Illustrating an RPG campaign

Warning to any who might want to partake in the Lost Mine of Phandelver campaign as a player, there are minor spoilers below.


Other than a very brief foray into game mastering for first just my wife and then, a year later for her and various in-laws, my only experience of running an RPG adventure has been online. (Indeed, after a few sessions in which we were first introduced to the world of structured make-believe, my whole history of playing RPGs has been through the medium of a computer, either on a virtual tabletop or through play-by-post.)

I splashed out on the Lost Mine of Phandelver module pack on Roll20 in the hope that it would reduce the amount of up front work needed to have the sessions run smoothly on the virtual tabletop. This did indeed work for the first few sessions, before I realised that a) five party members were just romping through this four-player adventure and b) it didn't give enough maps to cover all the scenarios (which, in fairness, is also the case with the physical starter set) so I needed to start finding images from elsewhere to fill out the gaps.

I also had the players provide me with an image each for their character sheet so that I could provide some tokens for the map-based encounters,and they sent me the following:

An elf, a gnome, a half-elf, another elf and a dwarf. Darkness held no mystery.

As you can see, there was something of a discrepancy in style, tone and portrait size. It was sufficient for an indication of which character was where doing what.

But the motley look rankled, and I wanted to do something to unify the game's appearance.

At this point, I was still participating in an online D&D game as a player, and the GM was experimenting with an isometric map. Coming into the world of RPGs from a world of miniature tabletop gaming, this visual effect struck a strong chord and I determined that I wanted to bring that style to my online game of Phandelver.

 I do not have a great deal of experience with digital art, nor do I have any particularly high-end devices. Never mind, thought I, this is the opportunity to break into the digital age. So, a few weeks into the campaign and armed with a Kindle Fire and a stylus I'd received as a freebie, I set about converting all the images the D&D module needed from top-down counters and floorplans to isometric maps and full-body figure portraits.

Painstakingly.

The maps were converted freehand with a virtual isometric grid to guide me, and they took flippin' ages. By the time I started on the big, final map, I'd realised that I could get away with ignoring the floor - Roll20 could provide that and the playing grid. Even so, this was a laborious process, and by the end I felt the effect was satisfactory rather than brilliant - the Kindle app I was using couldn't handle larger dimensions, so the map lost much of its quality when blown up to a size big enough for the counters I'd prepared. (In fairness, the image above is a much reduced version. The original is a sizeable image.)

For the majority of the monster and NPC tokens I digitally traced over various bits of official D&D art with some minor artistic modifications, and I spent so much time on some of them that I might as well have used the actual images themselves, were it not for the nagging need for visual uniformity.

A small selection of the many, many creatures to trace.

Copying existing artwork proved to be a double-edged sword - on the one hand I didn't need to worry about working out poses and colouring, on the other hand these images are incredibly detailed for someone not confident enough to omit all but the necessary aspects of an image.

The player character tokens were original pieces, guided only by the original portraits and the descriptions the players noted down:

This is the party before I killed the gnome off with the BBEG at the conclusion of the written adventure.

I'm ambivalent about the quality of these five figures - the first two poses are very dubious from a technical point of view - but again I labeled them as satisfactory. They were my first attempts at drawing vaguely human forms straight onto a tablet, and there is still much of a learning curve before me.

Ultimately, I wasn't blown away by the visuals of going fully isometric. It looked reasonable and was usable on Roll20 but, as I started drawing a wider range of creatures and NPCs for a possible homebrew campaign, it did not warrant the time commitment to drawing everything. I was developing something of an industry line to be as efficient as possible with them, but it was still taking several days' worth of lunch breaks and quiet moments to produce a batch of counters.

So, with the same degree of focus decisiveness as I have demonstrated with my physical miniatures hobby, I started doodling some characters by hand close to the standard Roll20 token. A bit of research later and I found that I could sketch a creature, scan it, render it colour-able with the click of a single button, colour it and crop it into a round token, all in a fraction of the time it took to make an isometric version, particularly after deciding to stop shading. Suddenly I could do several weeks' worth of free time in a weekend or two.

Not having to draw legs makes such a difference.

This quicker turnaround was emphasised last week when, having lost a player, I invited two more to join the campaign as it entered it's post-module stage. They gave me their character descriptions and I was able to deploy Roll20 counters for them in the course of an afternoon.

The latest line up of characters. They've an orc invasion to fight off, so they need the extra numbers.

I'm now playing around with drawing maps in your everyday squared excercise book. If I can make that work, then I will be able to fairly comfortably produce enough artwork on an easy enough basis for future campaigns and not have to worry too much if players nearly stumble upon the shortcut through the massive final dungeon*.

I have a suspicion that all that time and energy that went into isometricking it up will be for nothing barring the lessons learned in making digital art. I have a fairly large catalogue of isometric images lying around on my hard drive with little prospect of using them - the top-down Roll20 game is just so much simpler to work with.

So much for not overpreparing...


* Seriously, if you want to get through Wave Echo Cave in a jiffy, just keep heading left.

Running a first RPG campaign

Having just taken a group of players through the D&D starter campaign - The Lost Mine of Phandelver - and reaching the end of the module*, I thought I would sit back and reflect upon the experience. This will not be a particularly structured post, but hopefully will bring up some points which might inspire future blog musings, and generate some ideas for improving as a game master.

