[Art & Warcraft Stuff] October 2024

[jordangreywolf]

"Fancy" Ramen
A bowl of instant ramen "fancied" up with some vegetable bits. Another recipe article doodle.

This is influenced by the "research" Gwendel and I have done in our visits to local ramen shops and our attempts to "fancy up" ramen noodle packs fixed up at home. XD



Ironforge Rumbledethumps
"Rumbledethumps." I've got to love the name. Here, a Scottish dish has been repurposed to be "dwarven" for a recipe article for an imaginary newspaper. It's got cabbage in it, by the way.



Khaz Algar Rock Candy
Rock candy from Khaz Algar (perhaps a little literal on the "rock" part, so organics beware). Doodle for another silly recipe article for an imaginary newspaper. (Is it still a foodstuff if it's actual crystal? Well, the earthen eat it, I guess.)

For the background hexagonal sparkles I used Photoshop's "Define Brush" option, after using the polygon tool to make a 6-sided polygon. I then set the brush to pen-pressure-sensitive size setting, tilted the axis, and set spacing to super-high so I could "stipple" with the brush rather than smearing it. I then made a few layers in the background with the brush, either in Normal, or Screen or Overlay, and used Gaussian Blur to haze each layer out to varying degrees in hopes of giving an impression that SOMETHING crystalline is going on back there (but conveniently blurred so I don't have to spend all day detailing it).

Trying to draw the crystal in the foreground was a bit tough since I can't draw a straight line to save my life. Sure, I can get a passable line in Photoshop if I click one point with the brush, then hold down SHIFT and click to another, but when I'm working with size-pressure-sensitivity, it's pretty random just how thick the line is going to be. I tried rotating the crystal to align top-down and tried working in a bunch of vertical lines to suggest crystalline structures, but the look clashed pretty hard with the hand-drawn elements, so I ended up just scribbling away and hoping for the best, and then just rotated the "crystal" back askew when I was done. I'm sure there are better methods, but I haven't yet sorted them out (and the image always ends up shrunk down considerably to nearly thumbnail size anyway).




Gorgonzormu's Extra-Cheesy Gorgonburger
Gorgonzormu, master of time and cheese, is quite possibly my favorite dragon in the Warcraft franchise. What better use of Bronze Dragonflight time magic than to age cheese to perfection? Behold, the GORGONBURGER, the ultimate in cheesy cheeseburgers. ( :dragon-chef's kiss: )



2024 Critter Birthday Card
Okay, not Warcraft-related at all, but still food with that cake up front. It was time to do another birthday card for my niece. (My work on last year's birthday card was pretty rough -- I was calling my mom in the middle of working on the card for that year when ... things happened.) A big challenge is that I honestly just don't have much contact at all with either of my nieces, so I have no clue what they're up to. I do know, however, that they have pets. I don't, however, have photos of them -- except as blobs of fur snoozing in the background. I did at least get a picture from my sister of the dog's face (an older rescue dog, very scruffy), but I had to take wild guesses for the two cats (also rescue pets).

The typeface is "Swanky" from Font Diner. I use Fontdiner fonts a lot for my post-apoc billboards, posters, and signage as well.




Drivable Easter Eggs
I actually painted up quite a few "cyberpunk" cars this month, but I had particular fun with these little Zip cars from Fallout. I've previously assembled and painted (and semi-kitbashed) some Zips, but using fan-made STLs rather than the official ones (since those didn't exist yet at the time). Alas, the official models don't have interiors. I painted up the others as rusty hulks in various states of wreckage, so on a lark I figured I'd paint these up relatively "pristine" for variety. They could be additional cars on the street for a Cyberpunk setting and fit in reasonably well with the Antenocitus Workshop "Infinity" car designs, honestly, just with a little more retro vibe. On another whim, I decided to use a couple of pastel acrylics I rarely have a call for. Given the shape and pastels, I couldn't help but think of the resulting cars as reminiscent of Easter eggs.

STL link (Modiphius)



T-Wrex Billboard
I reused the "t-wrex" I drew for my niece's birthday card design a few years ago, and transformed it into a retro-futuristic post-apocalyptic billboard design, inspired by Ed "Big Daddy" Roth's "Drag Nut" monster model design for a Revell "Custom Monsters" model kit. I plan to use this as one of my interchangeable billboard inserts for my "That Florida Glow" campaign, to foreshadow the "T-Wrex" gang of mutant roadster-raiders rampaging along old US 19. In my alt-future, the FDOT continued its practice of "color-coding" US highways (whereas IRL in the 1990s onward, replacement signs had to be in federal standard black-and-white), so the T-Wrex gang has a red shield with a big "19" on it as part of their heraldry, along with depictions of the imaginary hot-rodding dino that serves as their mascot.



