I’m always in a rush before my in-person D&D games. Draw the maps on the whiteboard, refresh myself on the adventure, sharpen my pencils, pack the bag, set off on the bike. One of the most time-consuming bits has been finding miniatures or making standees for the players and enemies. All the worse because it involves casting strange incantations over the printer to get it to work.
Too often, I’ve resorted to using blank plastic standees that I can write on with a whiteboard marker – usually with the initials of the monster or bad guy. But the players just don’t gasp in the same way when you plonk down a white bit of plastic with an O on it. Much better to surprise them with something that looks the part.
That’s why I’ve made You’ve been Pawned – a simple tool that you can throw a bunch of images at and will reliably produce a page of standees to print. It should work in most Desktop browsers – if not let me know and I’ll try to fix. I find it really easy to get Bing Images (or other friendly AI) to make a few fun characters and to drop them into this tool. With a bit of help from the laminator and some scissors, I can make a whole session’s worth of characters in one go.
I use some of these whiteboard friendly blank game board markers from Amazon to hold up my standees. I think they work pretty well, and I particularly like that there are plenty of colours so I can throw a bunch of Orcs on the table and not get confused between them.
It’s also the first real bit of programming I’ve done for a while. Elm is my go-to language for making this kind of browser tool – something built primarily to work for me, but that other people might find useful. I find something playful about the language/architecture – it lets me get experimenting on the important bit of the problem right away, knowing that in the future I can lean on the type system to help me reorganise the code safely. And I find reactor-type code much easier to deal with than async/await code in javascript. In this case, the tricky bit for me was getting the CSS transforms for the offset and scaling of the images correct.
Let me know if you find You’ve been Pawned useful. If you have a particular feature you’d like that will make your life easier without making the tool too complex, drop me a line and I’ll see what I can do.
It’s always been hard to travel between the Ten Towns – the bitter cold and the harsh landscape testing the hardiest of adventurers. Lately though, with Auril’s chill magic shrouding the land, it’s deadly. The ferry routes from Easthaven to Caer-Konig and Caer-Dineval have long ceded to the frozen lake. Dogsleds overland are the only way to make passage across the tundra.
Three adventurers gather in the Northlook tavern in Bryn Shander, each waiting for a guide to take them north to Caer-Konig. It’s a seven hour journey overland – too much for a single leg. They’ve arranged a rest stop in Caer-Dineval, a little over four hours away.
Lucas, a red-skinned teifling warlock, is juggling a number of leads, all pointing north. A missing youth from Targos who left the town suddenly in the company of teiflings heading for a castle somewhere. Caer-Dineval maybe. A dog, Boy, now his loyal companion, searching for his master thought lost in an expedition to Kelvin’s Cairn. And, rumours of an abandoned wizard’s tower and a guide who can take a party there from Caer-Konig.
Eifira Galaran, a barbarian elf, seeking only to get to the furthest place away. Away from what? Just away.
And Veomileana, a short-statured Goliath wizard, with a secret agenda. Perhaps he too searches for the tower. Perhaps not.
Their guide arrives, Nebmara, from Farfrozen Adventures. Their dogs are fed and waiting and they encourage the party to leave rightways. “We should easily make Dineval by night-fall. If we don’t run into trouble…”
Two hours into the journey and all is quiet. Veomileana and Nebmara handling the cold as if they were born to it. The elf, Elfira, clearly suffering the effects of exhaustion. She’ll be fine holding that great axe of hers, but she’s slow to move and clumsy with the cold.
Something on the road ahead. Keen eyes pick out a large white cat and two smaller ones, not kittens but not yet fully grown. They’re feeding on another animal – carrion or prey, no-one can tell. Circle of life. They’ve not seen the party.
“The dogs won’t be able to take the sled overland – we need to clear this road.” Neb isn’t phased which gives everyone confidence. Eifira strolls forward, no attempt at silence, readying that great axe for the fight. The cats hiss and bridle, showing sharp claws and even sharper teeth.
It’s over quickly. Eifira, consumed by the anger that barbarians have learned to channel, dispatching the mother and one of the cubs. Veomileana stays on the sidelines firing bonfires towards the cat and sending his familar, a small owl, in again and again to distract the cats. Lucas is pounced on by the smaller of the cats but shields the attack with a flash of magic. Nebmara stays back at the sled, causing any creature that comes near the dogs to flee with dissonant magic whispers in their heads. Occasionally Neb shouts encouragement to the others – lacing their words with a sliver of bardic magic.
In the frozen north, nothing is wasted. The cats’ bodies will provide for other animals here, the adventurers take the pelts. Prized for their thickness, they’ll do to keep someone warm in this arctic hell.
