Boss Monster #2

Pixil, the lovelorn skeletal adventurer
who is doomed to wander the realms
until he wins the affection of a
long dead princess.

Another Boss Monster. This poor guy keeps trying to save a long dead princess from a forgotten age.

Special abilitiles will revolve around various gadgets.

The core "classes" or "roles" for the game will be the holy trinity (warrior/ archer/ wizard).

I have rules in place for six more "roles", but I will focus on the primary three in the first game book.

Boss Monster

Work has begun on my side project, a role playing game where the characters never miss, and wade through hordes of enemies in search of glory, riches, or arcane knowledge.

Boss monsters will prove more challenging, and will have unique special abilities.

I made this image using Manga Studio 5 and a set of custom nibs and brushes from Frenden.

Random Wizard Comic #6 is up

The sixth comic is now up on RandomWizard.com.

In this episode we make light of the idea that adventurers continue to risk their lives even after they amass small fortunes early in their "careers".

Also, the whole "railroading" thing.

I always enjoy low level adventures, when the players don't have a lot of agency, and certainly not much in the way of riches. I notice that some DM's try to adjust for player wealth by inflating the cost of everything. Having village children reveal the only method for getting past a chokepoint for 100 gold coins is not the answer.

"Thrown Bones" player reward cards are available for purchase.

I have been working on this for a while now, and I received my "proof"deck today!

The cards are available for purchase via "print on demand" from RPGNow.

Random Wizard Store

The cards are for any time you want to reward a player for, well, anything you think deserves a reward. The player hangs on to the card until it is used, or optionally, just takes the printed experience point value on the card.  The rewards range from small 5% dice roll bonus all the way to meta-game stunts like drawing a door on the map or hitting another player with a card to disarm an opponent. 

Sometimes it feels like forever between character levels. Use these cards to reward your players during that seemingly endless gap. The cards are all "one time use", so there is little danger that they will disrupt your game through their use. 

Did I mention that they were designed with system nuetrality in mind. The stated values and effects should work with most game systems.

Random Wizard #3 "soft launch"

You know I'm right... right?

The third comic is up, sort of. It won't move to the front page until tomorrow, but you can still get to it through the navigation arrows I think.

This comic deals with and pokes fun at the the trials and tribulations that come with working collaboratively in general, and more specifically chronicles a real life exchange that took place between Mundi and I when we were working on "Meckwick's Challenge".  I wonder if he ever got around to patching that hole in his wall.

You can find the comic here: www.Randomwizard.com

New "Random Wizard" comic up.

What does a monster have
to do to get a little privacy
around here? 

Check it out at RandomWizard.com

The idea for this one came from discussions online about how monsters get their money. I would think from robbing, looting, minting their own, or even from just being where stuff was left over from the past. Clearly I am not being imaginative enough about this, because the idea that gold coins and gems are essentially just "umber hulk" dung was pretty popular.

We are contemplating releasing two comics a week. This could work as I have summer coming up and I am making more that that amount now, but I work for a charter school and my summer is "crazy short".


If we decide to do this, you will be the first to know (well, first after "us", and provided that you are the first person to read the announcement post, and also if I get a post out before Mundi, and given that his blog is established and exponentially more popular than mine the odds of you knowing first are pretty slim). Ahhh, let's not get hung up on being first. You will be "some ordinal number of knowing", and that's still pretty good.

Random Wizard Comic Is Go.

Hapless Fighter from the 4th comic

I am happy to share that over 1000 copies of the One Page Dungeon Crawl/ One Page Dungeon Shamble/ Drinking Buddies have been downloaded through RPGNow. This was my secret benchmark that I never figured I would reach, but told myself that If I somehow did I would make a weekly web comic with my old buddy Mundi from the Random Wizard blog. I have like ten "in the can" so I'm not too worried about falling behind any time soon.

We will release a new comic every Sunday.  If you liked the One Page Dungeon stuff then you should like this too. 

If you hated the One Page Dungeon stuff then this is completely different and you will probably like this in spite of the garbage I threw at you before. 

If you thought the One Page Dungeon things were just so-so, then don't worry, the comic is like "ten times better". 

All kidding aside, you can check the comic out at RandomWizard.com

Posters for the One Page Dungeon Contest 2014

These are two posters that I made for the One Page Dungeon Contest 2014. The deadline is the 30th of this month (April) so there is still plenty of time to submit an entry.

