Encounter area created using Harrowing Halls Dungeon Tiles

Some of my favorite Dungeons and Dragons accessories in recent years have been the Dungeon Tile product line.  While I’ve written about free methods of creating your own Dungeon Tiles, I appreciate the quality of those published by Wizards of the Coast.  With their two most recent sets, WOTC have added three-dimensional elements to their tile sets allowing for even more interesting map and room layouts. 

The first set to include 3D elements is DU6 Harrowing Halls

2 of the 6 tile sheets contain 3D elements, the remaining 4 sheets consists of mostly wooden floors and furnished rooms with wooden floors.  The 3D elements can assemble as either stone or wooden construction.  The pieces include platforms: 2 pcs 2″ x 4″ x 1″ high, 1 pc 2″ x 2″ x 2″ high, 1 pc 4″ x 4″ x 2″; a 2″ x 4″ x 2″ high set,of stairs, a 2″ wide doorway, and 3 tables.  Also among the 2D tiles is a 2″ x 8″ tile which includes a wooden bridge to stretch between your choice of platforms. 

The second set with 3D elements is DU7 Desert of Athas.

Again, 2 sheets out of 6 are used for 3D elements, the remaining tiles tend to be desert sands on one side, with water and some greenery elements on the other.  The 3D pieces include: a  4″ x 4″ x 2″ high platform of a more sand colored stone, which can reverse to a small adobe/plaster style house, a 2″ x 4″ x 2″ set of stairs colored to go with the large platform, a 2″ x 8″ x 1/2″ high platform printed up as a dock on one side, with gray stone on the other, a 2″ x 4″ x 1/2″ high platform again decorated in the dock/stone combination, a small market stall, a small wooden cart, and a 1″ x 2″ table that reverses to a stone sarcophagus. 

Overall I really love the sets, they assemble fairly easily, though it might be nice if they added some instructions, especially for some of the more unusual elements like the cart and market stall.  I’ve debated about weather the tabs should be a little longer, but as things assemble now, the tabs are close to flush allowing miniatures to stand flat on the various platforms, so I think they’re probably about the right length.  The inclusion of so many water tiles in a desert theme set might be a bit surprising, but I am glad to have those tiles, and I’m looking forward to using them with my RPGA ship tile. 

While I’ll still make use of my free tiles, I also expect I’ll wind up with 2 copies of each of these sets, and if your budget allows, I definitely recommend you buy  a set of each.

Additional photos on my flickr page.

Dark Trail by Scott Hudson (License info below)

Recently I’ve read a number of books about people hiking the Appalachian Trail. The trail stretches approximately 2178 miles from Georgia to Maine and can take 6 months to complete.  Even with all the modern equipment, and with town stops every few days on the trail, the trip is long and fraught with trouble and danger.

Hikers must be wary of bears, snakes, bugs, and the weather.  They haul an average of 40 – 60 lbs of equipment and food, and that’s with modern clothing rather than the various armors worn by most characters.  They have to be careful of slips and falls on the trail.  And though they’re following a marked and maintained trail, they still have to deal with downed trees and washed out sections of trail on occasion.

These stories started me thinking about the difficulties characters might experience when traveling from place to place. While every trip your PCs take shouldn’t be as difficult, a session of wilderness travel could include some challenging encounters, especially if your world design embraces the points of light idea offering small areas of civilization seperated by wide areas of hostile territory.    

I’m not a huge fan of random encounters, but this is the perfect spot for them, replacing the mundane nuisances of bugs, snakes, and bears with more challenging equivilents.  Stirges replace mosquitos, owlbears replace black bears, deathrattle viper or viper swarms in place of rattlesnakes, giant rats replace the mice trying to steal the party’s food while they sleep.  Instead of finding bits of civilization every few days, characters might come upon villages of hostile humanoids, or a giant’s encampment. 

Then there is the simple act of survival.  While you don’t want to turn the trip into a daily combination of skill checks, the trip can be written up as a skill challenge.  Succeeding on early skill checks leaves you better able to handle the random encounters that come later.  For example failing an Endurance check might shift one of the character’s Encounter Powers into a Daily Power for 1d4 days.  Failing a Dungeoneering check might lead to damaged equipment, leaving a character with a penalty to damage or armor class until the equipment can be repaired. Difficult terrain could lead to a fall, injuring the character and decreasing their speed until they spend a full day resting.

Not every trip should be treated as a wilderness excursion, plenty of trips will be over trade routes or through other more well traveled paths, but sometimes how you get there is half the adventure.

Some of the books I’ve read on this topic:

Walking with Spring by Earl Shaffer
On the Beaten Path by Robert Alden Rubin
There Are Mountains to Climb by Jean Deeds

Photo: Dark Trail by Scott Hudson/NJScott is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic licence.

