D&D Mural Made by High School Gamers

I'm an art teacher. I play D&D. I used to run a D&D group after school for students, some of whom took art elective classes with me. One day I took them to a back hall and said, Your final project is to paint something here. This is what they did. It took them 3 months, and two of them came back a year later and added even more stuff.

In the basement, of course. Where's Waldo?

 On the left, a hoard of bad guys. A drow (with blue skin for some reason) redirects a lightning bolt from a blue dragon at his foes. Look for a beholder with a spare eye. On the right, the PCs, including a paladin, bard, half-orc rogue, and renegade drow whose name was Shade.
Three years ago the principal walks into my room and tells me the murals are being painted over, but not to worry because bulletin boards will be going up in their stead. I went out and snapped these shots before the modrons came and painted them over. Now it's a bare wall relieved only by furtive pencil sketches of genitalia. All my players have graduated. One had a baby. One plays keyboards in an alt-folk band. One's in law school. One's a nurse. Most of them still play D&D. With each other. I love 'em like they were my own kids.

Dragon blast!

Some of the PCs.

[Free Map] Deeps of Chaos Level 2, Unkeyed

Another map for you. Again, if you want the keyed version, download the Deeps of Chaos map back from the sidebar. Enjoy.

 

[Map] Chaos Deeps Level 1, Unkeyed

Here's a map I drew. Have fun with it. You can grab a keyed version by downloading the Deeps of Chaos map pack from the sidebar.

Character Backgrounds Defining Attributes

For a time, I ran a homebrew campaign called Neverland. It took place in the 1870s and was about the British Empire's conquest of Faerie. The PCs could be soldiers of fortune, explorers, traders, or even scientists trying to codify the laws of magic and bring back live specimens of mythical beasts. The two worlds were connected by a train line that left London via tunnel and emerged in Periopolis, an eternal city at the boundary of Faerie.

Character creation used a backwards-design process where you selected your career and training first, which drove your attribute scores. So if you chose Burglar, your Dex would increase, if you chose Pugilist, your Strength would increase, and so on. You would end up with a character whose attributes would be a good fit for their chosen career. I threw in a couple of freebie points or tweaks that the player could distribute as they saw fit, so in general, most Infantry Officers had roughly similar attributes, but one might be a bit more intellectual and another, particularly strong. It worked great and I wonder if there are any other systems out there that don't figure your attributes until after you've created a background for your PC.

[Actual Play] Welcome to the Plunderdome

Had a rollicking good time Saturday morning playing through Welcome to the Plunderdome with my kid.

[Spoiler Alert]
 

When she encountered the three disciples of Lord Reven and their captive haunted skeletons in Area 35 on the map, my sweetheart of a kid used her Resist roll to wrest control of the skeletons from the bad guys and free their spirits from bondage. Totally unforeseen move, but I should learn by now she wants to talk to/reason with every monster she meets! We stopped the game just after she found Fiddle hiding in the store room of the Priestesses of Lady Skew. She's going to have all week to think about how they're going to go about getting the Katasterrod back from the bad guys.

Sorry I haven't posted much lately. I have a very big and very fun commission creating a campaign map for an upcoming RPG publication, and it's been occupying much of my free time.

[Free Map] The Town of Chisca

Watercolor and colored pencil, 2005.

[Actual Play] Dinner and a Show

This evening, just before bedtime, a precocious 8-year-old elf warrior and her grumpy old minder, a paladin, were sent to Stormgate to find the source of a sinister stirring in the forces of Chaos somewhere beneath the city, as detected by the magic-sensitive diviners of the distant Elf Council. The two heroes were tele-dropped by the Council into a foggy side street under a dark sky, just a few feet from the front door of the Tides Inn (pets welcome, haunted room no extra charge). After offering a small fortune in out-of-circulation imperial coins to the Bonnie Raitt-ish innkeeper for a room and a dinner, the oddly-matched elves sat down in the dining room to a meal of roast chicken (yum!) and eel pie (ewwwww!) The young elf's pet fox begged for a chicken bone, and so she playfully hurled the bone up into the gallery on the second floor, where it plopped into the mug of another inn patron. Before the repercussions could be dramatized, the elf's mom appeared as a hologram and ordered her into the bath. The end.