Monthly Archives: August 2010

Color My World: Painting Miniatures

Just recently I’ve rediscovered the art of painting miniatures. I’d dabbled with it in high school and again in college, but I was never really happy with my results. At that time, before the Internet, it was difficult to find information on how to paint minis and I was reduced to trial and error, since no one else I knew did it.

Not so anymore. With the Internet, there’s a wealth of mini painting resources available. Here’s some the ones I really like:

  • Brushthralls.com. This is a blog devoted to miniature painting. While it hasn’t been updated since 2009, it’s still has a lot of great articles available.
  • Cool Mini or Not. This is a forum for miniature painters. They have a slew of articles on just about every aspect of painting you can think of.
  • Dr. Faust’s Painting Clinic. Offers a whole slew of painting tutorials from highlights and shading to creating believable flesh tones to basic sculpting.
  • How to Paint Miniatures.com. Just as the name says, this site will take you step-by-step through painting miniatures. Offers both beginning and advanced tutorials.
  • Jenova Project: Tips and Tutorials. Has a variety of painting tutorials, including recipes for creating various skintones.
  • Miniature Mentor. If you like video tutorials, this might be the site for you. They offer both beginning and advanced to tutorials for download and some on DVD for an extra charge. I haven’t tried any of them yet, so I can’t vouch for how good they are.
  • Necromancer Tales Miniatures: Tutorials, How-To, and Tips. Has a variety of tutorials, including several on building great bases for your minis to stand on.
  • Painting Miniatures Figures Made Quick and Easy. While aimed at the miniature wargamer, who wants to turn out whole regiments as quickly as possible, this site is still a great tutorial for the basics, even if your minis are one at a time labors of love.
  • Reaper Miniatures: The Craft. The granddaddy of miniature makers has a whole host of articles on their site. One of my favorites is on how to replace those gigantic swords.
  • The Ultimate Miniature Painting Guide. Offered by Cool Mini or Not, this is a PDF book of 400+ pages. While it could’ve desperately used some good copy editing (there are places I’ve had to guess the author’s meaning), it’s chock full of great mini painting advice, covering everything from preparing your miniature to painting to making bases to photographing your minis. At $10, it’s a book that’d be a steal at twice the price.

[Photo courtesy of dalangalma at Flikr Creative Commons]

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Beyond ‘Fred’: Ancient Egyptian Names

Sometimes the hardest part of building a character is  coming up with a good name. You can always take a name from Tolkien or other fantasy novels, but you’ve seen those names over and over and you want something a little different, but not way out there. How about an historical name? Or one from a different culture? So far in this series, we’ve covered Roman, Russian, Italian, and Anglo-Saxon names. If none of these suit you, how about an Ancient Egyptian one?

Ancient Egyptian Name Structure

Names in ancient Egypt seen to have been chosen with great care for their meaning. Many contained the name of a god, as well as common words or phrases and could be used by either men or women. In some cases, as needed for identification, a person might be known by two names: one as their formal name and another, which was what they were called most of the time.

As with all posts in this series, the list here isn’t intended to be historically accurate. It’s merely providing suggestions for use with role-playing games. If historical accuracy is important, you’ll want to check your name against reliable historical records.

(Photo courtesy of Flickr, ©isawnyu 2010)

Male Names

  • Abi
  • Ahmose
  • Amenemhet
  • Ahmose
  • Bes
  • Den
  • Djet
  • Hekanakht
  • Heru
  • Horemheb
  • Kamose
  • Menes
  • Metesouphis
  • Nebnefer
  • Neferirkare
  • Padiu
  • Pakamen
  • Pakapu
  • Panhsj
  • Seti
  • Siptah
  • Ti

Female Names

  • Achotep
  • Ahori
  • Amenirdis
  • Beset
  • Cena
  • Henut
  • Hetepet
  • Iutenheb
  • Khentkaus
  • Meritnit
  • Mutemwia
  • Mutnodjmet
  • Naunakht
  • Nefertari
  • Nitocris
  • Nithotep
  • Peseshet
  • Rennefer
  • Sacmis
  • Sekhet
  • Senen
  • Sobkneferu
  • Taiemniut
  • Tawaret

Sources

Other Beyond Fred Posts

Class Is in Session: Running a Convention Teaching Game

Game conventions are a great place to introduce new players to your favorite system. But running a game designed to teach a new system is a bit differently than running a game for experienced players. For one thing, you can’t assume that the new player knows anything about the system you’re running–even what type of die to use, if any. Also, you’ve somehow got to do a quick over-view of the rules without boring your players to tears and yet also manage to complete your scheduled adventure.

It’s a lot to juggle. Below are some steps to help you successfully pull off a teaching game. These steps don’t have to be limited to convention games; they’re also useful if you’re running a demo at a game shop or even trying to convince your regular group to try that new game you bought and are dying to run.

