Well, now it’s May, and it’s still so close I can almost taste it.

Truly, all I have left is complete the portraits for the Pre-Generated PCs appendix (see the spots below for those that have been completed to-date; I really love Hugh’s illustration stylings).

Portraits found in the Pre-Generated PCs appendix

Of the remainder of the adventure; it really is complete. Ron Redmond did an outstanding job providing edits to do the final polish, and I am very proud of this one. You can also check out the completed high-resolution maps in the Bone-Hilt sword page on this blog.

I was really hoping to have this all done and put to bed in time for this year’s ENnies but we didn’t quite make it. Oh, well, there’s always next year.

Valen’cya’s Horde is an adventure designed for OSRIC for character levels 4 to 6, spans 92 pages, and includes; 48 defined encounters, over-water encounter sandbox, over-land encounter sand box, 7 adventure maps, 3 new magic items, 8 new monsters, 18 pre-generated PC’s, GM’s Adventure log©, and Player Character Reference Sheet. It is the fourth book in the Bone-Hilt Sword campaign.

Requires the use of of the OSRIC™ source reference document. Some elements may also require use of the Usherwood Adventures Expansion for OSRIC©. Also compatible with First Edition fanatasy-roleplaying game systems.

Good gaming,

…your party of adventurers is huddled around the ale-stained table, clutching flagons of mead. The serving wench delivers a platter piled high with spiced tubers, roasted onions, and shanks of lean meat with the message, “The man in the corner sends this with his compliments.”

The dark-hooded figure seated in a lonely corner takes a deep draw from his clay pipe, and beckons to you. A large battle-scarred axe rests against the wall near his brawny arm…

But this is no module. This is a restaurant just discovered in my neck of the woods up here in the Pacific Northwest. It’s called the AFK Tavern, and it took me a while to realize that ‘AFK’ stands for ‘away from keyboard’.

I bring to this to your attention on this, the night of my 11 year old son’s birthday. We were trying to figure out a fun place to go for his birthday dinner, when my wife suggested this new place she saw on the way home from work. But, in fact, it’s not new (the place has been there for over a year), but we finally just bothered to look into it. The full name of the place is, AFK Tavern; a place for geeks and gamers.

WHAT!? How many times have I driven past this place, and not read the sign out front completely? So, we decided to have a look…wow. Decor-wise, it’s not that special. It’s clean, but not a truly unique place. Food-wise, it’s okay. Burgers, sandwiches, spaghetti, salads, soup; that sort of thing. But all the items on the menu are game-related, or else, are related to things a gamer/geek would be into. For instance; I ordered The Sam burger. What’s a ‘Sam’ burger? A ‘Sam’ burger is a ‘sub-class’ of The One Ring burger. The ‘Ring’ is essentially a burger patty with barbeque sauce and a large onion ring on it. The ‘Sam’ is that same thing, but with bacon and ham added to it. My daughter had a plate of Nazgul Slidders, which are basically smaller versions of what I had, less the bacon and ham. (please excuse the quality of the pictures; I took these with my phone)

The AFK dining room.

Now, what makes this place truly unique (at least in my neck of the woods it is), is that it is completely set-up for gaming. I mean, they have several tables long enough and wide enough to set up a gnarly RPG session, and still have plenty of room for your food and drinks. You don’t need a reservation. You don’t need to come on D&D night (if that’s your pleasure). You just show up, and if a game table is available, Bob’s Your Uncle, and have it.

They also have X-Box, Kinect, Wii, and Atari set-ups. And when I say Atari, I mean 1979, 8-bits of raw, unapologetic Atari power! And you can play these free. Free! While you eat. Free! It’s freakin’ awesome! And have a vending machine. Really, a vending machine. I know, it’s hard to get excited about a vending machine. But it sells Magic the Gathering cards and dice! Forgot your d20? No problem. Just head over to the vending machine and get a pack. And, they have a ‘menu’ of board games you can play, if you’re just in the mood for something of lighter fare.

Another shot of the AFK dining room.

The dice and card vending machine

Then there’s the graffiti room; a red walled alcove where you are encouraged to leave your mark. This extends all the way down the hall and into the bathrooms, where you are further encouraged to leave your mark (graffiti mark, don’t get the mistaken notion of marking your own personal territory with your musky scent). Be aware though, if you bring a family, the grafitti is not kid friendly; especially in the bathroom. Just sayin’…

The grafitti room.

The Atari set up. It ain't pretty, but shit, it's Atari!

