World of Verne Forum Hoard

Adventure in the worlds inspired by Jules Verne with Victorian Adventurers, Giant Prehistoric Mammals, an Aethership, and a group of picnickers riding flying fish machines! Thanks to Verminking, Cowboyleland, Scarecrow, and Glennwilliams for your contributions to the first Forum Hoard of 2020. :)

http://www.onemonk.com/fh-2020.html

Ratkins, Armored Cars, and Royal Mail Coaches!

Thanks to Gilius, Anne Welborn, and Verminking for leaving their toys laying around the forum so that I can upload them for everyone. Gilius's Ratkins also come with his GIMP working file and pair nicely with the Ratkins in the House Of Hopkins section.

http://www.onemonk.com/guest-dl.html

A Royal Mail Coach from Verminking, and you can never have too many coaches.

http://www.onemonk.com/verminkinglabs.html

 

Anne Welborn/Wildagreenbough made her VSF models in 2002 and are mostly hand-drawn and scanned creations that will take some extra fiddling to assemble. Unfortunately I only have the one Armored Car picture and I would appreciate build pics of the rest. These models are a big part of what inspired me to start designing and building my own papermodel VSF creations.

http://www.onemonk.com/guest-dl.html

Steamcoach Carriage released!

Tired of slogging through decaying Victorian era cities filled with zombies and martians on foot? Walk no further as Gerard Mechanique and Mayhem in Paper have provided the steam-powered luxury travel solution in the form of the Steamcoach Carriage!

Product includes four color variations; Red, blue, green and yellow and Studio3 cut-files for automated cutter support.

Get yours now; http://www.wargamevault.com/product/226192/Steamcoach-Carriage

 

 

Adventure Skirmish rules wip2

Wounded status; It looked good on paper, but not made out of paper. Instead of flipping the character's card when they reach 0 health it's easier to clear any other status markers off the card and place a "Wounded (-2)" marker on the card. 

I've been looking through the old Metagaming TFT rule-books, mainly looking for examples of what not not to do; Lists of Talents with no explanation or the explanations scattered throughout the books. Weapons with incomprehensible names and no description so you have to guess what it is from the weapons statistics. I'll try to keep things clean and concise.

There are traits for specialist skills and traits for weapons. Anybody can pick up a weapon and use it. But if a character has a Trait for it then they are skilled in it's use and get a +1 bonus that they can use for either To Hit or Damage rolls.

There is, however, a penalty for trying to use Alien weaponry.

 

The revised cards;

 

 

Adventure Skirmish rules work in progress

I've been working on some adventure skirmish game rules for a long time and just recently a piece fell into place in my head and clicked. I'm not shooting for an RPG system as I've been greatly enamored of the rules "lite" systems that have been proliferating over the past five years. I've been trying to solve issues without resorting to lots of stats but d20 systems have conditioned me to default to too many stats and saves. I wanted less. Two Hour Wargames really only has one stat; Reputation. Song of Blades systems have two; Quality and Combat. And The Fantasy Trip that I played in more than 30 years ago really only had three; Strength, Dexterity, and Intelligence. And that's what finally clicked for me. You don't use the stats to modify some other roll for an action, the stats are the target numbers for the actions, which are then modified by traits and the situation. When Characters and Heroes Health reaches 0 their card flips over and they can continue but their stats are reduced due to injuries. That's the basics, I'll write more later.

In the meantime here is a preview card of a basic soldier;

 

 

Steam Carriage progress

Here is a bit of how I design models;
  I start with a rough sketch, figure out some shapes and dimensions and use those as a guide for the 3d version of the model. I don't usually put much detail into the 3d model as it's not headed to a 3d printer and I just need the building blocks, details and texture come later.

 

  I then export from my 3d program to Pepakura to unfold the shapes, export from that as an eps file into either Canvas Draw or Photoshop. Canvas Draw has some handy features that can speed up some of the edits when it comes to duplicating, editing, and rearranging pieces. I try to organize the pieces in pages with this step of the layout.

  It looks like it's about five pages worth of material with some wiggle room if I want to reduce the page count or add in some small extra bits. Then it's off to Photoshop to organize into pages and start texturing. This is the longest part of the process and is usually two days work per page, sometimes more, rarely less.

 Each pieces-parts gets it's own layer workgroup withing the page. Above those groups are layer effects that affect the entire page; overlay clouds, levels adjustment layers, gradient overlays, etc. Once I see how the pages are filling up in Photoshop I think about what else I could add in to use up white space and enhance the model, in the case of this page I decided more destination signs would be fun. I still have room for four more destinations, still thinking what they could be.

Texture, texture, texture, days of it.

  One of my goals with this model was to limit my palette and my styles to just a handful of repeated choices with slight variations throughout. I find that helps make the process go smoother and faster.
  Then I print everything out and do a test-build of the textured piece. I sometimes do white model test-builds, but those are mainly for mechanical purposes if I'm not sure how something is going to go together. It's a huge help to have the physical model in my hands and turning it over and over to figure out mechanical issues.

  A completed Steam Carriage! Well not quite, I've got a page of notes from this build that are all minor corrections. The biggest gaff is that the steering yoke is upside-down, which puts the yoke in the driver's crotch, not what I'd intended.
  Now I've got a few hours of editing, more build pics for instructions, write the instructions, and make cut-files for ease of assembly on the next go. I also need to make a driver for this, and probably several other color versions for varieties sake.

  What's it all mean? It means I'll hopefully be done with this by next weekend. :)

~Eric