Hoiditthroughthegrapevine

Nothing would really break, but say you have a quest card that shows the barebones of a predefined quest. One of things that could be on it would be a map that shows how to setup the board. After you go through the trouble of setting the pieces up with pegs, if the board gets bumped it's no big deal, everything stays were you set it up. Also, with the peg holes being a standardized distance, the movement speed of your character (across different terrain types too) could be accurately simulated. Say you have a human fighter that has a base movement speed of 30 ft/ turn. If the terrain tiles were scaled at 1/1,440, then in one turn your fighter could move a distance of two peg holes. Pretty slick. And if you need to swim up a river, and you're not a great swimmer, ans say your movement speed was reduced to 5 ft/turn, it would take you 3 turns to swim to a new peg hole. Again, pretty slick.

Sorry to double post, but this is pretty cool stuff. So I was looking more into scale factors, and the more I thought about this the better I liked it. For one, it creates a unifying principal between the disparate pieces, and it also makes it more immersive. If you are battling a small 4 ft. tall kobold, it should look like it's kind of unimpressive, but if you are battling a 45 ft tall frost giant, it should look like it's gargantuan. Also, having a unified scale factor for the figures and a separate scale factor for the terrain tiles, makes sense because it's pretty intuitive to switch between 2 scale factors, your avatar being slightly larger (or much larger) than the scale of the world, makes sense to me. I think that for the purposes of prototyping we should pick either 1/192 (1 inch = 16') or 1/144 (i inch = 12'). Both would work, but I would argue for the smaller figure scale factor (1/192), it makes it so more creatures/characters would fit on a single tile and it's pretty cool to have things minuature. A 6 foot tall knight would be 3/8" tall, pretty sweet. Here's a graphic that shows the different figurine scale factors: The tiles, from peak to peak are 1" wide, and distance from peg hole to peg hole is 1/8". I tried out 3 different terrain scale factors, 1/480 (1 inch = 40 feet, from peg to peg is 5 feet), 1/960 (1 inch = 80 feet, from peg to peg is 10 feet), and finally 1/1440 (1 inch = 120', from peg to peg is 15 feet). I also whipped up a quick little tavern model that I rendered in the same axonometric projection that I've been doing the other diagrams in, and you can see what they look like in the following graphic: The kind of cool thing about using a terrain scale of 1/1,440 and a figurine scale of 1/144 would be that the figures are proportional 10 times larger than the buildings/terrain. After looking at all of this I kind of think that I like 1/192 scale for the figurines and 1/1,440 for the terrain a small village could be a single terrain tile, and a large city could be designed that's a full 8x8 tiled board (and that would an area of 1,440 ft wide by 1080 tall). Here's a quick picture of the Tavern and 1/192 figurine, scaled up a bit: Let me know what you think!

I actually had an extra one out in the car, so I just ran out and got it. But if I didn't have a backup in the car, I think that's one case where everyone would agree it's best for public health to not mask up.

Oh the humanity! So I was eating at a restaurant and one of those real life catch 22's came up (spoilered below): Answer: You run, just run.

Proof: I actually have a picture of it, and I think Kal's got some issues...he keeps talking to the top little pebble, calling it Tien...But, you don't argue with a man with a sprenblade, right? When he's stirring the nightly stew with his sideburned Rock on his shoulder talking about airlsick lowlanders, you just smile and nod. Or when he's curled up in the fetal position talking to his "little brother", you just give him a hug. Theory: (RoW spoilers)

@Experience blender is awesome!! It's a super powerful 3D modeling application, and I think I can make some figurines with it! Here are some more refined sketches of the knight and ogre figurines. It would be stellar to have a fixed scale factor that we're using, we'd probably need two, one for the figurines and one for the terrain tiles and buildings. If we keep these two scale factors, all the pieces will feel like they are part of a unified set, and the sense that you are building an actual will be stronger. EDIT* Just some preliminary modeling, this isn't quite what I was going for but it'll get there (spoilered below). I think I am going to go even simpler because with the width of a hexagon tile from peak to peak being set at 1", a harmonious base figurine scale factor would be 1/192, so a 6' tall knight figurine would have a scaled height of 3/8' (or .375"). If the ogre was twice as tall as the human, 12' tall, it's figurine height would be 3/4" or .75". That's not a lot of room for detail, so I'm thinking low poly modeling for sure.