And, they serve Mac and Jack’s. Any place that serves Mac and Jack’s is already on my A+, highly recommended, list. Don’t know Mac and Jack’s? Tell your local restaurant they must have M-n-J on tap, or you’ll never patronize them again…ever…period…you might also add that they’ll go straight to hell, never to be heard from again…just to emphasize your point. It’s the nectar of the gods. Speaking of which, they also boast the largest selection of mead I have ever seen. Even if a restaurant has mead, you’re lucky if they have 2 or 3 brands to choose from. These folks had at least a dozen varieties on the menu.

For interested parties, here’s a link to the tavern’s website; http://www.afktavern.com And hey, their website even hosts a link to the ENnies, so you just know they’re on the up and up. And when you do go, make sure to say that I sent you there. I hope to have OSRIC on their radar as a featured game soon.

[I have got to get OSRIC going here!]

Good gaming,

However, I have been having real trouble with Valen’cya’s Horde…the ‘Horde’…it became painful, you know? Every time I would open the file for this one I was at a loss. I had an outline from the original concept, and I knew what I wanted to achieve, but just didn’t know how to get there. I knew the path was there in the darkness somewhere, but I just couldn’t see it.

So, recently I  began to redesign the interior layout template for all my adventures, based on my work on the Usherwood Adventures Expansion for OSRIC. So, doing this, I decided to also redesign the covers for all my adventures (see thumbnails above). Not only did I go to lengths to colorize the images used in this whole series (which, I think came out pretty damned nice, if you ask me), but also highlight the experience levels a bit more prominently (see the line of text immediately following the adventure title on each cover.

So having gone to all this work, I then attempted to once again tackle Valen’cya. The defined chambers continued to elude me. So, I started re-editing the previous three adventures (which I had to do anyway, since I stupidly deleted all my original layout files on these projects). Going back to the downloadable PDFs, I started fresh and new on the first three books (watch for these revised editions sometime before summer 2012). Feeling that the editing process got me back into writing mode, I once again attempted Valen’cya.

No dice (forgive the pun).

However, I did have inspiration to re-format my approach to mapping. So, I re-illustrated all the maps for Valen’cya. They look nice; something between my previous style and more traditional types of mapping illsutration. I’ll need to do this for all the other adventures [sigh]. I just keep digging myself a deeper hole. I also was inspired to expand the journey portion of the adventure, and sand-boxed a ship-born segment involving pirates and sea-dwelling creatures (lots of new OSRIC creatures here for you guys…and gals).

Now, I find myself mid-December, 2011. I get an email from a reader, Ken Perry, “Hey Bonehead, where’s Valen’cya’s Horde and In The Halls of the Mage-King?”

Well, that’s not what he said literally, but that’s the way I took it, because, I tend to be harsh on myself. So, I made Ken a proposal; help me by editing what I have, and maybe it’ll help me get that much further. Adding to that comment, I also offered to give him contributing author credit if he submits me any ideas for any of the encounters. That was the week before Christmas 2011. Having that week off from working, I decided to myself, “Okay, let’s give this another try.”

As Emiril Legasse would say, “BAM!”

One week later, where previously I had just the new creatures and the journey section defined, I now have 75% of the adventure completely written out in first draft, with most of the remaining encounters at least outlined! Two of the encounters having been written by Ken, himself!

Wow. I don’t know about any of the other OSRIC authors out there, but writing out 26 encounters? That is huge for me. And I am not talking about sometime like this;

1. Guard Chamber
Chamber contains 3 orcish guards with long swords.

2. Another Guard Chamber
Three more guards occupy this chamber…

I’m talking fully described chambers, creatures, treasure, plot hooks, NPCs; everything! And traps; traps galore! Got thieves? I’ve got the traps for them! Got a player that likes to press the ‘Red Button of Doom’? I literally have a ‘Red Button of Doom’ for them to press! It’s so cool! I can’t wait to release this on you!

List of new, or new to OSRIC, creatures (to date): garnet dracolisk, aquatic elf, magma golem, hippocampus, giant marine iguana, salamander, aquatic troll, dracolich

List of new magic (to date): cold ring, mace of curses, ranger’s brand (sword unique to the campaign), ring of wisdom

Watch for Valen’cya to invade your game group January 2012. Next, on to Mage-King!…

Good gaming,

Have a license for the font? So what. It seems to be irrelevant. According to the Font Police (FP), that only allows you to install the font on your computer (or, ‘X’ number of seats to install). According to the FP, the license does not provide you the necessary permissions to distribute the font; and embedding within a PDF constitutes ‘distribution’.

So now, it looks like in order to embed fonts in a PDF that you intend to distribute by any means, they want you to actually own digital rights to the font file; and that gets really expensive.

