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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Humble Hovel on special until December 25th!

 The Humble Hovel is a useful, customisable, and beautiful scenery piece perfect for use in role-playing games and tabletop wargames that use 28-30mm miniatures.

Get this set before December 25th, 2012 and save $2 on the regular price!

Buy The Humble Hovel at Papercraft Dungeon now!

With a removable roof, and walls, you can easily access the interior in the middle of a game. The design gives you a sturdy, attractive model that will certainly see a fair bit of use on your table!

This set is customisable to a great degree, allowing you to adjust it to suit your gaming needs, skill level and personal taste. With a variety of options for the outside grounds, inside floors, walls, doors, windows and rooves, there are literally hundreds of possible combinations.  Using just this one set, you could make an entire village of Humble Hovels, with no two of them being exactly alike!

 

One of the real attractions of the Humble Hovel is the awesome, intricate 3D details we've added. They add a ton of visual interest and realism for those out there who are up for the challenge! We've made the 3d details optional though, so those who don't want to fuss around with lots and lots of pieces, or just want to build the model quickly, can opt to turn it off and build a simpler version.

  

 Of course, the Humble Hovel is not just a pretty little cardboard house... it's there to be used while playing games! We've taken that into account in the design. For the games that use it, we've included an optional 1-Inch grid on the floor, which comes in two styles. The design of the piece makes it very sturdy and tough, despite the materials used to construct it, so it can handle a lot of the perils of being a piece of scenery! As mentioned before, the roof and walls are removable, to provide you easy access to the interior, should the action head indoors!

Buy The Humble Hovel at Papercraft Dungeon now!

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Just a quick update!

It's been a fairly hectic couple of months since my last update here, and I thought I should just say something to let everyone know what's been going on. Most of my attention has been on ironing out some huge kinks in my commercial art business and that's been swallowing up pretty much every spare second of my time. I've recently gotten back into the swing of things, and have gotten down to wrapping up some of the many Kev's Lounge sets that have been sitting in limbo.

First up, I've got this new set: Hero's Hall that is just packed with awesome stuff! Update: It's out now!.

Regulars here will be asking "what happened to the Luxurious Lair set you spoke about last time?". Simple answer is that that is still coming, but I'm not entirely happy with some of the pieces and I want to give it another look before putting it out there. Hero's Hall was mostly ready to go, so I decided to release it first. The Luxurious Lair will finally make an appearance at some time around the end of November, and will be followed soon after by some of the other interesting ideas I've been working on forever that are almost ready to see the light of day.

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First preview of the Luxurious Lair set: Tower Dungeon Tiles

A while back, in this post, I mentioned that there was a new premium dungeon set coming up. That set, The Luxurious Lair, is slowly nearing completion and I can show you a little of what we have in store for you now.



This set could stand as a home base for the heroes, or as the headquarters of the villainous mastermind they're hunting down. It contains a bunch of 3d papercraft furniture and scenery pieces to represent the various areas you'd expect to find in a pseudo-medieval HQ, which we've narrowed down to The Kitchen/Eating Area, Sleeping Quarters and The War Room/Study, along with a brand new set of dungeon tiles which can be used to represent a multi-level tower to house it all in.

Right now, we're busy going through the various bits and pieces and improving the overall quality of the items we plan to include and adding some new ones as we go. We plan to release this set before the end of June, and will be updating you with various new shots as we complete the pieces for each section, but for today we're going to show you a little preview of the Luxurious Lair's awesome Tower themed Dungeon Tiles 

Like those of its predecessor, The Ominous Storeroom, The Luxurious Lair's dungeon tiles come in a layered PDF which gives you a variety of floor textures to choose from. There are quite a few different layers in this one, and the result is that there are literally hundreds of possible combinations. As you can see, we've also included the options of a 1-inch grid and a 1.5-inch grid for those who use them. The set will be completely compatible with all existing Kev's Lounge Dungeon Tile sets, and will work especially well with The Ominous Storeroom. It also includes the Rocklands texture as an option for the outdoor ground, so it's compatible with those sets too.

As you'd expect from a set of Kev's Lounge Dungeon Tiles, there are some brand new 2D markers, which can be customised to match the floor of your dungeons. These are in addition to the 3D furniture pieces in the set. This being the Luxurious Lair, the markers are exquisitely detailed and add a touch of opulence to the scene with things like a bearskin rug, a huge persian carpet and a moderately sized pool. As you can see in the pics, we've also given you some nifty papercraft spiral staircases to show the way to the next level of the tower.

The set is designed to create a tower battlemap, but it goes far beyond that. As mentioned before, the set is completely compatible with the other Kev's Lounge Dungeon Tile sets, and can be used to create non-square rooms as you see above, where we've used some tiles from the Ominous Storeroom set with this one to create a long room with rounded corners.

There are more photos in the Luxurious Lair preview album on our Facebook page.

