Location and NPC Sheets for DINO-PIRATES!

So many bad guys

Here at Scratch Factory we're big fans of making the DM's job easier; that's one of the key reasons we picked Old School Hack as the foundation for the new DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND role-playing game. You really can't beat Old School Hack for super-easy game mastering.

But we also really kind of sneakily LOVE filling out forms. We're addicted to character sheets, and have spent many long hours poring over how to fill out every field in our Campaign Planning Guide, and other such treasures. It's one of the things we've always cherished about tabletop role-playing games, and we wanted to make sure that the new DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND provided some of that love for the DM, not just the players.

So check out these fantastic Location and NPC sheets!

Easy-to-print, half-page forms that help you keep your notes organized, even if you're making them up during play! Keep track of minions and bad guys, potential treasure or secrets to be discovered. Have your bad guys easily statted up before the big combat, or make them up on the fly and keep track so they're consistent for next time.

You never know, your players MIGHT notice.

Anyway, you'll have fun filling them in, and hopefully the process of doing so helps you think through your next encounter so you're better-prepared than ever!

Download now!

In upcoming weeks we'll show you some complete DINO-PIRATES adventures using these forms and a few other key ideas that make a DINO-PIRATES adventure special. Stay tuned!

Confidence, Crushed

Some things just seem so obvious to me. Like the notion that Arnold's Conan and Julie's Maria belong together. Sort of. If you, you know, don't think about it too much.

So we watched Conan The Barbarian a while back, cause it's awesome (as you know), and I was listening to Julie Andrews singing "I Have Confidence", which is also awesome (as you also know) (and yes, I have The Sound of Music soundtrack on my iTunes rotation) (but I wasn't listening to Julie Andrews WHILE we were watching Conan, cause that would be annoying), and to be honest, the rest was just figuring out how to use new toys.

Steph got me a digital drum machine last year, and this is the first track I've used it on. It's called iDrum and it integrates fully into GarageBand 2. It also works very well as an independent groove-maker, outputting aiff files you can then drag into GarageBand as loops. Awesomely cool.

So this track features less GarageBand loops than any track I've done so far, I think. Only one pre-fabricated GarageBand loop is used in here -- bonus points if you can guess which instrument it is.

Crush Kittens

Steph again provided useful ideas. She also said I should lose the guitar. This time I couldn't bring myself to take it out. Way it goes.

Finish What You Start

Okay, so we were watching this tremendous British noir called They Made Me A Fugitive (damn them) with Trevor Howard and Sally Grey (where are all the Sallys these days?), and there's fantastic bit in the middle where our now-a-fugitive hero (I don't think I'm giving too much away if I say that a some point in the film the hero becomes a fugitive) confronts young Miss Grey and delivers a blistering speech on finishing what you start.

It's a nailbiter, for sure, largely because you're never entirely sure how far our desperate hero is willing to go. Trevor Howard is a great square-jawed but morally uncertain hero, and Sally delivers pluck and charm a-plenty. Rest assured she does, in the end, finish what she started.

Anyway, that speech kept rattling around in my head, and then it got really hot, and one day we were walking across the park and Steph mumbled, "It's too darn hot," and then Trevor Howard got mixed up with Cole Porter. And a cowbell.

So here's "Finish":



It's possible it needs more cowbell.

You Are In Love

Saw Brotherhood of the Wolf at the Festival here a few years back. Liked it okay -- painfully overcut, but otherwise some good stuff. Some time later Steph said, "Hey, remember that Italian actress from Brotherhood? The prostitute? She was really good -- she was in another movie, Tears of the Sun. Let's check it out."

Of course the woman in question is the actress Monica Bellucci, and is only one of an endless line of amazing actors that Steph has managed to pick out of the crowd and alert us to before we even know who they are. We have a whole "stable" of actors that she's identified as worth keeping tabs on. Sometimes we end up watching great actors in not-so-great movies (Tears of the Sun, say), but it's always thrilling watching somebody live up to the potential you see in them and deliver spectacular performances.

Now ordinarily I prefer subtitles to dubbing, since voice acting is if anything harder than normal acting, but Blaine's copy of Brotherhood doesn't include subtitles, so we watched it in English. And discovered that many of the actors did their own English dubs (since they're European and thus speak thirty languages) -- including Monica. So I grabbed a bunch of choice utterances, scrambled them up with a little Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass ("Green Peppers" from Whipped Cream and Other Delights), added a solid base of GarageBand loops and voila!

You Are In Love (We're Not Married)

Learned a lot listening carefully to Dmitri From Paris, Towa Tei and Coldcut on a recent trip to TO. It may not show, but I swear I learned it! I got more help from Steph, of course, than I did from any of them.

Flying Babies!

Today, a blast from the past: a scene from The Wrong Apartment, a film we did eight years ago (can it really have been that long?).