I’m still trying to get more information about this issue, since it’s still pretty fresh to me. But, I thought it important enough to make other folks (publishers or just gamers) who distribute PDFs to watch this issue carefully. My primary workload that I subcontract with this client of mine all comes through Wiley Publishing (Indianapolis, IN), so, it can be taken with necessary seriousness.

One suggested remedy (beyond the purchasing of additional digital rights for the fonts that a client uses), was to convert all fonts to vectors (outlines) before creating the PDF. Once in PDF form, you can use Acrobat’s OCR (optical character recognition) on the file so that the text remains searchable. But, this has not been tested on a full book (at least, I haven’t tested it in such a case). So, I am not certain how practical it would be. Theoretically, it shouldn’t make a file any larger, since a font file is just a bunch of vectors anyway. But, even that may not have long-term protections, since technically, it is the digital information within the font that is protected. And simply converting a font to outlines is still using the digital information contained within it. So, whatever…

Fore warned is fore armed. So, take this for what it is worth to you.

Here’s a link to the Digital Millennium Act of 1998 if you feel like cuddling up tonight with a good PDF…I wonder if the government purchased the digital rights to these fonts?

Good gaming,

Get the gist here? I want to avoid even the suggestion of trademark or copyright infringement. If you are submitting your adventure manuscript to Usherwood Publishing for consideration, please keep in mind, it must 100% OSRIC-fied. The covers may claim “compatibility with First Edition,” but that does not mean that First Edition stuff can be between the covers. Please don’t ask me to do it, because I wont.

Good gaming,

I am blessed with the circumstances that life has provided to me, in that, at this time, I am afforded the luxury of working out of my house as a freelance graphic designer. This situation may not last for long. However, it will be the status quo for the forseeable future in the Kramer Household™. In configuring the layout of my desktop, I have before me, my blessed iMac and its second monitor. Above this, I have a 22″ flat screen TV that I will sometimes loop DVD’s throughout the day for white noise. To the right of all this, I have my trusty 15″ MacBook Pro. During non-business hours, my MacBook is used to monitor family financial issues, my iTunes library, and of course, is my primary tool for all things OSRIC and First Edition.

Why even bring this up?

My MacBook, from time to time, runs TV shows or movies from Hulu.com.

So what? I like to have TV running while I am working. Most people like to have the radio on for audial distraction while they’re working. I like to have the TV running in the background for the same reason. Get over it.

Back to the point I wanted to make;

Today, I surfed in to Hulu.com and loaded up The Outer Limits. (Ordinarily, I’m not an Outer Limits groupie. I rather fancy Twilight Zone and Night Gallery instead.)

But then, I started paying more attention to the plots, scripts, and use of lighting. And I came to the conclusion; today’s shows pale in comparison to these shows. Why? Because these older shows did not have the ability to dress a scene up with tons of color. (How many police stations in real-life actually have glass office walls and neon-blue mood lighting? If you would believe contemporary shows like CSI, and Criminal Minds all of them are thusly decorated.) They also could not make a scene more exciting without slick computer graphics. (I’m a huge fan of the LoTR movies, and actually watch all the bonus material more frequently than I watch the movies themselves. One thing they make clear in these “Appendices” is that any filmed sequence can be cleaned up in post-production. Need to add a new creature? No problem, the CGA geeks will just add it in during post-production. Your background supposed to have a volcano, and not a skyscraper? Not a problem, we’ll drop it in during post-production.) But back in the 1960′s, if it wasn’t in the scene while it was filmed, it wasn’t going to be in the scene at all. The director had to make things happen in the camera. And the writing, the lighting, the script, the actors, the director; all had to tell the story, in the camera.

For all their ‘bad’ production values, I tend to think as a result, these older shows are better for the most part than their modern counterparts. Newer shows tend to just wanna be vehicles for some CG artist’s portfolio, at the cost of a show’s plot, acting, and directing. Makes me realize that’s probably why I like movies like 12 Angry Men and Duel.

Good gaming,

Steve Jobs dies; Apple co-founder was 56

In 1986, I had very first encounter with a Macintosh computer. It was small back then; the case roughly 10 x 12 x 12 inches, the screen was perhaps an 8 inch diagonal. It came loaded with 256K of RAM, and I am being generous if I say it had a 20 megabyte hard drive. The single application it came with was called MacPaint. As a graphic design student at the time, if I ever had a need to paint 2 bit brick wall patterns, I might have been more excited about this strange little device. But we all walked out the presentation shaking our heads, laughing, and saying, “Yeah, as if…”

Fast forward years, and I found myself working at a high-end commercial printer, working in the art department. We were still doing all our paste-up using waxers, rubber cement, and non-repro blue pencils. Client presentations were executed with markers, or else fully comped up the artists using color keys, or test print runs.