It was my first time as a GM and, at the beginning the campaign, still pretty unsure of the intricacies of the D&D 5e ruleset beyond the basic skill dice-rolling system and a rough understanding of combat. Now, twenty sessions on, I still don't know much beyond what you might find in the quick reference PDF, but I feel a lot more relaxed about that. There have been plenty of occasions where I have felt able to just say, "let's flip a (virtual) coin for it". 

This mainly worked thanks to a splendid group of players who, all with varying levels of experience, are relaxed about how accurately the slightly more obscure rules were applied. Having not organised the oft-recommended Session 0, pretty much anything could have happened. This group is made up simply by the first few people to respond to an ad I put up on a Discord channel. Six strangers with nothing else in common but for a hankering to end the life of some imaginary goblins.

Internet, you bring much strife to the world but by golly, you are a marvel.

Despite the presence of many horror stories about internet-based RPG groups, these players have all played together amicably, and even managed a bit of PC-on-PC conflict whilst remaining amicable out of character. They all reliably showed up throughout the campaign, barring the odd interjection of real life, with only one falling off the grid after a good six months' worth of sessions. We have recruited two more random strangers online to join in and carry on the adventure for perhaps a few sessions more.

It is the players who make a campaign succeed as much as it is the GM - it is they, after all, who grant the GM the 'right' to make a ruling and carry the story on. The world's greatest GM would only be able to run a very poor adventure if their players took no notice of their storytelling.

So, as much as anything else, my thanks go out to my players.

The Lost Mine of Phandelver, from my experience, is a good campaign for those GMs with a propensity for over-preparation. It's divided into suitable chapters, each of which, after a read through of the whole adventure, can be read and digested separately on an individual basis so that the aspiring game master doesn't feel overwhelmed at the prospect of mass information retention.

What it could do with, though, is some advice for the newbie GM on how to cater for larger or smaller groups. I had five players saunter through most of the first two chapters, until I decided to go through the rest of the maps on Roll20 and add more monsters to provide a bit more of a challenge. I also had to up the power levels of the various boss fights ** to rescue the conclusion of various chapters from being anticlimatic duds. I have since discovered a tool which might have made life a bit easier.

The five players created their own characters for this campaign, discussing amongst themselves possible backstories and coming up with a group of drop outs from a travelling circus. Interestingly, none were human and every single of one of them had darkvision. One wonders how much easier this made the adventure as a whole, what with the odds of being ambushed underground having been drastically reduced.

Combat and skill checks, after some initial teething issues, have proved nice and simple to work through. I'm happy with going on in the same vein in future campaigns. With regards to role playing and narration, however, I feel there is plenty of room for improvement. From little things like noting which voices I've improvised for which individuals, to shifting from NPCs as quest-giving devices to characters in their own rights - I think my role playing was adequate but not great.

Narration has improved over the sessions, but I need some prompts to make sure I go beyond sight and sound. Also some thesaurus reading, because I really need some more ways to describe the rustling of leaves in a breeze.

Overall, though, the campaign has (so far) been fun and enjoyable. I'll see how well these post-LMoP modules go before making any decisions about going homebrew- or module-based next time round.


* I would say conclusion, but having done exceedingly well all the way up to the last scene of the campaign, the party were unable to stop the arch villain from escaping, a variation the module itself does not take into account. So we are still going, now unfettered and unguided by a game designer's advice.

** Though even that can fall by the wayside if you can't pass a Wisdom save - in one gaming session which included the supposedly tough goblinoid boss of a keep I failed 14 out of 19 Wisdom saves, leaving all my toughest combatants either frozen in place or fighting for the wrong side...)

Humanities Professor

Another long-owned-but-never-painted figure, this one was either a birthday or Christmas present and has sat untouched for a long time.

I had intended for him to be an Indiana Jones-esque academic, so obviously he needed a hat. The selection on the Perry Civil War soldier sprue proved to be close enough in scale - I snipped one off and crammed it on the scalped head.

I experimented with a more wash-based approach on this fellow's clothes, which I don't think have been captured particularly well by my phone's camera. Perhaps the trousers need another layer of highlights. In person, however, I'm satisfied that they look sufficiently 'posh professor' for my purposes, if perhaps a tad bright. It was another use for the sepia wash, of which I am becoming particularly fond.

The Laden Traveller

I have had this chap sitting in my to-do pile for a good while now - he was part of my first order from Hasslefree Miniatures, all the way back in October 2013.

He has been given a range of different right arms, from his original pistol to cricket bats, before I finally settled upon configuring him as a character of indeterminate battle-readiness. His new arm comes from the Studio Miniatures zombie sprue - one of the few unarmed right hands I could find.

I'm still not particularly happy with the glasses, though I feel these fleshtone lenses work better than the white ones I've given some of the earlier miniatures.

More rebasings

Sleeping, database management, travelling on public transport - all these things are made more unpleasant with this heat (honest, Great Western Railways, where are your trains with functioning air conditioning?). To this list I add painting. No matter how wet my palette, the paint dries on the brush and the miniature before I can spread it across. I have spent half my painting time scraping off lumpy layers of paint with my fingernail over and over again.

Progress is therefore even slower than usual on the painting front.

So, back to rebasing the back catalogue of zombie hunters with a view to utilising them in some modern pulp games: