Monster Stock Art & Stand-Ins (PDF of Minis) Now Available

Stock Art of 4 Elementals

Stock Art of 4 Elementals

If you have a need for a PDF of 250 different minis (with great art) spanning nearly 150 different fantasy creatures or if you’re a publisher looking for collections of great color stock art, please do check out the details below.

But first a bit of background:  We’ve caught up on sending out the Monster Stock Art & Stand-Ins digital rewards (PDFs & stock art files) for every Kickstarter backer (thanks backers!) who replied to the survey as of a few hours ago.  We’ll continue to check for people who finish the survey later.  We’re working to fulfill the Kickstarter orders for physical laminated cardstock minis and should have them ready by the end of the month.

Getting the digital products out to our Kickstarter backers who have completed the survey allows us to offer them to the general public.  So far we’ve released the following through RPGNow:

We’ll add more packages of stock art monsters over the next few weeks.

May 14, 2012 ·  · No Comments
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Cityographer: A Random City Generator & Mapping Tool Kickstarter Begins

We’ve been planning our next Kickstarter project over the past couple of weeks, and now we can announce it!

Here’s the description from the Kickstarter page:

Random city generator and editor for role-playing games of multiple genres & systems. Runs on Windows, Mac OSX and Linux.

More than just map software!

Do your players ever take a game session in a different direction and you need a quick city or village?  Or maybe you want to cut down on your game’s prep time by getting some help creating some of the cities or villages in your game’s setting?

Cityographer is the perfect solution for these situations!  You set some preferences for the city you want (technology level, population size, whether the city has a river, if it is on the coast, etc.) on a setup screen and it will randomly generate an entire village or city for you.  (You can also start with a blank map/city.)

Not only will the program generate the city’s map, but it will generate simple floorplans of the buildings, and each building’s residents and any important belongings.  If the building is a business you’ll also get a list of the staff and a menu or price list of products available.

Further, everything and anything can be fully or individually re-generated or hand edited!  So if you don’t like the whole city, just start over.  But if you simply don’t like the placement of a few buildings, move them or delete them and add new ones.  If you don’t like a particular building just regenerate it or an aspect of it.  For example if the building is an inn, regenerate it or regenerate just the staff or just the price list or hand edit any particular item!

Note: Although the backer rewards list a delivery timeframe of October, we hope to have a beta available in September and perhaps earlier.

Take the city with you

Like sister-products Hexographer and Dungeonographer, Cityographer will be written in Java and can easily be run from a laptop running Windows, Mac OSX or Linux.  But Cityographer will also let you export your city/village to a set of webpages which you can ZIP and transfer to another computer or post to a website to view via a hand-held device.  An RTF export will also be available.  There will likely also be a PDF export which will make your city into a PDF document for viewing on anything with a PDF viewer.  Maybe an MS Word export too.

More details and screenshots from the prototype are on the project’s Kickstarter page.

(BTW, if you have an idea for a cool high-level backer reward, please let me know.  I’d love to entertain ideas.)

May 1, 2012 ·  · No Comments
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Q&A with the “Senior Folks at Paizo” on Reddit

In case you’re not a regular on Reddit: Erik Mona (Publisher), James Jacobs (Creative Director), F. Wesley Schneider (Managing Editor) & James L. Sutter (Fiction Editor and Developer) have done a lengthy “As Us Anything” (sort of a crowdsourced Q&A) on Reddit.

Some highlights:

  • They point out a couple of 4E features they don’t like, but say they are so busy with Pathfinder that they don’t have a lot of experience with 4E.
  • State that the 2013 Adventure Paths will be announced at PaizoCon and GenCon, but you might be able to read between the lines in their other answers.
  • To break into the industry: “Just do it: go to the Pathfinder Society web page and try to write a scenario, compete in RPG superstar, go to Kobold Quarterly or another third-party publisher you respect and try to talk your way into an assignment, write for fan publications like Wayfinder… Once you’ve built up some credits, you’ll be much more marketable. It’s a snowball effect, but you’ve gotta get it rolling.
  • Say they don’t have plans for other settings.  They try to make Golorian as diverse as possible for different sub-genres of fantasy.  Where that’s impossible (maybe Steampunk) it seems they might make a mini-setting as part of a sourcebook.

April 19, 2012 ·  · No Comments
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City Building Icons Added to Hexographer (Great for City Management Subgames)

Several new building Icons in use.

