Category: Tokens and Assets

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The Thronebrazing Kit – Also, the Foundry Module is now online.

Do you use Foundry? Are you dissatisfied with how small Brazenthrone is and wish you could make more of it? If you answered no to both, there’s nothing here for you, feel free to go about your day.

Foundry first. Here’s the manifest URL so you can install it the grown up way: http://modules.milbysmaps.com/MMPublic/module.json

That’s all.

On to Brazenthrone. I was asked about making assets to allow people to create new chambers of the city. I said, sure, I can put a few things together for you. Then I just went completely overboard and, next thing I know, I’m clipping stuff out of a dozen different maps, saying, “Better get that duplex hammer, you never know if someone’s gonna need one of those.”

So, here’s 80 or so assets. These include the ones I made previously and some new ones. There are empty chambers, floors and walls that tile seamlessly and an assortment of various other stuff. It should be enough to let you smash something together in Photoshop, anyway. The person asking for these said he was interested in making a Dungeondraft asset pack out of them, so there are 256ppi versions for that as well. By the way, let me know if there’s anything else you need for that.

Okay, that’s all for now. I’m going to bed.

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Map Module for Foundry (and a note about Roll20)

Here’s the Foundry VTT pack I promised. Actually, it’s not the pack I promised, it’s a lot more than that. Here’s the story: I was getting a few maps ready to export from Roll20 to Foundry, using a campaign on my friend Luke’s Roll20 account. I export everything, expecting three maps to come out the other side. Instead, I get sixty maps. Huh?

Oh, these must be the archived maps. I look through them and they’re ALL set up for dynamic lighting. Manually, by Luke. There’s Skywatch. There’s Tortuga. There’s FINBARR’S MARSH.

So I send Luke an email that begins with “HOLY MOTHER OF GOD” and I ask if I can share these all with you. He says, “Of course.” Also, he apparently has more. He then proceeds to copy over a few more from his other campaigns. So there are around 70 maps in this module, including almost everything other than Brazenthrone and Mont-St-Michel. He even threw in the tokens, some DM notes and some pre-generated characters. This was not a small amount of work on his part.

All the maps in there are the free web versions. I give Luke access to my patron content, but he doesn’t use the VTT versions, so all the maps are free already. If you want to use the VTT versions, you should be able to just replace the map image with the 70px VTT map and the lighting should work the same.

So, after getting all this together, there’s one thing that’s been driving me nuts. I want to give this stuff to Roll20 users too, but… I can’t. This stuff was MADE on Roll20. Luke set up the walls, doors and lighting on Roll20. And I can export it from Roll20 to Foundry, but I can’t export it from Roll20 to Roll20?! Are you kidding me?

I’d love to be wrong about this and, if you know how I can share these, please let me know. I can’t export the wall lines like I did with the other maps recently because they have to be made in a specific way to do that. So, I apologize to Roll20 users who feel left out here. I really do want to give you this stuff and, should that become possible, I will do it in a heartbeat. But the tools to do it don’t currently exist.

Should you feel that having these pre-lit maps is very important to you, there is a nuclear option: The Converter. I used it to convert these maps from Roll20 to Foundry, but it does a lot more than that. I am not telling you that you should do this, but I feel like I should point out the existence of this piece of software for those who may be considering it already.

Anyway, I hope this is useful to you! If there’s anything I screwed up while making this compendium (and there’s no way there isn’t, haha) please let me know!

EDIT: I couldn’t get the Great Hall in there, but this should do it. Make a scene with a 70px grid, place the image, then right-click the scene and select import data. Import the text file. You may have to place the image as a tile, not as the background image for it to work. I’m not sure why, I’m still new to this.

EDIT 2: The Route Finder module may cause problems with this for reasons unknown. If you’ve got it installed and Foundry is bugging out, try deactivating it.

 

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The Leviathan of Tyria – Everyone’s Edition

I’m making all the patron content for this map free for everyone. I’m pretty proud of this absolute monstrosity of a ship. I made a ton of stuff for it and I want you all to have it. You can download everything from my Google Drive here.

