Bits and pieces

This evening didn't go as planned, but I did manage to:

a) Book the club Xmas dinner

b) finally hang the D&D campaign world map (thanks to Pippa of the many sewing machines for hemming the edges so I could)

c) assemble Sarissa's cute little "Altar of the Unknown God" and give it an undercoat. Hey, it's a start!

More yak-shaving....

From Wiktionary:

yak shaving (uncountable)

1. Any apparently useless activity which, by allowing you to overcome intermediate difficulties, allows you to solve a larger problem.

   I was doing a bit of yak shaving this morning, and it looks like it might have paid off

Today's yak shaving involved upgrading my big iMac to macOS Catalina, as it can be done in the background, and allows me to make sure various essential bits of software don't break before I update my work laptop.

Of course, they do. Specifically, the time I was due to spend on podcast editing today went on getting a 64-bit Catalina-compatible version of Audacity working. :D

On the good side, I did also satisfy myself Wonderdraft still worked, and created a couple of assets for drawing top-down battlefield etc maps, specifically some Ordnance Survey style slope hatching.

Maps and dungeons

Surprisingly, this doesn't belong on The Sage DM.

I've been drawing a map for our trophy-winning Partizan game (of Men Who Would Be King) so AndyMac can submit it with his article for Wargames Soldiers and Strategy. You don't get to see all of it, because, well, we'd like you to buy the mag! But here's a snippet, again drawn using the rather fabulous Wonderdraft.

This evening at the club was testing out an Open Combat scenario written by Colin for our show in September - this one's a decidedly fun cooperative (or not so) dungeon crawl. Definitely a nice exercise of what is an excellent set of rules. 

Posh Lard prep, mapping

Today I've finished re-grassing the Omaha Beach boards... didn't think you'd really want photos as if you aren't fed up of the process by now, I certainly am :D

Also tarted up the Flames of War obstacle and barbed wire sets I picked up at Campaign. Just, you know, to make life harder for the Americans than it already is.

The car is packed. I'm sure I'm missing something :D

You will also notice on the left a stack of pots of basing grass, aka the stuff I've shaken off the boards once done. Should last me a while.

I've also been playing with Wonderdraft, a rather fabulous mapping program that runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. It'll import existing maps and allow you to keep them as a tracing layer, or let you draw your own, with a wide range of symbols for everything from continent down to city-scale maps.  I was actually using it to produce a better version of the map for my old D&D campaign, but I could also see it being useful for (say) Sharp Practice campaign maps etc. 

For those of you who missed it on Twitter:

The original map - 42 (+6) sheets of hand drawn A4. Has been hiding under my wife's jewellery case on her bedroom chest of drawers (for no reason either of us can explain) for the last decade.

A scan of a printout of the first attempt to computerise it (and reduce it to a manageable size!) using Pro-Fantasy's Campaign Cartographer (which is all very lovely but Windows only). In about 1994.

Using the above as a master to trace over using Wonderdraft. Total time about 2 hours.