Several new building Icons in use.

In the past few weeks, we’ve added a total of nearly 50 new building icons (by artist Keith Curtis), including well over half of those in the past few days. You can see several in use to the right.  They are all done as at least 300×300 pixel images, so they should scale well including for printing.

And they are all in the Free and Pro versions of Hexographer.

We used the Pathfinder Kingmaker city building list as a basis for what to create, and we’ve added a few others.  Here’s the full list:

  1. Academy
  2. Alchemist
  3. Arena
  4. Barber
  5. Barn
  6. Barracks
  7. Black Market
  8. Brewery
  9. Brothel
  10. Caster’s Tower
  11. Castle
  12. Cathedral
  13. Dump
  14. Exotic Craftsman
  15. Garrison
  16. Granary
  17. Guildhouse
  18. Herbalist
  19. Inn
  20. Jail
  21. Library
  22. Lumber Yard
  23. Luxury Store
  24. Magic Shop
  25. Mansion
  26. Market
  27. Mine
  28. Mill
  29. Monument
  30. Noble Villa
  31. Park
  32. Pier
  33. Shop
  34. Shrine
  35. Smith
  36. Storehouse
  37. Tannery
  38. Tavern
  39. Temple
  40. Tenement
  41. Theatre
  42. Town Hall
  43. Tradesman
  44. Watchtower
  45. Waterfront.

In addition to those we have several bridges, farm fields, wall segments and wall towers.

These are all included in the free and pro versions, as of version 1.71.5.  (Although any version that is 1.71 will have some of them.)

April 16, 2012 ·  · No Comments
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Recent Hexographer & Dungeonographer Reviews

Sometimes you just need to feel loved. :)   Or at least know that you’re making a product people like and find useful.

Old Guy Gaming has a review of Hexographer which includes this quote, “After looking at Hexographer, I heartily recommend it for those looking for an easy to use, yet powerful mapping package.” Mike (the reviewer) has some issues with the Mystara/Gazetteer style icons but those concerns seem to not be Hexographer specific.  He gave Hexographer another look after seeing Joe Bloch’s Darlene/World of Greyhawk style maps.

Troll in the Corner also has a Hexographer review.  Here’s one section:  More recently I sat down and created a list of what I need of a map making program. It needs to:

  • Work on Mac OS X (whatever incarnation I’m on at the time, Lion currently)
  • Be intuitive and easy to use for a n00b like myself
  • Create square or hex maps with user chosen terrain types and features such as roads, hills, cities, towns, rivers, etc.
  • Export the maps into a common image format (for inserting into the blog, printing out, etc).
  • Be affordable

Finally, I’ve found a program that fits each of those requirements. Hexographer.

Chaotic/GM reviewed both Hexographer and Dungeonographer.  In the Dungeonographer review, he points out, “Another very neat feature are the two different display types. You can select a Lineart/Classic or Battlmap/Semirealisitc look for your map and switch between the two with a simple click… A lot of great new features including random room descriptions and an upload functionality to help in online play have been added in the latest update.”

Hexographer: http://www.hexographer.com

Dungeonographer: http://www.dungeonographer.com

 

April 10, 2012 ·  · 2 Comments
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What Building Map Icons Would You Like?

Sample full-size building (a general shop.)

Sample full-size building (A general shop.)

For the past few weeks I’ve been working with artist Keith Curtis (who does a lot of the art for Hexographer & Dungeonographer) on a bunch of new building icons.  Many will be included in Hexographer to improve its city mapping functionality.  For a long time Hexographer has had simple buildings of different shapes and roof textures built-in.  A couple of weeks ago, I added the first batch (18) of new building icons.

The goal is to have built-into Hexographer icons that match (in theme/purpose and general shape) most of the Pathfinder Kingmaker building icons used for city/domain management.  Here is their list of the larger buildings/areas: Arena, Castle, Cathedral, Waterfront, Academy, Garrison, Guildhall, Market, Noble Villa, Temple, Theater & Town hall.  And here is the list of regular buildings/areas: Alchemist, Barracks, Black Market, Brewery, Brothel, Caster’s Tower, Dump, Exotic Craftsman, Granary, Graveyard, Herbalist, House, Inn, Jail, Library, Luxury Store, Magic Shop, Mansion, Mill, Monument, Park, Pier, Shop, Shrine, Smith, Stable, Tannery, Tavern, Tradesman, Tenement & Watchtower.

