that could enrich the experience for the players. For that is why I do what I do. To give the players a fun and memorable experience.

Thursday – Maps

Map night, maps I used 1 program and hand drew some concepts on post-its (I will show my board later.. ) but primarily I used just one tool

Inkarnate – I find this was great. Easy to use and intuitive. I only had access to the free version (will experiment with other map making tools in the future to find one that I really love) but this one was good. You can also sign in and store your maps (and link them) so that you can download them later, or someone else can

Friday – Fightnight

Fight night I used a few tools or information sources.

Imagery

Gimp – plain, simple and free! Gimp. Tracing images found under creative commons (creative commons) and then blending colour using a few tools and the pipet tool made this a… long but enjoyable? process. I probably used 4 images, the paintbrush, airbrush, pipet and clone/heal tool in gimp as well as a few renders.

Info

Kobold fight club – I use this tool quite a lot to balance out encounters and calculate adjusted XP if I use XP in that campaign.

D&D Beyond – If you have access to the digital content, like I do, there is a lot on here for which is (dare I say it..?) essential to running games.

Weekend – bringing it together

I normally do all of this in my mind – but for the sake of blogging and creating a content rich week here is my attempt at sorting out my brain.

From the above you can I have tried to colour coordinate my whiteboard and days so I can visualise what the process is in my head. Generally I do this.. on the fly / automatically but it’s been a great process in actually sitting down and forcing myself to map it out piece by piece.

I take the best bits from the week and move them over to the weekend tile, leftover red 120gsm paper from a previous craft project, and tada! my adventure.. right there and easy to see.

Let’s address the elephant in the room.. the colour palette.

I live in Australia and simply couldn’t go buy the post-it’s I wanted to use for this process as we are in lockdown due to COVID outbreaks and our post service is in such high load at the moment they have actually announced massive delays on shipments. So for now these are the colour post-its I have and I wanted to match the info blocks (without the color offending peoples eyes and causing mass blindness) to have traceability from whiteboard to blog posts.

Moving ahead

Process in the future.

What I want to have from blogging multiple options, maps, encounters, twists etc. is I want to move towards the community actually getting involved and voting/nominating what their favourite bits are during the week and for me to either use those favourite bits in creating the end result for the adventure.

I think to get this to work the adventure created from the content produced during the week there would be 1 week delay between the individual posts and the end product. This week, being the first week, will be an exception as we are just getting started here.