Phantom islands of the Atlantic (book report)

Hoping to find some inspiration for the island-hopping “5DM campaign,” I read Phantom islands of the Atlantic by Donald S. Johnson.  The book is written by an historian and sailor, and discusses seven legendary islands (or groups of islands) that have appeared, for varying terms, on maps of the Atlantic.  Links go to the Wikipedia pages on them so you don’t have to read the book too.  (It’s not a bad read but I skipped a fair amount of the geography and seamanship heavy discussions of where the islands might have been located and which real islands or phenomena might have inspired the stories.)  The maps included in the book include both some reproductions of the originals and some simplified line drawings, which could be useful.

1. Isle of Demons — not mentioned on Wikipedia: this was confused with an island where Marguerite de la Rocque  and her lover were marooned, and which is described in the Heptameron.
2. Frisland — where two adventurers become embroiled in wars of conquest on unknown islands
3. Buss Island – which was thought to be island that sank and occasionally rose again
4. Antillia, the isle of seven cities — supposedly settled by Iberians fleeing the Visigoths
5. Hy-Brazil — (I first heard of this in the wonderful film Erik the Viking!) — this one originated in Celtic mythology
6. St. Ursula and her 11,000 virgin companions — who supposedly sailed from Britain to Roma nad landed on some phantom islands.  Later explorers would name the Virgin Islands after this legendary figure.  St. Ursula was very popular in the middle ages and the modern Order of  Ursulines were founded in her honor, although the Vatican no longer regards her as a real saint.  This chapter has a good reminder about the trade in saintly relics that were big business in the middle ages.  When a mass grave was identified as that of Ursula and her 11,000 martyrs, there was an explosion of shrines built.  1000 skeletons were shipped out to one location. (The skeletons were probably either a Roman era graveyard or late Roman mass grave; there were not really 11,000 bodies there and they were not all women. Still, a cache of relics like that would be an authentic medieval treasure hoard, if you  are bored with gold and silver coins…)
7. The islands of St. Brendan – This is the longest chapter and mentions a number of islands: The Island of Smiths (possibly volcanic); the Island of Strong Men; many mysterious places like an island with food set out but no inhabitants, a rock with Judas stranded on it, a massive crystalline cube that might house New Jerusalem, and many other curiosities and wonders.  Brendan and his companions are also menaced by various monsters and devils, and receive aid from magical birds.  The story is fairly repetitive, in the Medieval manner, but has a lot of details you might steal.

The book also drew my attention to the Ebstorf Map, which I’d never seen before.  Some one needs to redo this in English, or better yet do a version for Greyhawk or some other fantasy world.  This is exactly the sort of map players should have.

How Scottsz fixed my map

Scottsz explains the goetic art of ‘Gimping,’ and shows how he transmuted my shi*ty map into gold!  Surf on over to Old School Jump to see how he fixed my OPD map.  It was obviously a lot of work, and I’m very grateful.  Thanks, Scott!

I hope this also motivates more entries into the OPD contest. At this point there are more prizes than entries!  And while that’s good news with respect to my chances of winning something, I tend to use a lot OPDs as spurs when I’m DMing so I’d like to see more entries!  Get on it, people!

OPD with revised map

I already posted a bit about the Belly of the Beast here, and mentioned my intention to get the map looking better.  Scottsz has very kindly cleaned up the whole thing, adding legible numbers and more consistent doors etc.

Very bluntly, if it weren’t for Scottsz & Sorcerers of Doom there wouldn’t be a Swords & Dorkery. I stumbled across his first incarnation of SoD (there have been three incarnations of that blog by my count) and saw someone plugging away at a gaming project I could relate to and the whole wide world of blogging opened up to me, and I thought, “I could post my crap! Someone out there will appreciate it!” Scottsz’s Old School Rant directed a lot of traffic to me in the early days too and I feel I owe him an awful lot now. Most recently he gave me feedback on an ealry version of Belly of the Beast, which has become my One Page Dungeon entry, and now he’s even transformed my crude hand-drawn map into something respectably professional-looking. Thanks again, Scottsz!