Golden Creme Delights Billboard
A revamp of my old "Golden Creme Delights" sign originally drawn for a Savage Worlds RPG adventure for the "Fearsome Critters" setting (a silly one where the PCs were all county animal control specialists working in a town where cryptozoology is a respectable and useful knowledge area).

With the retro vibe I went for, pop culture ideas that "Twinkies last forever," and so forth, I figured I could adapt this for "That Florida Glow."

I took my old image, repositioned and resized the snack cake image, did some touch-up work while changing proportions to fit my billboard frame, and then added the "FOREVER FRESH" (bogus trademark) element to hint at the possibility that our scavenger protagonists might run across some of these as technically edible (if not at all *healthy*) food caches in ruined grocery stores, bakeries, and perhaps even at the Golden Creme factory. Rather than being overrun by supernatural "fearsome critters," per the original RPG scenario, I can just sub in RADIATION and B-movie "science" to provide some mutant critters infesting the site.

Comments

[tuftears]

They do say radiation can help keep food from spoiling... (shifty sideways look)

That's got to be a pretty big burger!

[jordangreywolf]

That's got to be a pretty big burger!

Well, you know Warcraft cooking: you have to go slaughter 20 bruffalons in hopes of getting 10 units of meat to make 10 (or fewer) burgers. If the burgers are absolutely GINORMOUS and dragon-scaled, that makes a lot more sense, right? XD

[tuftears]

There's that, yeah. ^.^;; It makes sense if people are playing fire mages or something and incinerating the animals so there's very little actually edible left, but less so if a feral druid is doing the killing.

[jordangreywolf]

Of course, this same problem applies to lots of games. In Fallout games with survival mode turned on (I'm thinking either F:NV or FO4 here), you have to get food every few minutes (days go by fast in this game) to avoid starving, and killing a radstag or a brahmin will typically only net you enough meat for ONE meal. On the flip side, you may well be carrying around the combined meat of an entire HERD of brahmin after you've cleared out the entire zone of them, and storing them in a locked (unrefrigerated!) box somewhere without fear of spoilage, so there's a lack of realism all around -- but ultimately it seems to be geared toward "kill, loot, kill, loot, repeat umpteen bazillion times" because that's the gameplay.

I feel like if I were to do a tabletop RPG treatment, I'd have to change the dynamic considerably: combats take much longer to resolve and aren't dependent upon reflex timing and ACTION in quite the same way as a video game, and death is a lot more impactful (you can't just go back to the last "save point" and try again). Thus, for instance, the PCs shouldn't have to keep doing quests to go hunt animals to get food: one brahmin would likely provide a couple hundred pounds of meat at least. (IRL, a slaughtered cow might give you 500 lbs of meat, but I'm going to imagine that brahmin, living in the wasteland, are smaller and not quite as meaty.) The real challenge is going to be coming up with a suitable way to store and prep that meat, especially if you're traveling. Living on a "hunt for your meal each day" model would be more realistic with much smaller prey -- mutant jackalopes or giant cockroaches or giant molerats or the like, I think. It's just that THEN there's the lingering problem of accumulating "rads" in your system from eating irradiated foods. Also, unlike the video game, "Radaway" shouldn't be this disposable item you just take one action to consume and -- POOF -- your rad levels suddenly go down. The in-game model looks like an IV bag, and I would imagine it ought to be administered in similar fashion. The makers of the Fallout TV show would seem to agree, as the use of Radaway there seemed to be of a similar mode.

Ugh. It makes me wish someone already did all the work for me. XD It feels like I'm going to have to make a LOT of decisions about what sorts of things I need to track, and what ought to just be hand-waved for the sake of moving on with "the story." While it would be tempting to hand-wave SO MUCH (ammo counts, food, rads, illness, etc.), for an entry-level "scavenger" game my instinct is to think that at least at the beginning the PCs will be keeping tabs on every bullet, every bottle of purified water, every self-heating Salisbury Steak pack, etc. However, at some point, once they establish some resources (and until they make bad decisions or run into a spate of bad luck that robs them of same again), such as building or acquiring a still for the water, making arrangements with a local settlement for a supply of food, getting access to an armory for plenty of ammo -- then I might be able to go easy on tracking of certain details.