DM Riches discusses products, tools, resources, references, and other items of use to the Dungeon Master.

Recently I’ve been trying to weed through my list of podcasts. I’ve been downloading far more than I could ever find time to listen to, so I want to share one of my ‘keepers’ with you today.

The Tome Show hosted by Jeff Greiner mixes commentary, reviews, and interviews for a very entertaining podcast. While recent episodes seem to focus on mostly Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition, he’s also covered Pathfinder, so I think it’s more a case of him talking about the things that grab his interest rather than a case of the show limiting itself to one edition or the other.

One feature of the show I’m especially fond of is his ‘character build’ segments where he sets out to work on a race/class combo and talks through the choosing of skills and powers for the build. In Episode 110 he performed this task on a human warlord with Wolfgang Baur. In the same way it is interesting to listen in to someone else’s game sessions through podcasts from RPG MP3, or WOTC, it is interesting to listen in on the thought processes as powers are weighed against each other and either selected or discarded.

Another nice feature of the podcast is that he seems to mix up the length of his podcasts. Of the most recent podcasts about 1/2 of them run run approximately 1 hour, while the other half are in the 10 – 30 minute range. While there’s nothing wrong with a long podcast, sometimes those shorter episodes are just right for filling a gap during a busy day.

I suspect many of you are already listening to The Tome Show, but if not, I really think you should give it a listen.

Most recent episodes:

The Tome Ep 110: Wolfgang Advice
The Tome Ep 109: Quintessential Wizard
The Tome Ep: 108 Dragonborn
The Tome Ep 107: Monster Manual 2
The Tome Ep 106: 4e One Year Later

DM Riches discusses products, tools, resources, references, and other items of use to the Dungeon Master.

While I love the Dungeon Tiles produced by Wizards of the Coast, for their looks, and for their game board stock, there are also a lot of downloadable tiles available on the Internet. I’m particular fond of a free set of tiles by Crooked Staff Productions.

While Crooked Staff Productions offers many tiles to represent rooms and corridors, I prefer their Dungeon Tile-set which consists of individual graphics files of about 30 different tiles that you can put together to form your own rooms and corridors. Currently I insert the images into a Microsoft Word document and resize each on appropriately. Most tiles are 1″ x 1″, though there are a few dungeon dressing pieces meant to be different sizes.

Recently I’ve been experimenting with Gimp, a free photo-editing software program. I’m thinking about using that software to create my tiles in the future. It would allow me to rotate the different tiles for additional variety. For example, in the image above the large room is made from the “Light room tiles”. The set only has 5 different tiles, and while I try not to put the same tiles next to each other, there is a pattern in the tiles. I might do better with some sort of random choice of tiles, but by simply rotating each tile I could create a total of 20 different tiles to choose from.

I could also provide myself a bit more variety by adding in a few of the half-tiles and triangle tiles included in the zip file, though I don’t think I’d want more than one or two of each sprinkled in each room.

In the image above, the large room is my own creation while the other rooms and the corridors come premade from the Crooked Staff Productions site on their Dungeon Tiles page.

One of the benefits of this sytem is that you can print what you need on either paper, or card stock depending on how long you’d like the sheets to last. You can also laminate the sheets for additional durability. While perhaps not as durable as the Wizards of the Coast tiles, they’re a lot more portable. You could easily transport tiles for an entire adventure’s in a single manilla envelope for a convention.

Crooked Staff Productions also has some cavern tiles, furniture, building interiors, and minidungeons, so take a look around their site, and find something you can use in your game.

Additional photos: Printable Dungeon Tile Set

Last month I received a free PDF copy of Mythic Design’s Adventure Art Issue #1 as part of a Twitter contest. In exchange for the free PDF, I simply had to promise to write some things about the product.

The 20-page PDF consists of 13 pull page drawings, 12 single-character sketches, plus one scene of two characters facing off. They also use two pages to give some flavor text called “Initiative Intros” for each image. For the Dungeon Master these would serve well as the initial descriptions of these Non-Player Characters.

Overall, the art is gorgeous, and the characters have enough interesting details to help plant some interesting ideas if I were to use them for a PC or NPC sketch. These details also aid in making a character more than simply “an elf with a bow” or “a dwarf with an axe”.

Over the years I’ve probably played more dwarven characters than any other race, so I found the cover image particularly interesting. It shows a tattooed dwarf removing a plain mask, while a dog stands alertly next to him. If I were to use this as a character, I would make him either a ranger or druid, though he might also work as an arcane caster of some sort.

While this is a gorgeous product it’s not the type of thing I would have purchased for myself. When playing my games I generally use miniatures, and even if I wanted to use images in this way, there are enough free images available from online sources.