Here’s my original scan he started with:

Here’s his cleaned up version of it:

And here’s the final (I think!) OPD: Mike_Monaco_The_belly_of_the_beast_OPD

Chance favors the prepared mind

Last night I stocked a dungeon map I’d stumbled upon in my research into copper mines, using the Moldvay Basic book, and a few tables from The Dungeon Alphabet and Kelri’s Old School Encounter Reference. (I also had some of Al’s tables from Beyong the Black Gate handy but did not decide to use them, nor the DMG’s dungeon dressing tables, since I already knew the dungeon was a mine and I could make up dressing for it easily enough on the spot).

Initially I thought I’d roll up sixteen rooms and assign them logically to the sixteen numbered areas, but once I was done I didn’t feel like recopying everything I’d noted and instead I mostly kept the rolls as they fell, with a few modifications (some of the monsters from one area might be in another area or two, and a few traps/specials were moved around).  What I was very pleasantly surprised to find was that it was actually very easy to work out a “narrative” of what the hell is going on in the mines based on the various random elements.  If it goes over well in my game, I’ll go ahead and post it here.

Free maps, and some pamphlets

So this is pretty cool — refurbished old maps free for educational use.

I like the economic and fauna/flora maps especially, you don’t see a lot of them.

Unrelated but interesting too is this post about some old pamphlets.  I totally love the first image there.

ABC: Always Be Cobbling!

Craft projects are big in my household, between my wife’s sewing and scrapbooking, my daughter’s myriad crafts, and of course my own constant painting and converting of minis. I was just taking stock of the half-started/partly completed projects I am working on, or planning to work on (although lately the garden and a tentative return to exercising and even this blog have been competing for time):

• 1/72 armies. I have several hundred plastic figures in 1/72 scale that should eventually be painted and based for wargaming (DBA), including several that are mostly conversion jobs since no-one makes Lydians, Neo-Hittites, and various others. These have been on hiatus for a couple of years now, since I’ve been more interested in fantasy and RPGs lately.
• Painting (and to some extent re-painting) my old D&D figures, of which there are maybe two hundred, if I don’t count the vast piles of plastic figures from BattleMasters, Lionheart, Age of Mythology, and other board game figures I’ve drafted for RPG and wargame use, and if I don’t count some newer figures…
• Several armies worth of fantasy type armies, including some complicated conversions (I’d like to take some of the Lionheart knights and make them into fully armored centaurs, for example).
• Completing the rules additions for “Dungeon Delvers” and the large new Egyptian tomb dungeon I made for it, which will require some playtest time.
• Photographing all of the painted figures for pet project (I’d like to create a series of booklets of NPCs and monster stats, assigning names and values to each figure in my collection, probably statted in D&D as well as “Dungeon Delvers” )
• Fleshing out the megadungeon and campaign world for an OD&D or Labyrinth Lord campaign to rune someday.
• Testing out the Chainmail rules as wargame and for OD&D to see if the it would be viable to run a convention game consisting of a skirmish, a short dungeon crawl, and a larger mass battle or siege in a semi-simulation of the old Dark Tower electronic bard game.
• Painting up hordes of zombies and a few modern figures for zombie gaming.
• Painting up a huge pile of plastic cowboys & “Indians” for use with Boot Hill.
• Painting my swashbuckler/pirates figures, including all those undead pirates I bought earlier.
• Painting my small collection of superheroes and sci-fi figures, just to get them finished.
• Rebasing some figures that I rather impulsively put on flocked “grassy” bases although they really would be better off on neutral black bases, since they are for RGPs and may be indoors as well as outdoors.
• Make chess set, and/or a hnefatfl set for myself (I’ve made both as Christmas gifts before but you know, the shoemaker is barefoot or however that goes.)
• Create a pair of Ragnarok armies (both sides of the Norse apocalypse) for the game Hordes of the Things. Not to mention a Chaos army, an Imperial Warhammer army, some Hyborian armies, and a ninja army, all for HOTT…
• Repair a couple of Grenadier “masterpiece” models…the Goblin War Giant, which has a number of loose goblins, and the Undead Giant,which is currently in pieces.
• Build a 28mm scale viking hall, a tavern, and a coach house that are big enough for RPGs & skirmish wargames.
• And a scale pirate sloop, and a galleon, and a merchantman ship, all for pirate games.