Pictured here is a sample of one of the images.  The regular sized buildings will be 300×300 pixel PNG images so even if you use them in a printed map each building can be 1″ in size without losing detail by enlarging it beyond the original size.  Larger buildings will be 600×600 pixels.  The plan is to also offer them for a small fee along with many variations of each as a separate download.  The variants would give you many more options if you’re using Hexographer.  But in case you prefer a more general image editing program or other map editing software you’ll have the images built-into Hexographer and all the variations.

So what building types are missing?  I don’t think we’re going for a level of detail of showing a general store vs. a clothing only store.  I do already plan to include some icons that are just walls and pieces of the castle or towers so you can make a keep/castle in/near your town more unique.  These could also be used to make town walls.  But I definitely want to know if we’re overlooking something.

April 6, 2012 ·  · 6 Comments
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Coat of Arms Design Studio Updated

The Coat of Arms Design Studio was recently updated with two new major Pro version features. If you’re not familiar with the program, it is another tool from Inkwell Ideas that allows you to create a coat of arms in an easy, visual process.  It has hundreds of built-in graphics for creatures, symbols and ordinaries.  Of course it also has divisions and other objects can be children of particular divisions which allows for different ways of marshaling (joining two parents’ designs into a new design) the shield. Like Hexographer and Dungeonographer, it has a free version which is the same code but holds back a few features.

Here is a summary of the new features:

  • Several new shield shapes were added.  (The free version lets you choose between a traditional shield, a lozenge and a plain rectangle.)
  • SVG images may now be imported.  Like other images which may be imported in the pro version, they may be re-sized and re-positioned.  However, the imported SVG images may also be re-colored using the software’s color selectors just like other graphics that are built into the software.

More details about the changes.

 

April 5, 2012 ·  · No Comments
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Greyhawk Grognard’s Darlene-style Maps

Cropped and downsized copy of one of the Greyhawk Grognard maps.

Cropped and downsized copy of one of the Greyhawk Grognard maps.

I just wanted to call your attention to the great work Joe Bloch of Greyhawk Grognard has been doing in his “Mapping Beyond the Flaneass” series.  The series is his attempt to create  Darlene-style maps (like those in the 1985-ish World of Greyhawk boxed set) for the rest of the Greyhawk world.  These are areas not on the World of Greyhawk maps which were mapped or described in other products in the years since that boxed set was released.

And of course, he’s doing it using Hexographer. :) (Free version available that lets you do everything you see here; Pro version has power-user features.)

Here are direct links to the Greyhawk Grognard map posts to date:

You can read more about the techniques to make maps in this style in this Inkwell Ideas post.  (Although I’ll have to ask Joe Block for updates/further insights into the process.)

Furthermore Joe Block also has a Kickstarter going for his “Adventures Dark & Deep” project.  In short, it is his attempt to re-envision D&D 2nd edition, or more accurately maybe 1.5 as if Gary Gygax stayed in control of the project.  It uses Gary’s comments in Dragon, his later games and other notes as its sources.

March 30, 2012 ·  · No Comments
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Hexographer Updated: New Building Icons & Map Key Wizard Overhaul

A few of the new buildings in Hexographer.

A few of the new buildings in Hexographer.

Hexographer 1.71 was just released.  It includes a few new features as well as some changes behind the scenes that make it a bit easier to maintain.  Below is a quick summary:

  • The Map Key can now be saved! (Finally.)  Note: The map key wizard is a pro-only feature.  Go to the “Tools” menu and “Configure Map Key” to start it.  Then click the “Update Available Entries” (top left) to have the window auto-populate a map key based on the terrain, features, symbols, and lines in use.  Edit those as desired.  (That works roughly as before with a few changes/improvements.)  Now this information is saved and can be revised when the map is re-loaded.
  • We’ve added 19 new buildings to Hexographer’s map items.  These are for any city map, but they are particularly useful for a city management style/aspect to a game. This concept has become popular with some recent adventure paths. We’ll be adding several more and we’ll likely have a much larger collection available as an expansion pack.  The icons currently included may be revised slightly going forward. (A roof texture might get cleaned up a bit, etc.)
  • You can now place the hex grid over everything (instead of over just the terrain).  Go to the “Configure Lines/Text” tab and look at the options at the top and then click “Apply” on the bottom before going back to your map.