Sounds fun, I'm in, but only so I can try and use as many town names that are also food as possible.

How I see it working is that the terrain tiles would be printed with the pegs on the bottom, so they could be placed on the base level boards or stacked on terrain tiles. You could stack as many terrain tiles on top of each other as you want, and we could design some that have built in different heights on the same tile. Also could make some that have forests where there's only certain open pegs in the forest (movement modifiers, surprise attack modifiers, etc). This is totally just sn idea, do it how it makes the most sense to you and I definitely want to see what you come up with! Sweet, thanks for the info and hope the printing goes well!

Granted. You're encased in a 5 meter cube of lead. Ain't no crazy getting through that. Your bane is that your nose itches, you know, cuz it's filled with lead. I wish that I had a purple crayon that could alter both time and space.

Sheboygan

First off, have to say this is looking awesome! Nice work! I've given it some more thought, and mocked it up in in my vector draw program a bit more. Here's what I think would work the best, basically create a river that is wide enough to accommodate the figurine base for different peg holes. The dashed line is the size of the figurine base plus like a 64/th of inch of padding, and the river outline is drawn around the possible figurine placement positions. This would work like a charm. Also, I like your idea of bridges, here's a sample of a bridge that spans 3 peg holes along the vertical dimension of the hexagonal tile, and shows just the river outline on the tiles: Looks sick! I've got a little bit of file clean up to do on these, but I'll post an SVG file of the modified river tiles tomorrow and ping you when it's ready. I initially sketched the linkages that way too, but it just mechanically wouldn't work to connect them, you'd be trying to sync up tabs and slots that are joining at two disparate angles, doesn't work. Also, I think it would be best to have base boards that link with slots and tabs and the terrain tiles would just be placed and or stacked on the base boards using the pegs on the bottom of the terrain tiles. I did some more work on figuring out the base board tab and slot joints, here are some diagrams of how I envision it working the best. Orthographic plan views of the Flat Tab and Slots, and also peg depth and slot and tab placement. Here's an axonometric projection of the plan views, so you can get a better idea of what the tab and slots are doing: And finally, here's a top plan view of three 4x4 tile boards, with their tabs and slots and how they would joinj, with a bit of explanatory text as well. How I envision this working is that the base boards are the most commonly used boards, and quest cards would have you build up from the base boards with specialized terrain. As such, with the base boards, the areas where the hexagon tiles join could have more peg holes so that the peg hole grid is seamless, I'll post an SVG file of a 4x4 tile grid with the extra peg holes tomorrow too (and it will have an additional shape that could be boolean subtracted from the base shape to show the seams where the hexagon tiles meet, it would look super slick). Also, @Experience, what program are using to model the 3D printer files? I'm playing a lot of D&D these days, and it would be nice to make some custom models for my play group and for my kids too. This is seriously looking sweet, can't wait to see what you come up with!

I'm reading the Wheel of Time again (5th time that the wheel has turned for me) and I just noticed that the casting for Rand for the live action version was set when the Eye of the World first came out. The first US cover clearly shows that Rand needs to be played by (spoilered below):

Those look awesome! There should be a way to make the figurine bases fit in the river, I'll try and figure out a solution, and post some SVGs for you. I really like the start you got on these, they're looking great. Awesome, can't wait to see what you come up with!