("For the time being, the fridge is well-stocked." And then it might change after the PCs accomplish a bunch of goals and get to a good position, but then story-wise we "fast forward" toward the next crisis that provides impetus for further adventuring -- such as the food stocks running low, gas running out, generator failing, etc.)

[tuftears]

I think I prefer the handwaving version versus having to track each meal. It'd be the way wealth works in some games; instead of having a number that goes down as players spend, you're arbitrarily saying that they can afford (in general) such and such standard of living, and you only invoke cash for items that provide in-game benefits e.g. equipment, consumables that buff combat performance, tools for crafting equipment.

You could have two versions of RadAway to account for the differences: the Instant RadAway is really an emergency field treatment to purify the body of recently suffered radiation (like from rad-scorpion bites) and won't do anything for long-term radiation exposure; the IV RadAway is something they need to administer over time e.g. overnight, and purges the body of aforementioned radiation.

But don't you already have Fallout campaign rules you've used in the past?

[jordangreywolf]

Re: Fallout Rules: I just have rules I put together for one-shots. The group seems to be interested in a more sandboxy campaign with exploration, gathering resources, scavenging the wasteland, etc. In other words, I got the sense that they WANT to count bullets and beans. XD At least at first. But what I was trying to say was that I have it in mind that while it makes sense when the PCs are complete novices with barely a piece of scrap to their names, each bullet and bean might make a difference, but once they become better established, my hope would be to begin to hand-wave some things.

I did that to some extent in my zombie apocalypse campaign with some house rules I added on top of the campaign. If the PCs successfully raided a hardware store for loot, and they had a wheelbarrow or maybe even a working car to put things in, then rather than taking inventory of each and every item they might scrape off the shelves, I let them designate one "cargo unit" worth of loot (provided they had the TIME to spend to load things up and weren't just doing a quick grab-and-run-from-zombies trip) at a time.

For instance: you have a working sedan. I declare that the trunk is one cargo unit, passenger space can be converted into cargo units on (for the sake of abstraction) a 1:1 basis. (One more cargo unit, one less seat available for someone to ride.) In special circumstances, you could extend it -- hitch a trailer to the back (small trailer = +1 cargo, medium trailer = +2 cargo, etc.), find a container to strap to the roof, or in desperate times you might just TIE ON something on the outside of the car and hope for the best, but if there are any mishaps (plowing through a zombie mob, getting in a crash, etc.) it's likely to be very vulnerable.

Each "cargo" might have (let's say) $500 worth of goods in game terms -- I'd keep a note with it as to what SORT of resource it is. E.g., "tools/supplies from hardware store" or "shelf-stable foods from grocery store." That could impact (GM's call) how valuable it's seen for trade -- some other survivors might be really desperate for foodstuffs, so they'd value the food cargo more than the abstract "$500" value. Or, because you've GOT several cargo units of food, I'm going to say that we simply don't need to worry about rummaging for food for the adventure until we hit some sort of major disaster (PCs abandon the car and their food supply for some reason) or a major time skip (time passes, you get to spend Advances, but a lot of that food goes away over time in exchange for you not being in a weakened/hungry state when the action starts up again).

The other use would be if the players suddenly realize they need a rope or flashlight or replacement batteries or an empty gas can or whatever, but nobody has it in their personal inventory. Oh, you cleared out a hardware store? Duct tape sounds like a pretty likely thing you'd grab, so sure, it's in there. You can essentially "buy" items (using starting gear buy list, or my best guess as GM) from the cache. Once the $500 pool runs out, then the cache is expended -- sure, far more than those SPECIFIC items you've pulled out would fill up a car trunk, but we'll just hand-wave the rest of the stuff as supplies that turned out not to be so useful after all, or you've been using it up in the meantime on other, off-camera things, or whatever. The cache is used up, and if you want more duct tape / whatever, you'll have to do some more looting or trading. The advantage is that you grab a bunch of unspecific things so we aren't saddled with as much bookkeeping and because it's hard to know EXACTLY what you'll need later on.