So, let’s talk about this gigantic boat. The Leviathan of Tyria is a catamaran (two-hulled) warship which is powered by both rowers and sails. Armed with rams, artillery and a complement of marines, it is dangerous both up close and at range. In addition, the Leviathan carries four gunboats on board which it can deploy in battle to surround and distract enemies.

I made three versions of this ship to help it fit into everyone’s game. The first is armed with gunpowder weapons, the second is armed with ballistas and the third has neither, allowing you to customize the ship’s weapon loadout as you see fit. There are artillery tokens included to customize it on VTTs, as well as copy-and-paste-able artillery to modify the print versions of the map.

The pre-armed versions have around 25 guns/ballistas each. You can add more if needed, but before you turn the Leviathan into a 120-gun ship-of-the-line, let me suggest that you count how many D20s you own. I’m not saying you shouldn’t arm it to the teeth, just shop around for a dice rolling app before you have to start making hit rolls.

Here are the DM notes and the annotated version of the gunpowder Leviathan. Everything else is in the link above. Have fun with it!

There’s one more thing I wanted to mention: my wife is raising money for a charity called LauraLynn Children’s Hospice and I told her I’d post a link on my site in case anyone wanted to donate. I know this has been a tough year for most people and children’s hospices are kind of a super depressing thing to bring up, but they do important work and, if 2020 has been merciful enough that you can afford to donate, I’m sure they’d appreciate it.

I can’t think of a way to transition from that back to maps without it being awkward, so let’s just do it. Next up is Greenstone Hall, one of the four remaining chambers of Brazenthrone. It’s a small residential district which shouldn’t take long. After that, I’ll be drawing draw last month’s Cartographic Congress winner, a hanging wizard’s tower built into a stalactite. Or a stalagmite? The one that points down.

Anyway, hope you like the ship! If you’ve got any questions about it, just ask!

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Whiskey Point

Here’s an alternate version (explained below) and a ballista token I made for no specific reason.

Whiskey Point is a ruined fort and lighthouse which has been reclaimed by pirates, who patched it up and now run a black market from inside its walls. Other pirates come here to fence their loot and have a few drinks before getting back to work.

The alternate version only has one difference: at the top of the lighthouse, instead of a pyre, there’s a crystal. In this version, the idea is that the lighthouse is actually an arcane weapon that fires powerful beams of light. Should you use this version of the map? Look, I’m not trying to tell anyone how to run their game, but I just want to say two words to you, okay? Just two. Laser pirates.

Next up is Brazenthrone‘s Mushroom Farms. It won’t just be a cave full of mushrooms. It’s also where most of the city’s breweries are. And it’s where all the city’s funerals are held, since it’s the farthest downriver and the dwarves of Brazenthrone do Viking-style funerals. That’s where the deceased is placed on a boat, then the boat is lit on fire and sent down the river. Dwarves aren’t known for their love of boats, but they do live under a mountain and they can’t have dead people stinking up the place.

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All those dungeons and not a single dragon until today.

 

You can download the tokens from Google Drive or from patreon.

If you were in need of tokens for dragons or flying mounts, you should be all set. Personally, I haven’t used a dragon in my game in a pretty long time. Like, years at least. I mean, sure, dragons are cool and all, but they’re not as essential to D&D as the name would have you believe. Dungeons? You do usually need those. Dragons? Highly optional.

Anyway, I’m gonna get back to work on Brazenthrone! Hope you like the tokens!

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All the tokens I’ve made for my game and a few more.

Download all the tokens or just the new ones.

These are all the tokens I’ve made since my game went online in April. The second image is the new ones. I don’t know how useful a lot of them are going to be for a lot of people, but if you really, REALLY needed a token of a horse-drawn sleigh, well, you’re welcome.

My game is going to some pretty strange places. I’m running the Illithiad trilogy and I’m currently on the second part, Masters of Eternal Night. Basically, the players need to go to a crater, dig up an old spelljammer and get it running again so they can blow up a mind flayer death star. They’re going to meet some Gith, kill a giant alien spider and get chased around by some mind flayers in a sleigh. Hopefully no one gets their brain eaten by Tentacle Santa, but we’ll see.

The Great Garden is all drawn and inked and I should have it colored and done in a couple days. Until then!