If you just can't wait for this set to come out, why not get a copy of The Ominous Storeroom in the mean time?

Miniatures used in pictures are strictly for illustration purposes and are not included in the purchase.

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Thus ends May of the Dead.

As I'm sure you're aware, Kev's Lounge participated in a big interblog carnival held by the guys over at the Going Last podcast, with these little Gothic Coffins. I can't really speak for the other guys who participated, but at least from where I'm standing, it was a huge success, bringing in literally hundreds of new visitors to this humble blog of mine! So this is just a little open letter to say "thanks a million, guys!" to Ian and Justin for organising it, and to all the other participants for making it interesting.

If you haven't already, you can find the Carnival's page over here. There was a ton of great content on there, and I'm really proud to have been among such great company! I heartily recommend that you go and have a look.

There were a lot of highlights on there, but rather than rewriting the whole list, I'm just going to mention a couple of cool blogs I discovered as a result of this little event.

Terrain Wench Productions

The Terrain Wench is a very talented terrain artist from Wisconsin who produces some really amazing stuff. Her blog is filled with incredibly detailed logs of how she went about creating various terrain pieces, and is filled with awesome tips and tricks for beginners and experts alike!

This windmill is particularly impressive! You can see how she made it here.

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Fantasy Paper Miniature Models

Eddnic over at FPMM designs some really awesome 3d paper miniatures, which he gives away for free over at his blog. He's got some pretty interesting pieces over there including a couple of dragons.

•••

There are, of course,  many others up there, and you really should go have a look! Thanks again Going Last.

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News: Bug fixed on Papercraft Dungeon, and some other stuff

I've been absent again.. Just a quick note to let you all know what's been happening while I've been neglecting the blog.

First up, I believe that I've managed to fix a bug on Papercraft Dungeon that was a constant thorn in my side and was causing some firefox users to have trouble downloading stuff. Formerly this would occasionally cause the zip file to be rendered in the browser window as text instead of kicking up the "save as/open with" dialogue, but it seems to be working properly now. If you've been running into difficulty there, then please try again.

Secondly, I've got some new stuff on the way. First up is a new premium set named The Luxurious Lair. It will feature a whole bunch of 3d props for your dungeons like furniture, staircases and room dividers, along with some brand new and very cool rounded corner dungeon tiles great for representing towers, and combinable with all the exisiting dungeon tiles to create some interesting room shapes. Here's a quick preview of the tiles. I'll post some pictures of the furniture pieces very soon.



Finally, and slightly off topic, I've been trying to break into the comic book industry, either doing pencils or colours. So far, no luck, but I'm still trying. As part of this, I've actually written and started drawing a comic. The first chapter is 10 pages long and I will likely be releasing that online at some point in the next couple months. For those interested, I've got some quick previews from the pencil art below. Update: The first page of the comic is here!

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A small preview

Yeah, I've been away a while again. All sorts of things have been keeping me busy, and here's a sneak peak of one of them.


The Humble Hovel is the first of a series of 3D buildings, excellent for tabletop games from Dungeons & Dragons to Warhammer. The roof and walls can be removed to provide easy access to the interior and it comes with a bonus pack of furniture items to decorate the place and provide some cover and terrain advantage in game. The furniture pack is designed to be completely compatible with every Kev's Lounge Dungeon Tile Set released to date.

Buy The Humble Hovel at www.papercraftdungeon.com now!

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Kev's Lounge: The Web Comic

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"Kev's Lounge - A place where games are played and Coca-Cola is consumed. Risk, Axis and Allies, Zombies, Mordheim, Settlers of Catan and Dungeons and Dragons are but a few of the games discussed." Those words have been in the header bar for about as long as Kev's Lounge has existed, but they've never really made a lot of sense.

The way it all started, is that I finished highschool back at the end of 1998. We all went off to different colleges and the group dynamic kinda fell apart. At the end of 1999, I bought a copy of Risk, the classic one, and started inviting the kids around once a week to play, and that kinda cemented the group back together, giving us all a reason to hang out on a regular basis. We used to play in the lounge, hence "Kev's Lounge".

After a while, we started playing other games too... We went back and dug out all the games we used to play in high school, like Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons, and a whole bunch of interesting new games we discovered along the way like Settler's of Catan, Mordheim, Axis and Allies and Risk 2210. It didn't really matter much which game we were playing... It was just a great way to spend time with friends.

As for "Kev's Lounge" as a title, back in 2004 we were all young and thought we were really hilarious and that other people would laugh themselves silly watching us hang out in the lounge playing our silly games. Kev's Lounge was originally going to be an online streaming podcast... and the only thing that really stopped it was that not a single one of us was willing to watch and edit the video down to something that would actually be watchable. Of course, it was only a couple years before some blokes invented a thing called YouTube and we got to see just how awful that idea was in the first place!

