Sean Does Games

  A Creative Retrospective A very many years ago, I was hyper focused on fiction writing. I wrote a lot of short stories and shopped them around. A few were published, which was always exciting. Life came along, though, and I had to focus my time on other efforts. If you've read about  my life as a gamer , you know that it was only a couple of years ago that I got back into role-playing games. (If you've braved my Off the Dice interview on Time2Tabletop , you know even more about me.) Lately, I've been thinking it's time to get back into writing as well. To that end, I recently did a little ego-surfing to see if I could track down my older works. I was pleased to see Bewildering Stories , a site that had shown me a lot of love and encouragement back in the day, is still alive and publishing. My bio for that site is still active. It lists all my short stories published there. Other markets that published my work no longer exist, such as  Planet Magazine (an online mag...

Making Trees As I’ve mentioned many times before on this blog, I use Heroscape map tiles for my Dungeons and Dragons   homebrew campaign, Skyfell . A  large number of locales in Skyfell are in dense jungles and forests. While the Heroscape trees are great, I simply don't have enough of them to really drive home the flavor of many of those settings. Unfortunately, the original Heroscape terrain is now pretty pricey on eBay. So I decided to pull up my big-gnome pants and set into a little bit of do-it-yourself crafting. After a some looking around, I found  trounistro's   30-palm-tree set for a pretty good deal. This set includes a variety of types and sizes. They are also plastic, which appealed to me because I didn't want to fuss too much about storage and handling. The only drawback was that while each tree had posts to anchor it into either a base or a diorama, the set came with no bases. I didn't want to damage any of my Heroscape tiles either. So, I kne...

Making Tiles A vast majority of my RPG map bits and miniatures are hold overs from my Heroscape obsession from a few years ago. The hex tiles have enabled some fairly epic maps.   While I love the miniatures, their bases are a bit larger than the standard RPG miniature base. Top: Heroscape Figures Bottom: Bases from WizKids Miniatures This is a non-issue for exterior terrain builds because the Heroscape hex tiles are properly scaled for the larger bases. It’s problematic for interior terrain builds though because the standard 1-inch squares for your typical table map are just too small.  Heroscape Hex Tile Compared with Standard RPG Map Grid I got around this a few years ago by making my own square map tiles properly sized to the Heroscape hex tiles. They work great not only for Dungeons and Dragons tabletop terrains but also for the Heroscape game itself. This makes it easy to use both in a single map without much fuss.   ...