Help me make more free map sets. Support my cartography on Patreon! 8-BIT DUNGEON: Retro-Pixel Fantasy FPRPG Card Game #FreeMapFriday Series on Twitter. New Maps Every Friday! Big Book of Maps for Tabletop Roleplaying Games Hardcover Book Fantasy Virtual Tabletop VTT Maps Cartogprahy Icon Symbol Sets - Over 1000 Assets for Map Making The Perils Of... Geomorphic Map Sets & World Blank Templates Sci-Fi Science Fiction Virtual Tabletop VTT Maps Starship Deckbuilder Kits - Build Your Own Starship Deckplans! Starship Deckplan Maps for Virtual Tabletop VTT Mega Station X - Ultra Massive Mega Maps Planet Portfolios: Space Virtual Tabletop VTT Assets Cosmic Starscapes & Alien Worldscapes Large-Scale Environmental Maps for Virtual Tabletop VTT All Paths to Adventure Titles by Justin Andrew Mason on DriveThruRPG.com Tavern Sign Crafter & Generator

Thursday, February 25, 2016

Winter's Roar: Monster Miniatures & Tokens

I have created a series of constructable miniatures and monster tokens for the monsters included in "Winter's Roar: Vikmordere Bestiary" (published by AAW Games/Adventureaweek.com), and they are now available to the public. The set includes 30 monster miniatures with and without labels, 30 cut-out monster tokens, 36 constructable condition hoods for miniatures, and numbered icons for duplicate tokens.

Beautifully depicted by Romanian artist Mates Laurentiu, these standard-sized miniatures & tokens bring the dangerous monsters of the Vikmordere Bestiary: Winter’s Roar to your tabletop for miniature play.

 This product is available for purchase via Adventureaweek.com, DriveThruRPG, RPGNow, and Paizo.

Snow White Hardback Shipping!

The Snow White mega-adventure published by AAW Games/Adventureaweek.com is being shipped out this week! I have my copy in my hands now, and it's an absolutely beautiful book. There is currently a sale going on for the PDF version of the game, and it would be a great time to pick it up!

This is the third published hardback book that has my name in the primary credits (image below). As a game designer, I find that very exciting!





Friday, February 19, 2016

New Bundle Deals at DriveThruRPG.com

I've just completed the product designs for several Bundle Deals for AAW Games products on DriveThruRPG.com and compiled this social media add to get the word out.

There are seven new bundle deals which include: A-Series for Pathfinder RPG (25 adventure modules), B-Series for Pathfinder RPG (23 adventure modules), Mini-Dungeon Collection for Pathfinder RPG (25 mini-dungeons), VTT Map Pack (33 map packs/over high-quality maps), Classic C-Series for Pathfinder RPG (7 classic dungeon crawls), The Sussurus Tomb for Pathfinder RPG (adventure and maps from Lord Zsezse Works), and Rise of the Drow for Pathfinder RPG (the complete RotD series from Adventureaweek.com).

Additionally, Print versions are available with the Mini-Dungeon Collection PFRPG Print Bundle and The Sussurus Tomb PFRPG Print Bundle.


Thursday, February 18, 2016

Adventureaweek.com Subscriber Downloads

http://www.adventureaweek.com/
I just completed developing a new feature for the Adventureaweek.com website. Now subscribers can access current and past monthly downloads via the new “My Downloads” section. Moving forward with this new feature subscribers will have direct access to download any product they have previously downloaded as part of their subscription. All subscribers get two FREE product downloads every month. The link to this new section is in the sidebar menu located just beneath the “My Purchases” option.

Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Gaming Memory #1: A New Kind of Adventure



My Introduction to Tabletop RPG Gaming & My First Player Characters


This blog article is one in a series I will be doing recalling memories and personal experiencing related to tabletop gaming. If that topic doesn’t really interest you, then just ignore this series.

It was the frigid winter of 1991, I was eleven years old, and attending Christian County Middle School in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. Among the small niche of new friends I had made that year was a guy named Scotty. 

