Quarantine Adventure Design Contest - The Random Generator

The1True

My my my, we just loooove to hear ourselves don't we?
Holy crap The1True, did you do all these digital maps yourself? How??
Photoshop mostly. Not as handy as some of the purpose-built mapping tools out there, but more control over the look in the end.
3dsMax for the Ruined City and the Installation (that I never used).
 

Rabenwonne

A FreshHell to Contend With
Hey Rabenwonne, at first glance I must say: really great layout and artwork on this one! I can see I definitely fell behind with my 'scanned graph paper' method.
Thank you so much!
But I can assure you: It EATS UP time. I like your "scanned graph paper" graphics, by the way.
And after scanning through some other entries... argh, one can really tell that #1 I'm not a native English speaker and #2 I haven't written ANYTHING in English for at least 10 years. Be merciful :)

I hope I'll find the time to read through all the other entries and give a bit of feedback. But I am fairly new to OSR and have never reviewed anything before. So it might not be as enlightening as it should. You all seem to know each other quite well
 
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The1True

My my my, we just loooove to hear ourselves don't we?
ok ok, you've twisted my arm. I'll get back to work.
Yay! It was the slick addition of the logo on the front cover that did it, eh. Looks good, doesn't it ;) Apparently we need to lure @Grützi back from @Malrex though. Hell, we've got to lure everybody back from about a billion other distractions...
 

The1True

My my my, we just loooove to hear ourselves don't we?
Yaay, done. Certainly not perfect, but, finally, done. Thank you for the extension!
Wow! Some incredible maps and artwork! Very well conceived story. Ich wünschte mein Deutsch wäre so gut wie dein Englisch. Es ist eine schwierige Sprache!
 

The1True

My my my, we just loooove to hear ourselves don't we?
My hands just shake a bit and the lines look all squiggly! Something to work on next time.
btw. I went to some effort to find a way to make my perfect digital lines faux-squiggly. I found the maps looked dead without a little wobble, so don't get too tied up going at it with rulers or a digital art package; a living line is worth it! I offer Dyson's work as an example (although that dude has one hell of a steady hand; as far as I can tell, he doesn't employ a compass for his circles...)
As for the squares; I play with munchkins, so we like to see the exact dimensions on the battle map, but I can respect the no-squares point of view :D
 

Rabenwonne

A FreshHell to Contend With
Wow! Some incredible maps and artwork! Very well conceived story. Ich wünschte mein Deutsch wäre so gut wie dein Englisch. Es ist eine schwierige Sprache!
Thank you!
Yes, it definitely is! But you seem to manage ;) Have you ever read Mark Twain's essay on German? He spoke the language perfectly and must have liked it at least a little, but he sure hides it well.


And yes! Those handmade "faults" are what makes the lines interesting. Keep them! My illustration instructor in university forbid is us to ever use a ruler. Ever.
 

Grützi

Should be playing D&D instead
So if i counted correctly we still missing one adventure?
Evards small tentacle promised one ... or at least rolled up a title.
Two orcs and me are out because we are losers who let real life interfere with the really important stuff :p

So DP, Malrex and me judge the entries, then we see who gets the most points and crown him/her the winner?

I'll try to write my reviews nicely and go into some detail ... might take a little while for some of these behemoths :)
 

TerribleSorcery

Should be playing D&D instead
As for the squares; I play with munchkins, so we like to see the exact dimensions on the battle map, but I can respect the no-squares point of view :D
Yeah, plus you play 3rd edition! I am a theatre of the mind guy, although it can be a pain to keep track of sometimes.
 

The1True

My my my, we just loooove to hear ourselves don't we?
Jesus Christ @Malrex! Do you still have a state to live in? Every time I see the news it looks more like the bloody apocalypse over there!
 

DangerousPuhson

Should be playing D&D instead
The California fires get a lot of press because they are what we in Emergency Management call "Wildland Urban Interface Fires"; that is, fires that affect people. They are cyclical events with specific seasons, much like hurricanes and floods, where you would be utterly surprised if some major blaze didn't happen.

