Interview on The Flying Goblin and other news

A few weeks ago, Terence Wood of The Flying Goblin, a YouTube channel focused on geek culture in South Africa, popped around and interviewed me about Papercraft Dungeon and Kev's Lounge.

The interview was quite long and he decided to break it up over a couple videos, the first of which is online now and you can watch it below!

 Terence's channel can be found here.  Have a look and subscribe if you enjoy it!

Been working hard on some new sets for the shop over the last month. I've added a couple new free alternative bases for our paper minis.
25mm Round - Meadow (based on my upcoming outdoor tiles set, find out more about it here)
50mm Round - Meadow
50mm Round - Dave Graffam's Gravel (based on Dave Graffam's Gravel texture, used on the ground of many of his sets)
50mm Round - Dave Graffam's Rough Ground (based on Dave Graffam's Rough Ground texture, used on the ground of many of his sets)
50mm Round - Dave Graffam's Mud (based on Dave Graffam's Mud texture, used on the ground of many of his sets)

I've also added a pre-release section on Papercraft Dungeon, where you can purchase Work-In-Progress products at a substantial discount.  Buying any preview product will give you early access to upcoming products, and will allow you to upgrade to the full version free of charge, so it saves you money too!

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Kev's Lounge Paper Minis: Terrors of the Rocklands

We've justed added a brand new set of paper miniatures over at Papercraft Dungeon. This set includes artwork for four different terrifying creatures for your adventuring parties to encounter while they trek through the wilderness! We have a Groundbreaker Wyrm, an Earth Elemental (or Garden Golem, if you prefer), a Crested Drake and a Deathbloom Worm.

Get your set of Kev's Lounge Paper Minis: Terrors of the Rocklands now! Only $1.99 until the end of July 2013!

The figures stand nearly 2" tall and are scaled to 28mm, so they will look good alongside most popular brands of miniatures and all manner of 28mm scaled scenery. Each model has a distinctive front and back, and both sides feature rich and gorgeous detail. The detail is boosted by the high resolution of the PDF, and the colours have good contrast to make them pop at a distance!

The models are designed with removable bases. This set includes a sets of interchangeable bases and more are available on this shop. Another bonus of this feature is that the flat components are really compact and very easy to store because they don't take up much room at all!

Cutfiles for this set are available here.

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Kev's Lounge Dungeon Furniture Pack out now!

In the spirit of smaller sets like the Gothic Coffins, this set has foregone the dungeon tiles that usually make an appearance in our packs and has instead focused on a few pages packed with useful props and items with a bargain low price! This set has a focus on the kinds of common furniture that you'd expect to find in any area that's lived in, and can take an otherwise plain collection of rooms and turn it into a functional lair with beds where the inhabitants sleep, fires for them to cook their food and tables for them to eat at. The particular mix of elements here and the hundreds of possible combinations are not only great for making an inhabited dungeon, but would be perfect for furnishing even a very large tavern!

Get yourself a copy of Kev's Lounge Dungeon Furniture Pack now! Only $1.99

This incredibly useful set includes 4 pages, each covering a particular type of furniture. The set has a lot of options for customisation thanks to multiple layers, and the customisation is incredibly easy because it's all controlled by clickable buttons built into the PDF itself! There are 7 different floor textures to choose from, and several of the furniture pieces have their own customisation options, like the blankets on the bed. All this customisation allows for literally hundreds of unique options for some of the pieces, so to make things a little easier those pieces can be randomly customised at the click of a button.

What you'll find in the set:

Beds and carpets. The dormitory page includes a pair of beds with many multiple layers for the blanket combinations. Hundreds of unique beds can be created!

 

Chests. That classic staple of the genre! The loot's gotta be stored somewhere.

 

Sleeping mats for those not fortunate enough to have access to a bed. These make it very easy to set up a camp site. The set also includes a brand new crate cluster in the style of those seen in the Ominous Storeroom set. These are not only attractive, but they make for great barricades and obstacles for marksmen to seek cover behind

A nice mix of fires, from a simple campfire, to a cauldron of stew. There's also a pair of braziers to provide light and to add to the eerie mood of the dungeon.

Yes, that's a whole pig roasting away on a spit over a fire pit! Don't be intimidated by the complexity of the build... The model has multiple difficulty levels, so if you're not an expert at building complicated papercraft models, there are simpler versions in the PDF.