Sounds great, can't wait to see what you come up with! The big circles are just markers for the preferred place to put pegs on the bottom of the the terrain tiles (small number of pegs but should make the join snug). But those are totally just suggested join peg spots, that's the beauty of prototyping, you get to figure out what works the best. I was thinking about how we could join the tile boards, and I think this would be a pretty slick way to do it, use tabs and slots. Here's a sketch of a 2x2 tile board: Here's a more diagramitic view of a 4x4 tile board. With the tabs and slots arranged like this it should be easy to expand the board with additional tile boards. The tabs basically have little hooks on their ends that would be the bits that secure the joined boards together. I went through a couple iterations of design sketches, and this was the best solution I came up with. I'm going to be camping this weekend, but if you need any orthographics with specific measurements for the pieces, let me know and I can probably get those yo you by midweek. Cheers and happy prototyping!

The 5 Scholars in their wild and crazy world hopping days somehow get stranded on the Underworld planet, and they have to help the mafia lift a car to get back to Nalthis. So a rat-faced mobster explains the job to them, and during the long winded exposition Arsteel snores loudly. The mobster turns to Shashara and says, "It would seem that your friend needs to be awakened, please do so, I'm not one to waste my breath." Then he says to them mugs, "I gotta make Shashara you understand the job, see. First Yesteel the car, and I don't want see a single Dent on it neither, you understand? Vasher that, you Clods bring it here to Arsteel factory and we melt it down. Kapiche."

@Orlion Blight, of course it's almost 9 minutes! That is a great song! When I was listening to it and saw the playtime I thought it was going to be like Pink Floyd's Echoes. Imagine my surprise when at the 3:21 it switched to a more rollicking and fun Syd Barrett Pink Floyd sound, and my further shock at the disjoint between the frolicking happy tune and the grizzly lyrics. I don't think it's better than St. James the bachelor, but it is my favorite song that uses the word "gorse". Edifying as always, and as these things generally go, your song has reminded me of another of my favorite songs of all time: *EDIT: So I've listened to Long Lankin 8 more times, and I have to correct my original assessment, it's totally in the same league as St. John the Gambler, and is the best song I've heard this year. Well played @Orlion Blight, well played.

@Experience here's the SVG file: GM_TerrainTiles_ForSVG_Prototype.svg Here's a JPG preview of what it looks like, it's just the top plan view of the terrain tile and peg holes, but I also included a 4x4 tile and an 8x8 tile of it. Have fun prototyping it and printing it out! Definitely post pictures here! Also, if you could post the 3d printable files too, that would be slick, I could test print them out at my buddy's place. The terrain tile is pretty basic, and I don't know what your setup is for generating 3D printable pieces, but if you want I could get some otrhographics (Front, Side, Top views) of the token style figurine too if that would help you print it.That way we could test out the pieces in the board. I have some ideas about how to create a pretty seamless interlocking mechanism for connecting multiple tiled boards, but I have some other stuff to do over the next couple of days, so I'll post some sketches sometime next week.

Sweet! I can post a link to an AI, DWG, or SVG file of a terrain tile. If any of those would be useful just let me know. Another thing that would be kind of cool would be to have some terrain tiles dip on some of the sides, so so could create bluffs, buttes, and other topographic features. If the description isn't clear (seems a bit mucked) I can post some sketches of what I'm talking about.

Ok, so I ended working on this a bit, this is a pretty compelling project. I designed the base layout of the expandable hexagonal game board in a vector draw program, figured out what size the base for the figurines should be (to allow multiple figurines on the same tile) and mocked up a couple simple terrain tiles. The cool thing about a hexagonal grid is that there are six possible rotations for each placeable terrain tile, making it easy to create more freeform forms using just a couple standard tiles. The Board Layout is spoilered below for size (it's vertically long). Each of the hexagonal tiles is 1 inch wide and about .8625 inches tall. Also, the standard base for the figurine peg is .25 inches in diameter, and the peg holes are .05 inches in diameter. I'm not as well versed in 3D printing to know if there would be any tolerance issues with those sizes, but I think it's a pretty decent size. I also was thinking more about the base game board, instead of having a custom base that pieces snap onto, it makes more sense to use the existing peg holes or the shape of the terrain pieces themselves. That way with the base gameboard, you essentially have a basic map already set up, and you are just adding on top of that. I think the peg style would be best, but I do worry about the little pegs snapping off in the peg holes. Here's an axonometric diagram of the two different styles of terrain tiles. The peg style ones would still probably be the way to go, because it would look more seamless, but having interlocking stackable tiles would be nigh unbreakable. Also, for prototyping, it would pretty easy to make token style figurines, where you have a standard base that can hold a bit of double side printed stiff paper. The fully sculpted figurines would definitely be cooler, but these are much easier to prototype.