I have participated for the last three years with Mundi (Random Wizard), but this year he is running the contest so it doesn't feel "above board" for me to enter. I wish I could because the prizes are fantastic! Check out the submission guidlines and even download all of the submissions since the contest began in 2009 at the official contest site:

One Page Dungeon Contest 2014

Sponsors and Prizes:

Troll Lord Games  tba

Precis Intermedia  Disposable Tilescapes  Disposable Heroes

Goodman Games  tba
Wayne's Books  Adventures in Fantasy box set signed by Dave Arneson

Engine Publishing  Odyssey  Session Prep  Masks  Eureka

Rogue Games  Shadow Sword & Spell Basic and Expert

Sine Nomine Publishing  Red Tide Campaign Setting

Pinnacle Entertainment  Murder in the Magasin Rouge

Pelgrane Press  13th Age Core Rules  Eyes of the Stone Thief

ProFantasy Software  Campaign Cartographer

GygaxMagazine Adventure gets published in issue 5

Steve Jackson Games  Mirror of the Fire Demon  Underground Adventures  GURPS Fantasy  Cardboard Heroes 01

Autarch  Adventurer, Conqueror, King  Player's Companion

Hex Games  Hobomancer and Hobomancer Companion

Rogue Genius Games  Monster Menagerie Kingdom of Graves  The Genius Guide to the Talented Fighter

Goblinoid Games  Labyrinth Lord  Mutant Future  Starship & Spacemen

Eric Harshbarger  GoFirst Dice Set

Paizo  Pathfinder Core Rules

Anonymous  $500 Paypal

The judges are pretty fantastic too:

Judges:

Ernie Gygax (the Hobby Shop Dungeon)

Steve Winter (Howling Tower)

Brendan S (Necropraxis)

Martin Thomas (Daddy Rolled A 1)
Daniel "Delta" Collins (Deltas DnD Hotspot)

Sean K Reynolds (SeanKReynolds.com)

One Page Dungeon Shamble...Play as Zombies!

I started working on this around the same time as the One Page Dungeon Crawl, but put in on the back burner while i whipped up the cutout characters for Drinking Buddies. I have chosen five one page dungeons again, but this time around the theme of undead. The party will begin the adventure dead. This makes it perfectly suited for an antidote to the TPK.  If the characters are still alive, there is a simple table with options for killing them off!

The party will have to rush through five adventures to find a way to reverse their undead condition before they literally fall to pieces.

You can get it for free over at RPGNow.

http://www.rpgnow.com/product/128422/One-Page-Dungeon-Shamble

One Page Dungeon Crawl banners that were probably never seen.

These are some banners I made for the One Page Dungeon Crawl. 

Unfortunately, the way that RPGNow handles banners, the likelihood of them ever being seen by a human being is fairly low.

Rocket Knights and Blink Weasels?

My interpretation of Roberts'
"Chainsaw Naga".

When Mundi and I started thinking about putting together a small group of "one page dungeons (OPD)", we had a few things in mind. The first was to find past submissions that were bound together by a specific theme. There are lots of themes (Demons, tentacled otherworldly threats, undead, etc,) but we decided to go with adventures that featured pubs or taverns. The idea being that what would become the "One Page Dungeon Crawl" would be just that, a "pub crawl" from one adventure to the next.

We also wanted to avoid mixing genres and use only submissions from the previous year's contest.
While Caelum Roberts did submit his dungeon The Iron Cloud in 2013 (and was a winner by the way, good show!), it did not meet the other criteria we were looking for.

So then why did it end up in the "The Crawl"?
Because it is damned funny, that's why.

I honestly didn't realize how funny it was until I was crawling through it finding monsters and characters to turn into paper miniatures. Even then, I missed the blink weasels, and had to add them at the end of Drinking Buddies (because I was too tired to shift everything around after drawing for two days straight).

There is a lot to like about this one page dungeon. It looks good from the maps and illustrations right down to the font and layout. The characters and situations described are really clever, from Kragofax the dragonbot to the "chainsaw naga".

The Iron Cloud was definitely influential in creating the story to connect the adventures together.
Even if you didn't get the One Page Dungeon Crawl, you should download this adventure and play it. It would work great as a one shot, but with a little genre-bending and work, you can fit it into your existing campaign. Just figure out ahead of time how you will handle the characters getting laser maces and a 4wd van.