Folks need a place to eat their roast pork and stew so we've included a table and shelf to store their crockery. The table can have up to 4 chairs in a variety of positions. The chairs have two different designs to choose from, and their are a few possibilities for the table top clutter.

To help you build all these wonderful models, we've included a detailed fully illustrated instruction manual optimised for screen view. Every step is clearly depicted so that even a beginner will have no trouble getting great looking models at the end!

Get yourself a copy of Kev's Lounge Dungeon Furniture Pack now! Only $1.99

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A Luxurious Lair: Council Chamber released!

This set contains brand new Kev's Lounge papercraft dungeon tiles, and markers, along with 3d papercraft furniture, and a pair of innovative spiral staircases to add a third dimension to your dungeon delves! With the various layer options this set will allow you to create hundreds of completely unique pieces that can be arranged in nearly infinite combinations. Perfect for table top wargames, skirmish games and RPGs.

Get your copy of A Luxurious Lair: Council Chamber now! Only $4.99

 
This wonderfully versatile set includes:
4 Brand new and highly customisable Kev's Lounge Dungeon Gigantic Round Rooms Tiles

These beautiful 6 x 6 inch papercraft dungeon tiles work seamlessly with all existing Kev's Lounge Dungeon tiles. They make use of the Kev's Lounge Starlinks System to keep them together, allowing you to create some enormous rooms for your most epic battles. The tiles are perfect for representing the various floors of a large tower, and can combine with the tiles in other sets to create large rooms with rounded corners.

Layered PDF gives the following awesome features:

• 7 Different Interior floor textures and 11 exterior floor textures which can also be left out entirely if you choose.
• Multiple grid options, including gridless, 1 inch and 1.5 inch, with a variety of choices for the style of the grid lines
• Additional optional details, like dirt and splatters that can be turned on and off giving you a huge range of control over the look of your tiles

Several 2.5D Hazard and Obstacle Markers


As with every other Kev's Lounge Dungeon Tile set, you will find a great variety of hazard markers, also taking advantage of the layered PDF system to give you control of the floor background, and to add and adjust details to your liking.

Innovative 3d Spiral Staircases


These papercraft staircases are designed to look good on the table, and allow miniatures to stand on the steps. Each staircase allows a simple build, or a challenging one, to suit your tastes and level of skill.
Layered PDF gives the following awesome features:

• 7 Floor textures:  Damaged Flagstone, Herringbone Paving, Horizontal and Vertical Wooden Floors, Flagstone, Stonework Floor and Sandstone Slabs.
• Multiple grid options, including gridless, 1 inch and 1.5 inch, with a variety of choices for the style of the grid lines
• Additional optional details, like dirt and splatters that can be turned on and off giving you a huge range of control over the look of your tiles

Highly customisable furniture pieces.

Chairs, shelves and a big ol' table. You have a lot of control over what's on the shelves where you can choose between neatly stacked books, or untidy piles of them, or alchemy themed clutter, or weapon/trophy displays. You could even come up with your own unique combination! The table can be bare, or covered with your choice of clutter.
Layered PDF gives the following awesome features:

• 7 Floor textures:  Damaged Flagstone, Herringbone Paving, Horizontal and Vertical Wooden Floors, Flagstone, Stonework Floor and Sandstone Slabs.
• 3 Wood Textures
• Hundreds of combinations for the shelf, thousands for the table!

Easy customisation

A new feature for Kev's Lounge Sets, this one has control panels built right into the PDF page. Simply click the buttons til you find something you like and send it to the printer!

Fully illustrated, easy to follow instructions
36 page instruction manual, in PDF format, optimised for screen view to save you ink. Details every step of the process with clear, full colour illustrations.
Miniatures used in pictures are strictly for illustration purposes and are not included in the purchase. Photography by Photos by Mick.

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Kev's Lounge Paper Miniatures: Blazin' Bones out now!

A brand new set of Kev's Lounge Paper Miniatures. This set of 20 exquisitely detailed flaming skeletons will look great on any gaming table.

Get your set of Blazin' Bones Paper Miniatures now! Only $1.99

The figures are scaled to 28mm, and will look good alongside most popular brands of miniatures and all manner of 28mm scaled scenery. Each model has a distinctive front and back, and both sides feature rich and gorgeous detail. The detail is boosted by the high resolution of the PDF, and the colours have good contrast to make them pop at a distance!

