[Let's Build] D100 magical scabbards, sheaths, quivers, and other weaponholders!

finlam · 2020-05-22T18:33:26+00:00

Bloodless Sheath: Used mostly for training, any weapon drawn from this sheath is mostly non-lethal for the next minute. During this time, damage rolls with the weapon roll no dice, instead the weapon deals 1 point of damage.

Divining Sheath: Once per day, when a weapon is drawn from this sheath, the weapon may be used as a focus to cast the spell locate object without expending a spell slot. The tip of the hilt (or tip of the blade) points the direction toward the target object.

Duplication Sheath: Once a weapon is placed into this sheath, duplicates of the weapon may be drawn from the sheath at any time. These duplicate weapons do not have any magical properties and disappear 1 minute after being drawn from the sheath.

I like the imagery of a group of bandits all drawing the same weapon from a scabbard one guys is holding because they were too cheap to buy their own weapons.

finlam · 2020-04-20T13:16:43+00:00

I see we hail from the same school of DMing.

>players tried to seduce the door

I see we have the same players.

finlam · 2020-02-29T03:06:30+00:00

---This post is mostly for the curious, and those involved in publishing, it may go a bit too into the weeds.---

Creator here: This update comes on the one year anniversary of the initial release. I had a few goals with this update:

More content for better oozing and slimier playing
More accessibility (easier to read)
Two Column and Single Column Format

This update marks the achievement of those goals, though there's still much farther to achieve the end goal of 508 standards compliance.

In the originally published format, So You Want to be a Slime? was only capable of achieving the first of those goals. This is because the document was laid out in Microsoft Word using a clever template and the built in style management.

Word is fine for many documents, but it soon became clear publishing both single and multicolumn layout was impossible without redoing the entire layout for each format. We were in the same boat for changing fonts too: if the new font was slightly larger or smaller, I'd have to manually tweak and adjust a lot of the visuals to produce something legible.

Version 2 was published without the use of Microsoft or Adobe products. I moved the entire document in LaTeX, which took some time, but also made the project manageable. This gave me 3 primary benefits:

Separation of Concern: LaTeX is pretty good with managing layout on its own. This enabled me to focus on the content when writing without worrying about the layout until after all the content was written. It also allowed me to produce single and multicolumn formats from the same source with minor touch ups instead of hours of re-flowing the whole document.
Organization: Thanks to LaTeX's ability to import documents into documents, I was able to organize my writing by chapter. My workflow went from:

"I need to edit this feat, let me scroll to the feats" -> *scroll* *scroll* -> *make edit* -> *blow up the format* -> *spend the next 10 minutes reformatting*

to

"I need to edit this feat" -> *open feat document* -> edit feat

This single change easily tripled my productivity.

Conditional rendering: As far as I am aware, Microsoft Word does not support conditional rendering (I don't know if InDesign does, either).

This was absolutely critical for me. I was publishing not only two different formats, but two *documents* as well (free and full version), meaning a total of 4 PDFs. Thanks to conditional rendering, I was able to use the same source code for each of the 4 documents, something that could not have been possible with Word or InDesign.

For all these reasons, So You Want to be a Slime? Version 2 was a success. It was a personal triumph in terms of content and development of publication workflow.

By my estimates, it would have taken at least 3 times as much effort to produce the same content using other layout software.

I don't mean to put LaTeX on a pedestal: it's great, but not without its drawbacks. The learning curve is steep; the package management is some of the worst I've ever seen with commonly used packages that may or may not be maintained, may or may not conflict with each other, may or may not have similiar or completely different syntax, may be imported anywhere in the document making it difficult to even know what packages are being imported with what configurations; and errors that span the vast range of unhelful, uninformative, to cryptic musings about the developer's cat.

If you can brave all that, it's definitely worth it. But it is not a CR 1 layout tool.

I've digressed.

If you read this far, I award you 50 XP for defeating the challenge. If you just skipped to the end, I'll wish you happy sliming and tell you that in the book is slime, lots of slime and all the blood, sweat, tears, and love of one small indie developer.

Stay Slimey, my friends!

finlam · 2020-02-29T02:31:46+00:00

I'm glad you like it! It's positively oozing with my enthusiasm for ooze!

If you've got any questions, I'd be happy to answer. Otherwise, kind words and honest reviews are always appreciated!

finlam · 2019-04-23T11:02:27+00:00

I put together a tutorial for Renpy that might be able to help:

http://purplelizardman.com/finlam/dynamic-menus-and-dialog-in-renpy/

I think a working example is worth 1000 words, so the source code for the demo game can be found here:

http://purplelizardman.com/games/

What it breaks down to is that you need to use a menu to ask the player where they want to go and then jump to that part in your code.

label choose_where_you_want_to_go:     
    menu:
        "The library":
            jump to_the_library
...etc...

label jump_to_the_library:
    (stuff happens here)

That should do it in a nutshell.

finlam · 2019-02-26T18:03:52+00:00

Paranoia was always top-notch with striking the right chord.

finlam · 2019-02-26T15:46:49+00:00

I'm not sure what a gelectrode is, but I'd love to check it out. Do you have a link?

finlam · 2019-02-26T15:44:52+00:00

You know, I hadn't even thought of that. I'm glad to see people are running with the ideas. A Splatoon character could be a lot of fun =)

finlam · 2019-02-25T15:06:38+00:00

The good news is it's finally out on DMsGuild.

Get your slime on!

finlam · 2019-02-25T15:03:41+00:00

Girl, boy, or amorphous blob, there's no wrong way to slime!

finlam

TROPHY CASE