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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