The models are designed with removable bases. This set includes 2 sets of interchangeable bases and more are available on this shop. Another bonus of this feature is that the flat components are really compact and very easy to store because they don't take up much room at all!

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Character Portrait: The Flirtatious Barmaid

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A bit of background on this drawing:

This young lady is a minor character in the first chapter of Live By The Sword, our newly started comic.She's already made a background appearance in the first panel of the first page. This particular drawing of her is a cleaned up version of her character concept sketch that I'll be using in an upcoming set of paper miniatures.

About the character:

Cassandra is one of the more popular young barmaids at the Green Dragon, a small tavern near the docks. Her friendly demeanour and innocently pretty face get her a lot of attention and affection, and are certainly among the chief reasons that the Green Dragon is never short on customers.  She's not just a pretty face though, and she's not nearly as angelic as her virtuous smile suggests. She's cunning, educated and smart; and indeed, when she first realised that the boys found her attractive while growing up she thought to herself "I can use this to my advantage!" and she's never failed to do just that. Apart from all the coin she's garnered from overly-generous young sailors eager to please her, working at a dockside tavern puts her in a good position to gather a wealth of information, with so many travellers from so many lands passing through its doors. She realised early on that that kind of knowledge was very valuable to certain interested parties, and makes a very tidy profit on the side by selling it.

Kev's Lounge Friday Character Portraits is a weekly feature on this blog where I take a bit of art that I've created somewhere along the line for some or other purpose and present it along with a little bit of back story for you to use as in role playing games as hand-outs, or as inspiration for characters or NPCs.  Here are some more in the series:
1. Town's Guard Captain
2. Female Rogue
3. Arch-Wizard
4. Pit Fighter 
5. Skeleton Pirate 
6. Serpent Cult Assassin
7. The Gambler 
8. Flaming Skeleton

No character portrait next friday... Instead you get the second page of Live By The Sword, there will be another the week after however.

Before you go, have a look at some of the paper minis we've already released!

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A Mini-Game of Chance: Quick gambling rules for RPGs (part 1)

If you're playing a low-fantasy, western or grungy modern role-playing game, gambling is likely to turn up at some point. It might even be a  regular occurence in some campaigns. Occasionally you might find it worthwhile to play out the games with actual cards, but if you really wanted to sit down for a round of poker every other week, you'd just have poker night instead!

This mini-game is one way of simulating a round of gambling, or even an entire evening's worth, in a short space of time, with reasonably meaningful results. It determines the outcomes based on the characters' abilities and gambling skills, rather than that of the players, and with the advanced rules in part 2 (coming next week,) it allows for cheating and bluffing with mechanics. One last benefit of this version is that it allows for virtual characters to participate without the GM having to attempt to play multiple hands of cards simultaneously while attempting to be fair.

Note on mechanics: The basic version of the mini-game presented in this article is completely system agnostic, but the advanced rules for cheating and bluffing in next week's article will use example mechanics specific to d20 games, specifically Pathfinder and Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition. They are fairly intuitive, and should translate quite easily to whichever system you are using though.

You'll Need:

A set of Poker Dice:

These are standard d6s but with special faces representing card values instead of pips. The faces are 9, 10, J, Q, K and A. They come in sets of 5, and you'll need all 5 for this mini-game. If you don't happen to have a set, you can simply use 5 standard 6-sided dice, in which case, treat 1 as a 9, 2 as a 10 and so on, with 6 representing the ace.

Basic Mechanics:

Ante

Gambling is all about risking something to gain something bigger. To keep things simple, a single round of gambling with this mini-game requires each participant to pay an upfront fee to play. In poker, this initial forced bet is called "Ante" and even though this game doesn't necessarily represent poker, we're co-opting that word. They'd deduct this from their cash count on their character sheets before the game starts and it's considered spent. The prize is made up of the sum of all the Antes, and winner takes all.

The prize does not always have to be coin however. It could also be a magical treasure that's just been discovered, or it could be some privelege, like claim to the only decent bed in a dodgy tavern. In this event, skip the ante and just get down to business.

Turn Order

It's best practice to establish turn order before starting. It doesn't matter much in the basic version presented here, but with the advanced rules for cheating and bluffing in part 2, it can be slightly advantageous to go later than the other players. Turn order is simply initiative order, but in reverse, so the "slowest" player rolls first, and the "fastest" rolls last.