Now, if someone DOES want to be specific, that's legit. Let's say someone is speculating that TOILET PAPER will be absolutely essential after the apocalypse, and people at a well-situated settlement will trade good money (or food or bullets) for it later on, so let's cram that trunk full of as much toilet paper as we can possibly jam in there. That's cool, I'm not going to feel the need to "abstract" it any, or assign it a cache value. Similarly if someone is set on it being "as many Twinkies as possible." I'd be hard-pressed to figure out exactly how many that IS, so I'll be likely doing SOME sort of hand-waving about it, but I will try to roll with whatever the players want to do. Abstraction is supposed to make things easier -- not restrict the sorts of things the players are allowed to do beyond what would "make sense" in story context.

...

Anyway, sorry if that's something I've already hashed out before, but it's a certain amount of abstraction I already came up with for the zombie apoc campaign and plan to use for the "Florida" campaign, especially since one of the players wants to play a traveling merchant with a pack brahmin. Rather than requiring him to keep track of EXACTLY all the oddball items he has, I'd treat it as a "cargo unit," and if he acquires a Fallout-2-style wagon to pull behind it, likely a *second* cargo unit, in addition to whatever *specific* gear items he has on his person.

If the PCs get into a situation where they could load up on food to last them a good while (they successfully clear out a still-functioning MRE factory, run by robots, or they go on a hunting trip and bag some big game and have a *refrigerated* trailer they can haul along to keep the meat semi-fresh) then the consequence might be that they no longer have to worry about keeping their bellies full for a while. (Depending upon the food type, they still might rack up Rads along the way, but that's likely to be an ongoing struggle regardless. Of course, I need to be reasonable about it, or it will cause one to wonder why all the random NPCs are still alive and not yet ghoulified if it's SO HARD to find non-irradiated food and water sources.)

....

I really like the Rad-Away "instant vs. long-term" idea. It could be something like the "Golden Hour" in Savage Worlds -- where it's a whole lot easier to do "first aid" treatment on the scene, if you have a healer, and then we can just pretend that the injuries you took weren't that serious, but if you go on as "walking wounded," at some point we just assume it WAS a "real injury," and it's going to take serious recuperation (or miraculous healing) to deal with.

Maybe I could repurpose "Rad-X" that way. The exact difference between Rad-Away and Rad-X seems to vary depending upon Fallout game. More recently it's been that Rad-X is a preventative (I'm about to go into a radioactive area without a rad-suit, so I pop Rad-X right beforehand so I soak up Rads slightly more slowly), and Rad-Away is a curative (flushes Rads from your system after the fact). But I could treat Rad-X as the "instant/first-aid" version, as per your suggestion, and Rad-Away is for something that's gotten more distributed through your system.

I always found "preventatives" annoying in-game. I almost never used them, because the duration was stupidly short (time being super-accelerated and all) to the point where you really needed amazing foresight (or of course to have just died from radiation and then you reload the game from your last save point and try again, this time with Rad-X -- which amounts to much the same thing), AND the bonuses were just incremental rather than truly life-changing anyway. Instead, Rad-X just became something I'd collect while looting/scavenging because it was lightweight and had a good resell value to merchants, much like bullets sized for weapons I didn't use.

[tuftears]

Cargo units and '$X amount of goods' make sense! Savage Worlds is supposed to be "fast and furious" after all. ^.^

I concur re: preventatives, but one way you could cushion things is that a dose of Rad-X contains enough nano-whatevers to heal X amount of radiation, so you *could* take it ahead of time, or within a short enough time of incurring radiation, once you realize you're taking radiation damage. If you took less than X, then the remaining amount stays in your system for the next hour or so.

[jordangreywolf]

Well, I suppose one tweak I could make re: preventatives is to make sure the duration is extended significantly. In the game, time is so weirdly compressed. "How am I hungry again? It's only been 10 minutes since I last ate!" In theory, Rad-X could be useful to take before I'm going to poke around a ruin that may have pockets of radiation, but in practice searching an area can be pretty time consuming unless this is a REPLAY and I already know where everything is, so I'm going to have to popping those things every couple of minutes or so to keep the effect going. It's pretty annoying. For a tabletop game, if it's more like, "Rad-X will help you for the day," then it's good enough as a boost for an adventure session where the PCs go exploring some strange vault that might or might not have radiation hazards, but it probably won't be cheap enough or available enough in quantity that they would be taking it routinely every day during a cross-state journey.

Or ... well, at least having it last an hour would still be enough to do a lot of tasks and get through some fights with feral ghouls and "glowing ones" and such.