DM Riches contain products, tools, resources, references, and other items I think you might find useful or entertaining.

Khyber’s Harvest is Wizards of the Coast’s contribution to the 2009 FreeRPGDay held back on June 20th. While this review will be brief, let me warn you now there will likely be a spoiler or two.

Khyber’s Harvest consists of a 32 page booklet, plus cover, and a 2-sided 8×10 dungeon tile.

Keith Baker designed this Eberron adventure for 2nd level characters.

The adventure consists of 10 encounters including 2 skill challenges, 1 trap, 6 combat (with some traps and hazzards included) and 1 encounter which “sets the mood of what is to come” and effects the outcomes of some later encounters. Though a little linear, this mix of encounter makes this adventure a nice introduction to Dungeons and Dragons.

The adventure also does a wonderful job of introducing the Eberron setting. Encounters are sprinkled liberally with many bits that I have come to associate with Eberron: Dolgrim, Dolgaunt, Dragonshards, a living spell.

I especially like the way several encounters mix combat with harzardous terrain and traps. Though there will still be plenty of direct combat, these encounters should help teach players to pay attention to their environment.

Also included are 5 player characters: Dwarven Paladin, Human Artificer, Half-elf Sorcerer, Kalashtar Invoker, and Warforged Fighter. If I were running the adventure I might re-create the characters in the Character Builder so players would have the cards for their powers.

I do have a couple of small quibbles, I’m worried the encounter with the living spell might be a little too difficult, and the same encounter includes a well of darkness, about which I’d like to have seen a little more explanation. The wells effects on vision are explained, but I’m curious whther it’s meant to be an actual well/pit, or just darkness welling up from the ground. My thought is the latter only because no mention is made of what might happen if players move or fall into the area of the well.

And the dungeon tile is done beautifully, a cavern of dragonshards on one side, with a more traditional tiled room on the back. Part of me wishes they’d done some modular pieces instead of these large rooms, but I know many folks like the larger tiles.

So overall a great product, even better because it was free.

DM Riches contain products, tools, resources, references, and other items I think you might find useful or entertaining.

My last post showed a chart I on simple 1/4″ square graph paper. I printed that sheet of paper from a web site called Print Free Graph Paper. Because I use an ink-jet printer, it is probably cheaper for me to buy pads of graph paper from the store, and I certainly have purchased a few over the years, but I’m not always the most organized person, and I never seem to be able to find it when I need it. In addition to printing the sheet I used, I was able to save a PDF so I’ll be able to print more sheets when I need them without going online.

While I printed out a basic sheet of Cartesian graph paper, the site also allows you to create hexagonal, isometric, and polar graph papers, as well as a couple other styles. Using this site you may choose beteen .1″, .2, .25″, and .5″ squares, and you can get it in either 8.5″ x 11″, or A4 paper sizes.

Though I’ve used this site before, I did a Google search and managed to find a similar site that offers even more versatility. Incompetech.com offers many of the same options, it has a lot more types of paper, triagular, dots, octagonal, and a lot more. Also, this site allows larger paper sizes, listing 11″ x 17″ and A3 sizes in addition to those listed by Print Free Graph Paper, plus allowing input of custom paper sizes. And instead of a limited selection of grid sizes you can input your own number of lines per inch.

So next time you run out of graph paper you can save yourself a trip to the store and just print your own.

D&D Compendium Screen Shot

I’ve been a subscriber to Wizards of the Coast “Dungeons and Dragons Insider” from the beginning mainly for the Dragon Magazine, and Dungeon Magazine content. In fact, for a while I considered the D&D Compendium kind of useless. After all, I already own the book, right? Maybe, but not quite.

Basically the D&D Compendium is a database of all the D&D rules published by WOTC. This includes major releases like Monster Manual 2, but also Dungeon and Dragon magazines, and RPGA adventures.

As a DM you can use it to find creatures based on name, then sort by type, role, level, or XP value. In addition, you could search for a specific power and then find creatures with that power. Just as an example, there appear to be about 41 different kobolds in 4E already, though I’m always looking for more.

As a player you can search for Feats, Powers, Paragon Paths or Epic Destinies. For example, I did a search for speed and found a feat called ‘Shared Speed’ which allows a familiar and his owner to share a speed bonus.

And when it comes to owning the books, you don’t have to, as long as you have your subscription, all that information is yours. Even though I have yet to purchase the 4th Edition version of Manual of the Planes I can still see and print the stats for the Barbed Devil from that book.

So, if like me, you subscribed to D&D Insider for the magazine content, or perhaps for the Character Creator, make sure you take the time to try out this outstanding resource.