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JRR TOKEN

Here are the tokens.

I’m running a 2e module called “A Darkness Gathering,” which… hang on a second–

*SPOILER ALERT*

Right, let’s just get that out of the way. So, it’s the first of a three-part series of modules where the party discovers a mind flayer plot to darken all the suns in the universe. It’s actually quite a bit more complicated than that, but that’s the gist of it.

So, in the first part, the players discover the plot. In the second, they have to find and repair an illithid spelljammer. And in the third, they travel to the mind flayers’ homeworld, find an artifact, kick in the door of the sun-destroying machine and blow it up. Then they walk away from the explosion in slow motion. Wearing sunglasses.

It’s a great story and I’ve wanted to run it for a long time. And now I am. Feels good man.

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More tokens from my game. The party is in Chult, which means we are go for dinosaur cavalry.

These tokens are huge spoilers for my game, but I’ve banned my players from my site and my patreon so I can give them to you. Download them from my patreon here or from my Google Drive.

The party is deep in the jungles of Chult, having just found their way to the Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan. If you’re running that, this is nearly all the tokens you need, by the way. The dinosaur cavalry is something I made for an encounter along the way. The party’s paladin is a jungle dwarf who worships Thard Harr and he just got Find Steed, so I decided to give him a deinonychus, which is the smaller of the dinosaurs up there. It’s powerful, sure, but it’s one of those things that’s going to be much less of a big deal in a few levels. Plus, I’m a very stingy DM when it comes to magic items, so there’s room to do stuff like this.

My philosophy with magical stuff is, when I give the party an item, I want it to be meaningful and I want them to feel special for having it. I don’t want a player to check if this magic sword is better than their current magic sword. I want them to go, “Holy crap, I have a magic sword!”

While I don’t give the PCs magic items often, when I do, they are the hotness and I don’t think it underpowers the party much. One side effect is that everyone can get through their turns quicker in combat because they know what their options are. It takes forever when players have to look over a thousand different options every turn because their gloves can cast three different spells, their axe can cast two, their ring can cast four and their other ring lets them do some other crap.  When a player only gets a new item every 6-8 sessions at most, they have time to learn what it does and they can keep track of their options more easily. The barbarian isn’t the only one who can get through their turn in under a minute (“Groknar frenzy. Groknar smash monster with axe forty-seven times. Groknar finished”).

Anyway, that’s how I handle it. I’m interested to hear your thoughts about it if you have any or if you do things differently and it works out for you.

The High Temple of Mystra is coming along. It’s about halfway inked and it should be done by the weekend. It’s a big one. All right, I’m gonna get back on it!

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My first VTT session went great! Also, here’s the tokens I made for my next session.

 

First, here are the tokens.

All in all, it felt a lot like DMing offline. Previously, my impression was that Roll20 was much more automated than it is. But it mostly just rolls dice and adds modifiers. You’ve got to determine if the rolls succeed or fail, add or subtract hp and do pretty much everything else yourself, which I like. Thanks again for everyone’s advice! I’m sure it wouldn’t have gone nearly as smoothly without your tips.

So, I made these tokens for my next session. They’re kind of a weird selection, I know, but they’re what I need. The goblin is a character you might remember if you’ve ever run LMoP: Droop. My players made friends with him and now he’s, like, their mascot or something. I made some goblin tokens before, but I needed an unarmed goblin. Droop is a lover, not a fighter.

The bear is actually for the druid. She took the shapeshifting path and she’s able to turn into a brown bear early, which means… well, she gets some work done. After she slaughtered her way through Cragmaw Castle, I described her as looking like the back seat of the car in Pulp Fiction. So the bloody one is her: nature’s brutal killing machine.

Originally, I just drew one stirge, but they’re tiny and I decided that only letting one fight in a 5-foot area seemed crazy, so I made a flock. I’m putting three of those things on one tile and if the D&D police want to lock me up for it, they can come and get me.

I’m working on the next map, which is based on the library of Gravenhollow from Out of the Abyss. It’s supposedly so complex and changing that it’d be impossible to make a map of it. Challenge accepted. After that, Brazenthrone.