A few years later, I then went on to start this blog, and I was going to use it to talk about the games we played. If you look at some of the very first posts, that's exactly what I was doing. I found that pretty boring, so I started sharing the stuff that I'd made for the games we played instead, and that turned out to be pretty popular, so i kept doing it.

The original idea of the podcast stuck with me the whole time though, and I still think that there's a story worth telling. Back in highschool I used to draw comics, which I'd photocopy and distribute to anyone who cared to read them. I still have the original artwork somewhere, but I'm slightly embarrassed looking at it now, because my 15 year old self had a very warped idea of what constituted "cool!" Earlier this year, i thought I'd give it another try, and I landed up drawing the comic you see above. I haven't really carried on with it, because there is so much else going on in my life right now, but I think I'd like to explore this a little further. Develop some proper characters and come up with a decent long term story line. What do you guys think?

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Is Kev's Lounge dead? Definitely not!

Hi guys... There has been some speculation that this blog and all the associated projects have been abandoned. That is to be expected I suppose, given the amount of time that has passed since anything has been posted here, but I'm here to tell you all that reports of this blog's death have been greatly exaggerated!

The short explanation for my absence over the last 4 months is that I haven't had much spare time as my graphic design business has been keeping me incredibly busy. I have had some time, just not enough time. The dungeon tiles and counters I create for Kev's Lounge generally take a fair bit of time to create. There are ways I could speed up the production I suppose, but in my mind that'd only cheapen what I'm trying to do here. I do it for the art, and I don't like taking shortcuts. There's a sense of satisfaction I get from the pieces I produce, knowing that I've created something that looks good to myself and to anyone who downloads and uses it. Every piece that I design gets built and added to my collection and gets used at the game sessions that the crew and I hold here weekly, and if it's not ready for my games table, I won't put it online.

Here are some previews of the various projects that will be posted here in the near future:

New Dungeon Hazard and Obstacle markers. Got a big set of these on the way as soon as I finish up some of the last bits of artwork. The set will include all the markers already released in the dungeon tile sets as well as a several new markers to complement them. Pictured above are some of the new rubble markers, a chest marker and 2 bedroll markers.

The second set in the Rocklands outdoor tiles. The first set was limited to a serpentine linear trail, while this set includes crossroad sections and t-junctions making this set infinitely more useful! Naturally it will also include more hazard and obstacle markers, and like it's predecessor it will come with a 1" grid or without one. Also in the pipeline are a set of proper instructions for the assembly and a 1.5" grid for the Mage Knight crowd.



Brand new sets of tokens to follow on from the Ammo set. These sets are focused on Supplies and Money. Pictured above: One of the new Potion tokens, an Olive Oil token. a Standard Rations token and a Gold Coin token. The finished sets will include over 30 new double sided token designs with multiple denominations of all the common coin types, a range of ration types, a variety of consumables like spell components, and several new potions and poisons. Silver Coins and Gold Coins are now available!

There are several other projects on the drawing board, including further expansions to the dungeon tiles allowing for non rectangular rooms and angled and curving corridors. There will also be new papercraft doors in a variety of styles which will be a great improvement in both style and appearance on the previous ones.

Lastly, I intend to spend more time on articles for this site including reviews and possibly tutorials so that it doesn't sit quiet in between projects like it has in the past. Lately we've been playing a lot of Descent here in Kev's Lounge so I may write about that a little in the coming weeks while I get the new sets finished up. If you have any thoughts on things you'd like to see, please leave a comment!

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Kev's Lounge Twitter Feed

Kev's Lounge now has a Twitter feed! Follow us to find out when new stuff is coming out and get feedback on our progress with our various projects.

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Please Rate our Posts

Hi,

We have just added a rating facility at the bottom of every post. Please feel free to rate our posts and be honest because this will help us to improve our content. All you have to do to submit your rating is click on the relevant star (1 for horrible and 5 for excellent).

Regards,
The Kev's Lounge Team

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Kev's Lounge: What is this all about?

I am Kevin and my lounge is a room with a million stories. Once or twice a week my friends and I will get together and forget about the drama of our lives and just enjoy each others' company while consuming vast amounts of Coca-Cola and enjoying one of the numerous games that we've collected over the years.

This Blog is about those games. Risk, Axis and Allies, Zombies, Mordheim, Settlers of Catan and Dungeons and Dragons are just a few of the games I'll be discussing here. I will be sharing some experiences and tips on strategy and etiquette, and possibly writing a little about house rules and some variations to breathe some new life into these great games when they start feeling a little repetitive. I also plan to do a few posts on miniatures with some advice on sculpting, converting and painting, or just showcasing parts of my vast collection for those interested in having a look, and I want to include some step-by-step diorama and scenery projects for the readers who enjoy the craft behind the hobby.

Please feel free to comment on any of the posts, and if there are any articles that you want to see, then please let me know and I'll see what I can do!

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