As a teenage Christian Slater would say imitating a 45 year old Jack Nicholson, Greetings and Salutations. I was thinking about this some more, I could do some paper prototyping of the game board design and get the dimensions right before we figure our how to kick it out to a 3D printer. This is a pretty sweet idea, so I'll find the time sometime within the next week to do it, and will post some pics of the prototypes.

@Channelknight Fadran, @Knight of Iron and @Butt Ad Venture. The game doc is hilarious, and I think this is a really cool idea, here are some ideas about how you could make the gameboard. Have any if you ever seen the 3M bookshelf series game Feudal? You might have come across it in a thrift store, the game itself was kinda garbage, but the gameboard and the pieces were amazing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudal_(game) Basically it was a pegboard with terrain drawn on it, and the playing pieces were little sculpted figurines that had pegs on the bottom that fit into the holes on the board. It was pretty sweet, but I think you can take this basic idea and make it loads better. Using a modular hexagonal gameboard, you could have quests cards (with the world map, quest objectives, event types etc) attached to the back of the board, and have a base that custom terrain cells can snap into. This would be modular and could expand, and the quest map would show you how to setup the board. Here are some sample terrain building pieces. Each is a hexagonal cell or group of hexagonal cells that would snap onto the game board, and would have small peg holes, like the Feudal gameboard, that the figurines for player characters and monsters could be snapped into. And this is the part that would be really cool, the small but sculpted figurines could be scaled somewhat proportionally. Not to toot my own horn, but I am a very accomplished technical illustrator, if someone has access to a cad program I could design and create Adobe illustrator files for the orthographics for the base board, and a blank terrain piece with the peg holes that could be turned into 3D printable pieces. Also, I could design the standard base for the custom figures too. I would help with the concept art that some other talented sharder could turn into 3D figurine models to attach to the peg base. The thing that is pretty sick about this idea is that it's all modular and expandable. There could be a starter set that has a few quests and mostly base terrain pieces, and you could have expansions that have more custom terrain, buildings, etc. The floating island piece could have extended clear acrylic pegs so that it could actually look like it's floating over the gameboard. Something else that would be very cool, would be to make the base components available on thingverse so that players could create custom terrain, figurines, etc. Players could create and share custom figurines/terrain/campaign cards, I think this could be amazing. I've got regular work that I need to do, but I think this is a super cool idea and I would love to help out. I've got a buddy that has a 3D printer, so if we get a CAD person we could start prototyping.

Just finished this portrait of my buddy's lab, he's as big a fan of the beer Hamms as I am. Spoilered below is a vintage Hamms beer ad, their jingle is one of the best. @Knight of Iron, I have 2 more pet paintings for friends to do before I get to Coco, but I'll be painting her in about 3 days. If it takes more than one night to paint I'll post update pictures. Spoilered below is an earlier state of my buddy's painting.

Granted, the thing that you want is now positioned directly above you and everything else in our Galaxy. That highly coveted thing is 3000 light years above the earth, ~2000 light years above the spiral arm of the Milky way Galaxy, and approximately 500 light years above even a singular atom of matter and is a comfortable -459.67° F. Really hope that thing you wanted was just an iPhone or something. Your bane is that you now have 2 left hands, but strangely you're still right handed... I wish I had a form of portable personal transportation that allowed me to fly safely. Like maybe a working propeller hat, or a small quad copter skateboard, or jetpack shoes, you know, something like that.

It's bad form, I know, to double post, unless you are doing a great public service. This is, without equivocation, the best song ever made. You're welcome. I send this challenge out to the Shardesphere, prove me wrong and post a better song.