Map Bonanza

Mwahahahahahahaha!

Status Rings

Friggin' finally I can put these up on the shop.  At the start of each year I have a list of all the items I'd like to develop into product lines that year.  Most of them get put up in the relative slow period during Jan and Feb but there's occasionally a little hanger-on that takes a lot longer for one reason or another.  This year these were that "hanger-on".  Not for many technical reasons but mostly just because I always had something else I was working on.  Some other prototype or order for a client took priority.  One upshot of that is I've been playtesting these since April or May and they're a marked improvement on the old square tokens.  Being able to drape the ring around a mini helps a lot but even when the mini doesn't work for that they sit under the mini quite nicely too.  Being able to carry them on any given loop saves a lot in labor and materials too, which is a large part of how these are about half the price of the condition tokens now that they're up on the shop!

Map, Soulvale

The client was a player for a DM who hadn't yet mapped their campaign.  So we knew some of the names and rough locations but not how they related to one another or what they should look like.  So the client suggested we plot their homebrew locations over the map for the Broken Isles in WoW (because they had the same number of "zones" I think).  That actually worked out pretty well.  I'd've been just fine drawing up a land mass from scratch but adapting the terrain I know quite well from my time as a Tauren Drood was a lot of fun.

Map, Terna

When I listed the Adventurer Maps I wasn't sure how many orders I'd get where the clients provided their own maps.  This was the first and other than replacing the text (it didn't survive the processing for the engraving) the map is just as the client drew it.

Wallet of Devouring

Remember that Bag of Holding?  The client liked that so much they put in an order for a Wallet designed after it's infamous cousin: the Bag of Devouring.  We used the same basic construction (milled veg-tan shell, canvas lining) for a tri-fold clutch wallet with space for cards, cash, change, and the client's cell phone.  I might've added a little more space for the cards or tightened the elastics for the phone a bit more on the whole I think it came out pretty well.

Map, Riverdale

When I first heard the client wanted a map of Riverdale I thought of the eponymous comic/TV series but it turns out it's also a neighborhood in central Toronto.  I tried a few new tricks with the drafting of this map (dashed line rail roads, graze engraving trees/parks, etc) that I think worked fairly well.  There was a railroad yard that I removed early on because it was cluttering up that area of the map but in hindsight I think it might've been worth cleaning up and keeping.

Map, Waterdeep Topography

After the headache that was my first attempt at a topographical map of the City of Splendors I wasn't exactly eager to take another swing at it.  But after investing all that time and material I'd rather have something to show for it rather than a "Don't Do This" lesson.  It took about a day to rejigger the files and drafts to work with the plywood and I scaled the map down a touch to reduce the number of segments I'd working with.  And I'm glad I went through the trouble because the result is excellent!

I fixed the whole thing on a 1x2' piece of MDF that I painted and sealed to look all water-y.  My signature's looked better but it was just a goofy personal project at the time.  The plywood engraves wonderfully though and all the text (even the teeny tiny street names) is pretty readable if you get up close.  All the tiny details (like the sea caves or trees beneath Cliffwatch) came out really well.  I was close to inverting the image (so the streets would be burned down beneath the buildings, sort of like a relief carving) but seeing the final result I think this was the right way to go.  Cool as having the buildings stand up above the streets would be, it would also mean the buildings were semi-fragile white bits over black streets and it just doesn't quite look right.

It's been a little while since this has been up over our game table and it's been pretty handy to point at (with laser pointers) while we're planning where to go in the city.  So handy that I decided I may as well add it to the shop!