The Hiring Hall

Hiring Hall is a new web app I made, drawing on DunGen and DunMap. It's a hireling generator, sort of like Meatshields, which helped inspire me to make it by being down long enough to annoy one of the GMs I play with. Meatshields is quite good. I hope it comes back. But in the meantime, and afterwards for variety's sake, give Hiring Hall a try.

There are some shortcomings with it being a one day project, so far. The names are lifted right out of the namer for NPCs encountered in dungeons in DunGen and DunMap. So they are a bit dark and florid for your usual bunch of torchbearers and mercenaries. The weapons to character class matches are poor for some of the rarer classes, like monks and druids. So edit those when they come up inappropriate. Some of the quirky adjective phrases are out of place in this context, like describing someone as especially well equipped when they roll off the same table as everyone else. Maybe give them a bump in gear if that comes up, or a magic item. I fudged hit points to a D6 + 1 for all mercenary/soldier types, 1d6 for noncombatant servants, and D8 per level for fighter type classes and D6 per level for other levelled classes to keep the coding down.  There is room to add a lot of customization controls, and option in the historical names lists in place or in addition to the syllable masher. All of this stuff is grist for iteration.

But it generates NPCs. Some of them make me laugh out loud when I consider using them. That's a win. And it got me coding game stuff again and some of the data structures I added to equip characters for it can feed right back into DunGen and DunMap.

Something I have always wanted to do...

I have shied away from attempting landscape painting for decades. Painted hundreds of minis, lots of table top terrain, and not one painting to backdrop it for photos.

Until yesterday.

I took some photos Sunday of my layout for my first game of Andrea Sfiligoi's Of Gods and Mortals*  that I quite liked but the background room clutter really detracted. I started thinking about how I really ought to get started with the airbrush and make a backdrop to hide the clutter for better pictures. Whited in the sky on a couple of handy still-flattened box lids Sunday. Well, I backed off on learning to airbrush too and finished the first painting as a regular brushed painting with some cheap craft store acrylics I usually use for terrain last night. I'm pretty happy with the mountain, not as much with the clouds. But now I know I can do something good enough to use. With the dam broken, I can start getting better. And maybe start learning that airbrush too.

Anyway, here it is, proof of concept...

The painting by itself. Yeah, the box lid folds and corrugations show. But it is basically a throwaway learning piece. Took about an hour and a half maybe. I was in the zone and really don't know. There are some little flecks of white still there from a stupid ancient bottle of blue paint whose lid crumbled to plastic dust as I tried to open it. Got most of them off...

Anubis in a fearsome aspect.

I learned that having tall shadow casting terrain and a sharp board edge in front of the painting is a bad idea. Could take down the towering bits and plunk some lichen or rocks down at the board edge to break the flat line . But hey, he's awesome, so I want a picture here of him until I take a better one! He's an old Diablo-related action figure that I based up on two bases, one for each foot, since he is so big, and could stand, if unstably, without any base at all.

Sobek's left flank guard is the mighty BOAR CROC!

I think my next one will be on foam core to be wider and still lightweight, and not have corrugations to show through. Maybe do two so as to be able to line a 6 foot table edge?

(Thanks to the guys that reported the pictures problem. I was able to see in from Safari on my work machine. I have re-uploaded the broken images by another path and will see if they are visible soon.)

* Published by Osprey. More on the Anubis vs Sobek game I'm doing with it in my next blog post. I think its going to rock.