What's really scary is that at any given time, there are at least a dozen (often dozens of) huge wildfires in any given part of the country that are designated as "out of control" (ie. they can't be contained or extinguished, so the only option is to let them burn themselves out while minimizing as much damage as possible). Not to mention the hundreds (often thousands) of normal forest fires that crop up during a year. Seriously, it's not just California; up here in Canada, the Northwest Territories, mainland BC, and northern Alberta are perpetually ablaze.
 

Malrex

So ... slow work day? Every day?
Jesus Christ @Malrex! Do you still have a state to live in? Every time I see the news it looks more like the bloody apocalypse over there!
I wouldn't know....I'm too busy reading your 90 page adventure (check your messages--got a question for you).

2017, 2019, and now 2020...my town or in close proximity has been on fire. Honestly, it's like taking a shower to me...pretty used to it now.
I've been lucky in that I havent had to evacuate, but have come darn close (the line was the street and I was on the right side to not have to leave) and I hardly lose power because I share the grid with the hospital...which is great, because I can continue to read this 90 page adventure....

But work gets busier for me with the fires....I go out to the scene and help landowners with resource issues...you know...like a druid.
 

TerribleSorcery

Should be playing D&D instead
OK everyone. We are all waiting with bated breath for the final reviews to come in, and I don't want to get ahead or anything.
BUT while we're sitting around passing the time, I already have a list over a page long of "stuff I learned during this contest." Most of it is really basic, beginner mongoloid stuff because I have never tried to create a pdf before.

My process was like this:
I wrote everything up in Google Drive (where I write all my gaming stuff)
Drew the maps on graph paper, and the pictures in my notebook for the nice white paper. The art was the most fun. I did a few rough drafts, looked at google to get some ideas. I traced the double-tetrahedron by taping a piece of paper to my my monitor like it was a light table.
Budget-grade solutions, but they work.
Scanned the pictures at the local Staples, messed with them in GIMP (just stepped on the brightness/contrast, and digitally coloured the one) and put the whole thing into LibreOffice Word, which is the free open-source Microsoft Word lookalike that I have here in Ubuntu.
I then went on to do edits at this stage (horrible idea, I know that now). And fiddled with the layout until it looked halfway passable. Honestly, LibreOffice Word is not a great program for doing that, as some of you probably could have told me. It's like "zine-level" layout at best.

So my question is, how did everyone else do it? Some of you had tremendous digital art, some of you had great fonts and layout, etc. What programs did you use and how do you like them? Are they hard to use? Are they expensive? Anybody draw on one of them tablet things?
 

The1True

My my my, we just loooove to hear ourselves don't we?
I did my writing initially in Google Docs, but had to move over to Word when I started adding art. Docs gets clunky when you add art. As you mentioned, Word isn't much better. I've got Adobe InDesign as part of the CS6 suite, but I opted out of installing it way back when I installed the rest of the suite and now I'm scared I'll bugger everything up if I try to add it. Genius hacker I am not.
All my art was done in 3ds Max and Adobe Photoshop. The learning curve on both of those packages is mean and I'm benefiting from years of video game dev work back in the day. On the upside, both apps have strong communities, excellent support and thousands of text and video tutorials if you have the time and inclination. Professional subscriptions are insultingly expensive, but clean cracks are readily available in the usual places for hobbyists and people who are just learning.
I'd love to get a drawing tablet, particularly one of those big-ass Cintiq's we used to use back in the animation studio, but I just can't legitimize the expense to myself.
Also, credit where it's due:
I used DrawHexGrid and rechneronline.de to create custom hex grids.
When I was looking for a little inspiration I messed around with RPG Citymap Generator and good-old Donjon for rough map ideas.
For stats I used my increasingly unstable copy of eTools mostly to check my math.
 
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