Good grief. I’ll be doing this when I’m senile.

Maps of mines

Quick idea: suppose the upper level(s) of the megadungeon you are planning is composed of mines. How do you map a mining complex? Wing it? Or do you check some real-world mine maps?

Here’s a link to some guides to mines in Illinois (pdf documents).

And here’s some maps of West Virgina mines.

A little more Googling might lead you to mines in your area. Unfortunately, the National Mine Map Repository does not have an easy way to find the many maps they’ve scanned — you need to know what you’re looking for there.

A couple of updates

I added my revised rules for the Heritage dungeon crawls to the Rules page, and the rules & maps for the dungeons to the mythology page.

If I should make any new maps, I will, based on my experiences, do the originals on 8×10″ panels to be assembled later!  Actually I have some ideas about creating sections that can be assembled in multiple configurations, like the old D&D “Dungeon Geomorphs.”

Oh, and the most awesome thing to report is that my 4-year old decided to make her own “D&D map”:

She saved a piece of cardboard (“Daddy, if you don’t recycle this I can make a D&D map”) and needed a little help painting it (“What color does black and red and yellow make? What color does green and blue and red make?”), and admitted “I don’t know how to play D&D” when she was done, but I’m encouraging her to make it up as she goes.  She said the unpainted square on the upper left is the start, so she has some idea it is like a board game, and put one of her toys on it.  We’ll see.  It will be nice if she has something to do with all of the dice she’s stolen from me!

Finally finished the “gift” games!

As I mentioned last time, the boards were all finally in a finished state:

But noone can actually scan a board that big, so, although it killed me to do it…

Cut into scannable chunks, scanned, reassembled as the pdfs I put on Scribd, printed, touched up, laminated.

Happily I was able to salvage the originals into a usable form too, as I’d hoped.  I covered each section with clear shelf paper and then reassembled them with more shelf paper so that fold like game boards.  Unfortunately I’d cut one so assymetrically that it looks really bad folded up but all are serviceable. Edge on:

3/4 opened:Completely opened up:

And completely folded up again:

So anyway here is what a completed gift game is looking like:

That is the “Hall of the Frost Giant.”  Map, booklet (general rules and the specifics for this dungeon), two laminated sheets of tables, and two record sheets, each usable to keep track for at least two adventures, and case for the figures (they’re on the map in this shot).  The monsters are in the large oval feating hall room and the adventurers are in the hall to the left.

Focus!

And lastly here is a shot of the figures in their boxes:

And the figures for the other three games:

Now that I’m ready to wrap them up, I’m a little excited that I can get back to painting figures for myself again….

OfficeMax, you’re dead to me

I could have sworn I called OfficeMax’s copy center about making copies of my map boards.  But when I strolled in Saturday morning to have the rules books printed up and copies of maps made an laminated, they said no can do.  They have a flat bed scanner that can only handle 11×17 and even then with some loss on the edges.  WTF? How did I not realize copy places can’t make copies of anything bigger than 11×17?  Technically you could find a scanner for something on paper that is bigger, but I used foam core to reduce warping from the paint.  In the end I couldn’t bring myself to start all over, so I cut the boards up into 8×10 or so sections and scanned them on my computer, then got my brother to reassemble them as printable pdfs.  They are not perfect, due to my cutting more than Tom’s reassembly.  Oh well.  The prints look decent and I will touch them up with a Sharpie, have them laminated, and the project is finally done!  In time for Xmas too!  Woot!

I’ll take pics and post them later.  For now I went ahead an uploaded the the files to scribd.com, for the curious.   Here is one, for example.  The scenarios, and my version of the basic rules, are there too if you poke around.

OK, maybe I never did call OfficeMax before … it is kind of a blur now.  Still, I coulda punched someone when that happened.