March 19, 2012 ·  · One Comment
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Hex-Crawl Tips & Contest Update

The Welsh Piper just posted a very well-timed article with advice for creating hex crawl encounters.  I think it is well-timed because last week we kicked off a hex crawl location “contest.”

I put contest in quotes because all you have to do is send in eight 80-200 word locations.  The prize is a get a free license to Hexographer Pro (or any other Inkwell Ideas product such as Dungeonographer, the Coat of Arms Design Studio or a set of DungeonMorph Dice or Cards.)  So far 6 of the 12 prizes have been claimed.  The contest runs until we receive 12 submissions or March 31, 2012.  Details are on the linked contest page.

Here are a few example from the submissions-to-date:

[Mountains] Battle Glacier – Charles Reynolds

Some time, long ago, a large battle was fought during a snow storm. It snowed so violently, the soldiers were encased in ice. Bodies of the warriors can be seen through the face of the glacier, many still locked in combat. Sometimes it calves and a quick scavenger can pick up ancient weapons and armor from the base if they are willing to brave further ice falls. Most of it is heavily damaged from the crushing pressures of the glacial ice but, sometimes, a piece of real value is found.

[Grassland] Hive of the Ant People – Elmer Tucker

A large sinkhole, some three hundred feet in diameter cleaves out of the surrounding grasslands sharply. It seems that the earth surrounding the edge of the pit has been packed into a dangerously rough looking ramp. The sinkhole descends several hundred feet, and a wilderness-themed character will easily be able to tell that any tracks in the area are reminiscent of giant ants. However, the ants here are more akin to centaurs, but walk upon six legs, with a pair of arms above. This sinkhole has recently opened up, exposing their underground realm, and they are alerted by the pheromones of any intruders very quickly

[Grassland] The Skeletons’ Tavern – Jan Pralle

A large house sits next to a small stream. A demolished bridge leads over the stream next to it. The house itself is in a state of progressing decay. The roof has caved in, the windows are all broken and the shutters dangle on their hinges and squeak faintly with the wind. The place seems nice as a shelter for the night. It was a tavern once, as the large common room with its long bar state. Every single chair is still occupied; occupied by a skeleton. Even behind the counter the skeleton of a once sturdy man leans at the cupboards still full of dusty tankards. Some skeletons have been torn half of their seat, probably by wild animals. None of them still have a bit of flesh on their bones. In the back of the house you find several storage rooms, all full of rotten foodstuff. The kitchen is the same, but also with a skeleton of what must have been a stumpy women. The guest rooms in the upper level are all empty, except for furnishings. The tavern seems to have all the equipment it needs, but there is nothing of worth to be found, not even a purse of one of the guests or the earnings of the innkeeper.

[Jungle or Forest] The Face of Fate – Bob Morris

The characters find a limestone cliff covered in vines. A stern face with an ornate headdress is carved into the face of the cliff. The mouth of the face is opened wide enough that a character could easily slip a hand inside. The half-rotten remains of fruit, native totems, and other offerings can be seen inside the mouth. If the characters look straight into the mouth, they will also see a glint of light reflected from something inside. Characters reaching into the mouth have an equal chance of finding a small totem made of gold and gems (10-20 gp value), a large uncut gem (50-200 gp value uncut, 500-1000 gp cut and polished), an aggressive venomous snake, or 1-3 giant centipedes.

[Forest] Crow’s Cage – Gregory MacKenzie

Crows call, and scatter as you approach. An iron crows cage swings from the strong limb of an oak. The ground under the oak is littered with bone and scraps of cloth. The crows continue to circle overhead above the tree canopy, calling noisily, for they soon expect a meal. The only time anyone ever comes here is to imprison someone. The crows soon settle in nearby trees to watch. The cage is locked with a padlock, its bottom is covered with a pelt. The pelt conceals bent bars which some enterprising escapee has pulled apart. There is just enough room for a medium unfortunate to wriggle through.

[Marsh/Swamp] Eldil’s Folly – Erin Smale

A crumbling windmill, its blades tattered and rotting, lists in the swamp. This is all that remains of Eldil the Cunning’s final investment – an attempt to undermine the local lord’s monopoly by milling flour out of swamp reeds and honeydew. Eldil’s fate is unknown, though it’s suspected that he went into hiding after tricking a trio of knights into funding a ziggurat scheme. There is nothing of value in the mill, though it can provide a night of dry shelter free of wandering monsters.

My thanks to everyone who has participated!

 

March 15, 2012 ·  · No Comments
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