  1. Always use pre-generated characters. I’ve yet to see a successful teaching game which started with the players creating their characters. I’m sure someone’s done it, but it does make teaching the game much, much harder. With pre-gen characters, not only do you save valuable play time, but you can also plan your adventure around those specific characters.
  2. Create “iconic” characters. Teaching games aren’t the place for off-beat or unusual character ideas. If you use archetypal  (or even cliché) characters, players can spend less time figuring out their motives and more time learning the game itself.
  3. Don’t make your players add. The other good thing about using pre-generated characters is that you can do as much of  the math ahead of time as possible. You want to be able to tell a player to “roll a d20, then add your BAB [marked in large numbers on the character sheet] to it.” As much as possible, try to keep your players from having to add more than two or three numbers together at a time.
  4. Prepare “cheat sheets” or “quickstart” versions of the rules, if the game company doesn’t provide them. I always make a one to two page summary of a game’s basic rules so the players have something they can refer to while playing.
  5. Consider creating character packets. I create an information packet for each character that contains the character sheet, any relevant character background, written descriptions of the character’s powers, and a brief summary of the game’s setting and background. It seems like a lot, but if you limit the background information to its most crucial elements, your players will thank you for putting what they need to know right at their fingertips.
  6. Simplify the mechanics. Strip away anything not absolutely critical. You want new players to get a feel for the system, not bog them down with modifiers and exceptional cases.
  7. Plan to spend the first quarter of the session explaining the game and its basic concepts. Here you want to focus on the essence of the game, not the mechanics. Sure, do a real-quick mechanics run-down (I usually go through the cheat-sheet), but spend most of this time going over the character sheet and game background and answering player questions.
  8. Tell players to hold their questions until after your explanation. If you’ve done a good game introduction, you may find you’ve already answered the players’ questions. This also helps prevent you from getting bogged down in player questions and having time to finish your introduction.
  9. Begin with a bang. Start your adventure with the PCs in the middle of something: they’re in the car on the way to the haunted house; they’re trapped in a burning building; they’ve just been locked in a room with a group of people, one of whom is murderer. Unless you’re running Tales from the Floating Vagabond, try to avoid the “You’re sitting in a bar…” opening.
  10. Do the  math for them. Try to handle as much of the mechanics yourself as possible. You want to give players a feel for the game, not bog them down with situational modifiers. Let the players roll dice, but add the modifiers yourself and describe the results to the player in words, not numbers. Sometimes you need to give the player numbers, but try to serve them with some descriptions as well: “You’re knocked back against the wall as your opponent’s blade rips through your shirt, drawing blood and pinning your sleeve to the wall. Take 8 points of damage.”
  11. Be flexible. Keep an eye on the clock. If your game is running over time, try to bring it to a conclusion, even if it’s not the one you’d originally planned. You may need to improvise scenes or cut some out. Allow the players to ask questions about the game, but try to keep them focused to the adventure at hand.
  12. Get feedback. If you’ve got time after you finish the adventure, ask for player feedback. What did they need the most help with? What game concepts need to be made clearer? Is there anything that should’ve been covered in the introduction that wasn’t. That type of thing. Really listen to what the players say and, if need be, modify your introduction and information packets accordingly.

This steps should help you teach new game systems to players successfully, particularly when you have a short amount of time to do it in, such as at a game convention. Please feel free to leave comments letting me know if I’ve left anything out or need to improve something.

The Collected Beg, Borrow & Steal Now Available

The Collected Beg, Borrow & Steal is a PDF eBook containing the first ten issues of the Beg, Borrow & Steal newsletter. More than just a reprint of the newsletters under one cover, the information in this book has been edited and reformatted to make it easier to read and use. Also included is a new list: “20 Magical Curios” that is unavailable anywhere else. This book contains

  • Campaign Control Journal
  • 14 Last-Minute Tips to Customize a Published Adventure.
  • 20 Magical Curios for Fantasy Games
  • On-line GMing Resources
  • How to Age Paper
  • Game Money
  • 9 Ways to Use PC Dreams
  • Unstick the Stumped with Bibliomancy
  • Tips for Creating Memorable NPCs on the Fly
  • 20 Unusual City Encounters
  • 20 Unusual Wilderness Encounters

For an example, check out the 20 Unusual City Encounters post.  The cost for the eBook is only $7 (US dollars)

You can purchase it by clicking the button below:

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Teaching the Game: August Blog Carnival

First off, thanks to Mad Brew Labs for hosting the July carnival on Growing the Hobby. It really got some great discussion going. This month’s carnival actually (and inadvertently) extends that discussion. Much of the consensus about growing the hobby focused on how we, as RPG players and GMs, need to teach our games to as many new players as we can. This month, I take that one step further and ask how do we teach them?

I’d originally intended to call this “Passing it Down” and focus on children and roleplaying, but then I realized that was only one type of new RPG player. So this month, I want to focus on the hows and wherefores of teaching RPGs to new players, whether they be adults or children, people just joining their first game or people who’ve been playing for decades learning a new system.

Here’s some possible questions to get you going:

  • How do you find new players?
  • How do you help them learn the mechanics of a system (and how much of the system do you require them to learn?)
  • How do you teach the non-mechanics part of the game?
  • How do you teach someone to GM?
  • What’s the best beginner system?
  • What’s the best system for teaching roleplaying to kids?
  • How do you run games for kids?
  • What was your first game like? How could it have been better?
  • Should roleplaying be taught in the schools?
  • Do you play with your own kids?
  • Are all-kid game groups better than adult-kid mixed groups?

And, of course, anything else you can think of.

I’ve always enjoyed teaching games and most of the convention games I’ve run have been designed to introduce new players the whatever system I’m running. Later this month I’ll post my techniques on running a teaching game. I’m looking forward to seeing your posts; just put the URL of your post in the comments section below and at the end of the month, I’ll do a wrap-up post listing everyone’s contributions.