Dragonlance D&D Game Blog

Stumbled on a great artist, Stefani Rennee, who has in his portfolio , wonderful renditions of Eric and Sheila from the 80's Dungeons and Dragons cartoon . Check it out from the link above. I was a fan of the series as a kid, and I admit that I kinda liked Hank the Ranger the best (let's be honest, he had one of the few offensive weapons in the group), when I re-watched the series a few years ago, when I bought the DVDs, I realized that Eric is probably the most realized of all the characters. I hope Stephani adds portraits for the other characters in the same style. I could easily imagine a one-shot game night where the players take on revised versions of those classic characters, and use the new artwork for reference. 

This isn't going to be a post about how the subtleties of being a really good DM, or player, have vanished in the modern day. No, this post is actually about the lost art of D&D.  Literally. It turns out that back in the early days of TSR, when they were developing and designing all those great classic books, the company had a policy of not returning art originals back to the artists. Compounding the issue, at some point TSR threw away classic art from a number of highly revered books and modules. But there is the next best thing. Artists Jeff Dee and Diesel LaForce are currently organizing Kickstarter campaigns to recreate art from various books, included the 1e version of Deities and Demigods. If you're interested, here are links to their respective pages where you can sign up to be a patron and get some nifty items for your contributions that would make great art for your gaming room! Jeff Dee Kickstarter page . Diesel LaForce Kickstarter page .

Ulf Ironfist Lady Flame Bergin Heromachine is a nice little app that's been around for a long time. It's especially great for DMs who aren't very artistic (like me) that want to add more visual flare to their games. With a dizzying array of options, any user is just a few dozen mouse clicks away from building a character or NPC to printout and show at the next session. You start off choosing a body type (male or female and slender/bulky) and then selecting from various menus everything from boots, bracers, cloaks, weapons, etc. While Heromachine isn't specifically geared for fantasy characters, there are a good enough number of options to render a variety of fantasy types. Characters can be printed out and the data to build the character can be saved into a simple text file. Here's the text data files for the characters above. Note: there seems to be an issue where whatever is in the character's left hand is not properly save/loaded and doesn't actually app...