Though we came from completely different social circles, we shared many of the same interests, and would often enthusiastically discuss fantasy video games. The two of us formed a friendship that would last for many years before our lives took different paths during high school.

While I had been a fan of fantasy since young childhood, I had only been introduced to the genre of fantasy roleplaying games a year earlier (in 1990) when I received a free copy of the Dragon Warrior video game for my new NES with a subscription to the 1st issue of Nintendo Power magazine.

One day while discussing the game Final Fantasy, Scotty mentioned a different kind of game that his friend, also named Scott, had introduced him to the previous summer. The game was called Dungeons & Dragons. I had heard of the game before (having read the TSR choose-your-own adventure books under the same brand), but never had the chance to play.

When asked if I had played before, I embarrassingly assured Scotty that I had, and promptly made myself out to be a fool by presenting him with character data from - you guessed it: Dragon Warrior.

During this phase of my life I was an extremely insecure kid, just coming to terms with a cross-country relocation and I often “exaggerated” truths if I thought it made me seem to fit in more. Rather than ridicule me for my obvious fib, Scotty said he would bring some books for me to read the following day.

The next day during morning “home room”, Scotty arrived toting a stack Xerox copies that were crudely stapled together to form a book. He passed the stack over and informed me that these were the “real” rules to the game and that this was my copy of the book. After school the previous day Scotty had rode his bike to the local post office, and spent at least a week’s worth of lunch-money to copy every single page of the Player’s Manual from the 1983 TSR Basic Rules Redbox Dungeons & Dragons Set 1 as well as several copies of the character record sheet on its back cover. 

[Old school piracy, right? A misdeed that I would make up for with tens-of-thousands of dollars worth of purchases in the coming decades.]

I took my makeshift copy of the players manual home, and read it twice that same evening. I was immediately hooked. 

The following day I brought my Xerox D&D book to class, and Scotty brought his polyhedral dice. During our morning break I rolled up my first ever character (3d6 to each of the stats), creating Kato the Fighter. The name Kato a direct transfer of my character name in Dragon Warrior, which was limited to four characters).

During the afternoon classes, while completely ignoring lessons, I ran Kato through the solo adventure included in the manual. Technically that was the first time I ever played Dungeons & Dragons.

By afternoon break that day, Scotty informed me that I would need an entire party of characters to go on the adventure he had planned (which happened to also be the first dungeon he had ever designed). So, I created the rest of my party during that break: Astos the Magic-User, Mordred the Thief, and Shadow the black panther pet of Mordred – which, if I recall, shared the stats of a dire wolf from the Dungeon Master’s Rulebook from the same set.

By the end of the day, my very first D&D characters – the brutish Conan-like Kato, the elderly, white-bearded Astos, and the suave, black-haired, goatee-sporting Mordred (and the Shadow that never left his side) – where ready to go on their first adventure together. The following weekend we arranged for an all-night stayover at Scotty’s house, and I spent the weekend delving the 36-room (totally nonsensical) dungeon he had built – the only story premise in play being that a King had requested us to rid the “ancient castle” of the monsters that were inhabiting it.

That was my introduction to Dungeons & Dragons and tabletop roleplaying games. It was crude and basic, but it was in every way a good-old-fashioned dungeon crawl. Over that first weekend I developed an addiction to tabletop roleplaying games that lasts to this day, and which would have a hugely significant impact on the years to come.

Tuesday, February 2, 2016

AetherCon IV Panel: Cartography (Video)

On November 21, 2015 I was invited to be on the "Why That is There" Cartography panel at AetherCon IV online role-playing game convention.Today the video of that panel was published to the convention YouTube channel and posted on its website.

Stephen Radney-Macfarland (Paizo), Christopher West (Maps of Mastery) M, Keith Kappel (Fantasy Flight Games), and I discuss RPG map making and answer audience questions.



AetherCon IV Panel: Cartography
Video Posted on February 02, 2015

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