One day, while were sitting happily among all the toxic vapors that markers, rubber cement, and film processing solution make (those were fun days, though I frequently went home with a headache), the owner of the print shop escorts into the art department a gentleman who is pushing a cart of white boxes. The large Garamond lettering on the boxes read, “Apple Macintosh.” I think, he must have gone over to the public market near the freeway, but why so many apples?

Well, of course it wasn’t apples. The owner of this print shop just decided on this day, that his art department was going to enter the computer age. The technician got all the machines set-up, plugged in, and turned. The shop owner then said we were to start using these machines on Monday morning (this was a Thursday as I recall). He then walked out, confident, we would have it figured out. Terrified? Yes, as a matter of fact I was. I didn’t even know how to turn the damned thing on.

Today, I couldn’t imagine my life without my iMac, my MacBook Pro, my kids’ eMac, my wife’s iPad, my iPod, and all the other wonderful things this visionary from ’70′s has brought us. I never knew him, never met him, and probably would never find my path ever crossing his at any point in the future, but I will miss him terribly. The consumer computer world has lost its best friend. Good-bye, Steve. And thank you for a life-time.

Good gaming,

About 30 to 45 minutes into the film though, the filmmakers start to reveal the human side of these people. And surprisingly, I found myself very interested in what happens to these them.

Bob’s journey takes him on a rollercoaster-ride as he attempts to launch a career as a scifi-writer and a cable-access TV host. His story is both crushing and up-lifting as you see him go from self-doubt, to elation, to defeat, and finally to success and redemption.

Richard goes through the trials of the frustrated DM who has a group of players not happy with the fact that, due to their own bad decision-making during the course of a game, all die. They willingly and without DM-prodding, all jump into a sphere of annihilation. And the players all apparently got upset with the DM, picked up their toys, and left. This guy is fun to follow as we watch him decide to close his game group, tell his non-gaming wife he’s getting rid of his game books (which he never does), and then try to take care of ‘normal life’…he’s dangerous with a chain saw, by the way.

Elizabeth…yes, at first, I thought this young lady was a freak. I mean, who dresses up as a drow elf, painted head to toe in black body paint…just because. I was dumb-founded. But as the circumstances of her life and relationships unfold, I really began to feel for her situation in life.

D&D’ers are human. We go through the same troubles as everyone else. And by the way, none of these people are shown to be Satan worshiping psychopaths. You should check it out. I found it on Hulu.com.

Good gaming,

As with all Usherwood Publishing illustrations, this illustration was first developed by one of my super-talented illustrators; in this case, the artist is Hugh Vogt (http://www.hughvogt.com). Once final, the art was colored in Photoshop by yours truly.

The instruction to Hugh for this piece was very simple; “give me an action piece.” I wanted something to evoke danger, and to incorporate as many of the archetypical player character classes as possible. And man, did he deliver.

The color scheme was actually quite simple to establish. Since the monster is a creature of darkness and flame, I wanted it to have an overall warm palette, with the only cool tones coming in lightly in just a couple of the characters in the foreground. These colors, I determined, would be used in the masthead design for the publication’s title. So I intentionally kept the number of colors to a minimum.

The flames in the background, which were rendered in Bryce 3D, were added post-prouction.

I hope you’ll download the Knockspell PDF or order the POD when it’s available later this month through Mythmere Games. It should be a pretty good issue!

Good gaming,

Clicking was nostalgic fun, seeing allot of informational clips, and production drawings that I hadn’t seen in a very long time.

Clicked on to the Episode V (Empire Strikes Back) panel. Reviewed the thumbnails at the bottom. Came a across a listing for the ‘Space Slig Storyboard’? Huh? I’m not a professor of Star Wars by any stretch. Never been to a convention, and never pretended to be a Jedi in a lightsaber duel with my Darth Maul replica saber. It just sits on my wall, collects dust, and waits for me to show it off to my kids’ friends every once in a while.

But I don’t think I have heard of a ‘space slig’…oh!, space SLUG! That’s what it means…

…a typo, on a web page for what it is undoubtedly one of the most successful movie franchises in history (try to argue it’s not, you wont succeed). Now, I know I am not world’s best speller, or typist. And I make loads of mistakes if I am not very, very…very…careful. But this is a major product release by a very large corporation. Don’t these things get edited and proofread like, for months on end?

‘Space Slig’!? Seriously? Well, at least now I don’t feel so bad when I let a typo of two get through.

Good gaming,