The Basic Game
Each player, in turn order, gets to roll the 5 poker dice once. Whatever they get is considered to be their Hand and they are stuck with it (Part 2's Advanced Mechanics do allow some modification). They should make a note of what their Hand is and pass the dice on. NPCs get rolled by the game master when their turn comes up in the order.

Once everyone's rolled, compare their Hands to this chart to determine who wins. If there's a tie, then the player with the highest card in his hand wins. If there's still a tie, then tied players should roll a single die each to break it.

Next tuesday we'll bring you Part 2 where we will go over the rules for cheating and bluffing and luck, and the following week,  Part 3 detailing the rules for gambling houses and handling a night's worth of gambling.

The illustrations in this article come from our comic: Live by the Sword.
All Artwork and Characters appearing in this article © 2013 Kevin Richard John Berry

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Character Portrait: Flaming Skeleton

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A bit of background on this drawing:

This artwork  was originally created specifically for a paper miniature included as a free bonus in our d12 calendars.

About the character:

Flaming skeletons have long been a staple of fantasy... The most obvious example rides a motor cycle with flaming wheels, but this guy's not related to him at all, I swear it!
Recently I had a lengthy chat with one of my friends about the phenomenon, and how it's a particularly odd sort of idea. I figure they came about because they're terrifying, both as symbols of death and as walking examples of a terrible way to die, but perhaps the main appeal from a gaming perspective is that they're actually pretty dangerous in comparison to their wimpier unignited counterparts. We also had a chat about how this would even be possible... Bones don't seem particularly combustible. He decided (and lamented) that we'd just have to settle for "a wizard did it." Personally, making a burning skeleton seems pretty easy to me, it just takes some bones, some kerosene and a flair for the dramatic. Making that guy walk around on his own... now that's the tricky part!

Kev's Lounge Friday Character Portraits is a weekly feature on this blog where I take a bit of art that I've created somewhere along the line for some or other purpose and present it along with a little bit of back story for you to use as in role playing games as hand-outs, or as inspiration for characters or NPCs.  Here are some more in the series: 
1. Town's Guard Captain
2. Female Rogue
3. Arch-Wizard
4. Pit Fighter 
5. Skeleton Pirate 
6. Serpent Cult Assassin
7. The Gambler  
9. The Flirtatious Barmaid 

There will be another character portrait up next friday!

As I mentioned before, this guy was designed as a paper miniature. That miniature's available completely free as part of our D12 Desk Calendar set, available for free download here. He's nice and easy to build and will look great on your gaming table. Go get yourself a copy and throw this guy up against your party in your next game!

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Free d12 Desk Calendar, includes some bonuses!

Update:
There's a new version of this calendar for 2014!

Who doesn't want a gigantic d12? It's the biggest damage die you get in most games, so why not make it the biggest die in your collection?

This downloadable papercraft kit allows you to make a d12 that's about 10cm or 4 inches in diameter. It doubles as a 2013 desk calendar, so it's got an excuse to sit on your office desk in case you ever need to work out how much damage your barbarian's great axe would deal in the middle of a week day afternoon!

The d12 comes in 6 different colour styles, so you can choose the one that suits you best!

This free set, which I mostly made just for fun, also includes some cool bonuses:
• A really nifty paper mini: This one's a Flaming Skeleton armed with a deadly pair of fiery swords
• 3 Power Circle markers for use with Kev's Lounge Dungeon Tiles, with all the floor textures available in our various sets.

Get it from Papercraft Dungeon now! It's completely free!

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Comic! Live By The Sword: Chapter 1, Page 1

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As promised, the first page of Live By The Sword. I won't go into too much detail about my plans for the story just yet, though I did give a little more information on Joe, our main character for this chaper, last week.

Regrettably, I'm going to be a little slow with adding new pages at first, as I do have quite a few other commitments at the moment. Page 2 will be up in 3 weeks time, on the Friday, 25th of January, with more character portraits and other regular Kev's Lounge stuff  in the interrim I do plan to shorten the release gap down to two weeks, and then down to one, in the future. I also plan to set up a better home for the comic once I have a few pages done with better navigation and a nicer user experience than blogger can offer.

Artwork and Characters © 2013 Kevin Richard John Berry

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