Holy Crap! You can still get Dungeon Dwellers Minis!!!

Well, I was just googling around, did a search for "Max Carr" the brilliant sculptor who created most of the miniatures which lured me into the hobby back in the 1970's and early 80's.

I found the website for Dungeon Dwellers, and excellent archive of the miniatures from that line. After drooling my way through memmory lane looking at each of the photos there, I found a page that directs to a site that still makes and sells minis from this line.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Game Figures, Inc..

Unfortunately, they aren't making and selling the best loved minis from the line, but the hope remains. At anyrate, it was like bumping into an old girlfriend from highschool and she still looks hot. It was like that.

Chaotic Neutral Elf Bard

That's what I am.

What D&D Character are you?

Still sick as a dog, but....

Well, predictions of my rising from the dead may have been exaggerated, as I've been unable to get out of bed since Saturday until this morning. I got a call from the glass shop and put out an emergency call to my friend with a truck, and told him that my 4x8 sheet of clear plexiglas came in.

We went and picked it up and now its on top of my battlemat and game table in the basement. It is really perfect, because there is no way for the vis a vis markers to stain the battlemat now.

Neato.

With luck, the phlegm and mucous will eventually depart from my body without an exorcism. Anybody got a spare cure disease spell on them?

Reaper Launches Legendary Encounters Series

Over at Reaper Miniatures they are getting ready to launch their new plastic, pre-painted miniature line. I saw them myself at Reapercon, and they really look fantastic. The painting is of very good qaulity for mass production, and the detail and quality of the look is superior to the WOTC minis.

If you follow the link above, you can sign up for one of the 25 sets they are going to be giving away to celebrate the launch.

Click on the thumbnail below to be taken to a higher res photo of the product line.

Adding in weather to the Forgotten Realms

Realms Helps

I'd found this site a while ago, but haven't had a chance to incorporate it into play yet. Thre are a lot of really useful "helps" on the site, but probably the most useful is the weather determination program. It is really a godsend in terms of adding the element of weather to the game without having to make it up on the fly.

Dandello's Faerûnian Almanac.

You enter in the date, the relative climate of the area your PCs are in, and then make sure you click on the button for effect on characters. Then submit and in the blink of an eye you get the weather conditions for that day in that area with complete stats for the impact on characters.

For example:
The Weather of Flamerule 21, 1368
From Dandello's Faerûnian Almanac

Temperature
Low: 55
High: 70
Effective Temperature: 75
Precipitation: Moderate rain
Relative Humidity:
Morning: Moderate
Evening: High
Winds: From tropics at 10 mph.
Phase of Selûne: 1st Qtr
Number of daylight hours: 14.2
Dawn is at: 4:54

No wind effects

Visibility reduced due to rain (-4 on listen and ranged attacks, exposed flames extinguished).

Everything is geared toward 3rd Edition, of course, but most of the really helpful tools work no matter what edition you're using.

An Excellent Session

Well, it was strange to be playing again after so many months off. But we managed to get back in the swing of things pretty quickly. One of my players recently picked up a nearly complete collection of 2nd Edition books from a guy who was selling it on eBay. He's started his own campaign in addition to playing in ours.

The disease is spreading. :)

Thanks, players, for making the trip down and for making the session so enjoyable--even if the thief did succumb to drow sleeping poison in the first 5 minutes and spent the entire rest of the session sawing logs while all around him was death and mayhem.

I've really begun in earnest to keep a readable chronology with notations and illustrations of the current campaign over at the Severed Head Blog.

If you're interested, now would be a good time to start reading, because I've just gotten finished with the posts dealing with background and the first two mini-adventures.

Feel free to post comments and questions over there. One of the really fun things for me is interweaving information, characters and history from the campaign I ran in High School into the campaign I'm running now. All the characters from The Hopeful Seven were the ones I ran back then as a player. Some of the things those old duffers set in motion are going to have profound implications for "the next generation".

Who knows? The old Dungeon of Doom might even turn up, restocked and more dangerous than it was in the 80's.

Session tomorrow...first since JANUARY???

Wow, time really flies when you're too busy to do any dungeoun delving. My players and I have arranged a session for tomorrow, and in prepping to post the notes our scribe informed us that the last session was in January. Makes you weep, really. I really miss the old days when we started playing at 6:00 every Friday and didn't stop untill we couldn't keep our eyes open, sometime Saturday moring.

Of course, I was in high school in the good old days and didn't have a job, but what difference should 30 years and a salary make?

Anyway, I'm in full out prep mode, trying to get my entire brain back in the DM saddle. The basement is clean, the monsters alphabetized, and I'm re-reading the module. I've got to sort through old notes and post a compiled synopsis to the Severed Head blog, update timelines, and pre-generate some of the random encounters to save some time.

Exciting.