They’re an hour or so from Caer-Dineval, their first stop, when the small lantern Lucas has strapped to his belt starts glowing. It was given to him by an academic in Targos who’s hunting for the mythical Chingwa spirits of the north. It glows when they are near. Persuading the party to stop, he fashions a quick pull-trap from a box, stick and string and puts it on the road ahead. Cutlery that he ‘borrowed’ from an inn set inside as bait. The party wait, and wait. The elf again feeling the effects of the cold. “Enough” says the Goliath, “I’m going to send my owl up to search for these creatures. We can’t wait here forever”.
The owl circles, spotting some odd stones to the North East. The party heads to investigate. “Not a good idea,” says Nebmara “I’m staying with the dogs.” They search, the cold wracking their bodies, but nothing. Returning to the sled they set off again towards Caer-Dineval, what passes for night now approaching and the temperature dropping fast. As they pass the trap, keen eyes notice that the cutlery is gone and there are what could be tiny footprints around it.
The tower of Caer-Dineval in sight, a bloodcurdling howl comes from the tundra and then another. Two terrifying creatures break forth – these are the fables yetis that the Reghed talk of. There’s no way they can fight these, not in their exhausted state. “Faster, faster,” says Nebmara, urging the dogsled forward – the last push before the town walls. It’s a bumpy ride, everyone hanging on for dear life. Neb loses their grip. They’re thrown from the sled towards the terrifying, charging beasts.
Suddenly, their familiar, a large orange owl is there. Catching them in a practiced manner and lifting them high out of the yeti’s grasp. The yetis turn to follow the flying creature. “Keep the dogs” Neb shouts to the adventurers “they weren’t mine anyway.” As they are carried away, chased by the terrors of the snow, keen eyes would see their whole appearance change as some kind of magic gets dispelled. Who was this person? Were they even the guide we were expecting?
Three exhausted adventurers arrive finally at the gates of Caer-Dineval. The frozen lake below them, the old castle high on the bluff ahead. It’s always been hard to travel between the Ten Towns.
In the past, I’ve encouraged players to spend time on their backstories, but now I ask them to simply come up with some character quirks that they can use to make their character come to life. Let me explain how I do it and why.
I think I’ve always struggled with detailed backstories. They ask too much of a player. It’s hard to project a whole detailed backstory into what’s happening at the moment. Same goes for long lifestyle questionnaires about characters – ‘what’s your character’s favourite drink colour?’. I never know what to do with them.
I should say that some people find that backstories work really well for them, and they enjoy working on them, and that’s awsome. But they’re not for me.
For me, your character is not a backstory, or even a character sheet, it’s what gets shown to other people round the table, through your actions and reactions at the table, usually over many sessions.
So, I like a very short backstory – a couple of sentences that just describe how my character plausibly got to the start of this adventure. Just enough that I can answer consistently if another character asks. I’ll fill in bits of my past as I think about them during the campaign.
What I do like though are quirks. These don’t have to be funny or extreme . If they are, they can wear out their welcome very quickly. Instead, there are two types I try to build into my characters: habitual quirks and motivating quirks.
Find some small habit that your character has. Maybe the barbarian is always cleaning her axe with boiled linseed oil. Or sharpening it with a whetstone. Maybe your fighter always puts their sword back in its sheath and closes it up with a snap. Maybe your wizard always picks up spell components from the ground. Maybe, the cleric keeps a diary. Maybe… well, you get the picture. An action that your character takes regularly, that crucially, other characters can see. and react to.
This serves a few purposes. You always have something to do when you can’t think of anything else to do. That’s not nothing! It keeps the atmosphere alive and the group in-character. I am always surprised how much this adds.
The magic is that, over time, a habitual quirk will take on more meaning. What starts off as ‘always fiddling with her glasses’ becomes ‘always fiddling with her glasses when scared’. And to complete the circle, once this has happened you can signal you’re scared by fiddling with your glasses. It really works.
Don’t worry if your quirk ia a bit boring. In the midst of action, doing something boring can be a dramatic choice. Think of Qui-Gon in the Phantom Menace turning off his light-saber and meditating during the fight with Maul.
The second type of quirk I like is one that gives you a reason to act – lets call these motivating quirks. It’s important that these quirk prompt you to do something. “Afraid of the dark” is a fine quirk, but it doesn’t motivate action directly. “Always lights a torch when entering a dark place” or “Will only enter dark place holding the hand of someone with darkvision” are much better. Let’s do another one: “Hates boats”. Not necessarily motivating. “Always tries to convince the party to avoid boat trips”, “Always closes eyes and rocks back and forth when on the water”. Motivating.
These are similar to the bonds and ideals in the 5e rules. But I find they’re way too general as written to be helpful for new roleplayers and new characters. “Everything I do is for the common people” is unmotivating. “I give any treasure I make to the village orphan and foundlings fund. If I get a chance to steal from a noble, I take it” would be much more motivating.
When I’m making a character, I like to give them a couple of habitual quirks and four or five motivating ones. After a few sessions of playing I usually know if these are working and whether I should drop or swap some out.
Whitebeard's Realm 