First, the notion: we wanted to do a "reimagining" of the "Odessa Steps" sequence from The Untouchables, only with an elevator instead of a staircase (mainly because the staircases in the building were not suitable for that sort of thing). The thinking and crazy idea-making that came up around that idea led to what you see here:



Obviously we're limited by not having guns or squibs, but we did have a lot of fun. Note that the scene more or less follows the three-act structure John Rogers has noted as required for an action scene: the opening that establishes the problem, introduction of complicating element (baby carriage), and then resolves itself through that element (flying baby).

Honestly, if we'd had squibs and blanks, I wouldn't change much about this sequence.

More Groove

I seem to be in the midst of creating a bunch of sort of "movie-related" music. One reason is that since I can't sing worth piss, and don't have any useful way of recording voices anyhow, I use vocals I can get ahold of, like movie dialogue.

Also some of my favourite music is movie music (like the Kong theme) so what are you going to do?

Now, if you were to grant points based on awesomeness of theme song AND crappiness of movie, I think you might have to rate Diamonds Are Forever as the highest of the high. Song: awesome Shirley Bassey ass-kicking. Movie: Well, uh, no. It sucks a lot. I can't think of another Bond film that quite combines those two qualities so well.

So here we have:

Only Diamonds Never

Steph helped a lot with this one so if you like it you should thank her. You wouldn't like it so much without her.

Savage Breast, Soothed

Hurray for GarageBand, my lovely M-Audio "Keystation" (thank you Stephanie), and The Movie WAVs Page. I have just released my latest no-doubt-soon-to-be-topping-the-charts tune, Carpenter's Moon.

Making music is one of those things I totally suck at, but love doing. Unlike, say, football, which I totally suck at, and HATE.

There aren't many things I totally suck at and enjoy. Music. Drawing. And sleeping. I never really got the hang of that, which means I usually only do it five or six hours a night.

Which ain't healthy, but I'm just no damn good at it.

Anyways, yay! Music! Yay!

More Swashbuckling Fun!

Yes, the Swashbuckling Cards are BACK! Born many moons ago in a long-lost thread on good old ENWorld, Swashbuckling Cards add guaranteed fun to any campaign. We've updated the cards so they play just as nicely in True20 as they do in standard d20 campaigns, and along the way they've been compatibilized (?) with games like Grim Tales and Mutants and Masterminds. They ought to work with pretty much any game that descends from the d20 family tree.

These cards let your players mess with your storylines, cheat certain doom and generally play merry hell with all your plans. If that sounds like fun to you, download the PDF and get cracking!

True20 Character Sheet

And now a full-blown character sheet for True20 players. Takes care of the niggling issues on the "official" sheet without changing the layout much, but includes some new handy stuff -- you can note your adept's increasing Fatigue Save penalties under the "Fatigue Save Modifier" header, and there's slots for Power Bonuses and Power Save DCs. Also a handy key to keep track of which powers require concentration, maintenance or mental contact, and which are fatiguing. Also has a slot for Grapple Bonus, which is one of those numbers I always seem to end up using more often than not.

Of course we'll be using a version of this for our upcoming playtest session at Drexoll Games, July 8th. One brave soul has already signed up. Who else dares? The SLAVE QUEEN awaits...

True20 Fun!

So it's looking like Dino-Pirates of Ninja Island is likely to be some variant on Green Ronin's rather excellent True20 system. I like the system, even if it does have a few peculiarities. Especially the remarkably poor job the rulebook does of explaining some of the key rules.

Like damage. The damage section makes no sense, and it's only with some careful review of assorted message boards that I managed to piece together what's SUPPOSED to happen.

And the "official" character sheet wildly deviates from the rules in a number of places.

But anyway, I am liking the rules themselves and they're definitely the right sort of spirit for that Dino-Piratey feel. Ar. And, armed with the experience of playing it once, I've gone ahead and made my first True20 playing aid: an NPC record sheet for GMs to, uh, record NPCs on. There's six blocks on each sheet, where you can note down the pertinent details on any and all NPCs you need to worry about.

Enjoy!

Peking Opera Map

In case I hadn't mentioned it before, Stone Software's Create is one of my favourite pieces of software ever. Right up there with Sketch-Up and VoodooPad.

And every so often I just want to fart around in a piece of software I love and make stuff. Which is where these battlemaps come from.

Here's a Peking Opera House to go with the Teahouse we've already offered. Guaranteed fun!

Battle On High!

At last the FREE Adventure for INFINITE: Epic Modern is available!

Battle On High is fresh off the digital press and ready for perusal!

Finally. That one took a while. But next up we have Fantasy Incorporated, a cynical, but hilarious view of what happens when Big Business meets High Fantasy. Stay tuned!

Did You Ever Hear of... Kong?

In celebration of Mr. Jackson's re-release of the original classic of all classics, I have created Kongadelica. It's not a thing of beauty, but it makes me giggle.

I love GarageBand almost more than I can stand.