I'd like to take a break from homebrewing for a moment to talk about some of the changes coming to Solo Adventures. These changes will be referred to as release 2.0, and will be concurrent with the completion of the Champion's Odyssey set. Here are a list of the major changes I'll be incorporating...
1. At least 3 new "board" layouts - Terrain will be placed differently to form new maps. You choose which layout you want to play for that game. At least one map will be incredibly difficult for a more challenging game.
2. The addition of a Shield Deck for the opponent that will include Standard Bearers. A new Shield would be drawn for each combat.
3. The addition of a "Stronghold" Deck for the opponent - this would consist of Stronghold Upgrades for opponent Strongholds, Stronghold Downgrades for your Strongholds, and cards with abilities that specifically affect Strongholds.
4. Currently, when changes to the Doom Counter occur, you have to roll greater than or equal to the Doom Counter or your Stronghold is rubbled. This will change from an automatic rubble to a battle on your Stronghold space, with your creatures on the space able to defend. If you win, the Stronghold is saved. If you lose, the Stronghold is rubbled and the Doom Counter moves to 8 (your Guardian is threatened, so time is limited). The roll will change from 3D6 to 2D6.
5. Creatures in your deck are no longer unique - you may have up to 3 of any creature in your deck. However, whatever creature you choose as your Champion is still unique.
6. Opponent bribery cards now remain in play until used, unless an effect forces them to be discarded.
7. At the beginning of the game, all opposing Guardians pool their Power Stones, and when opponent channeling occurs, Stones are removed from this pool. When the Stones run out, there's no more channeling against you unless an effect gives them more Stones. During combat, to determine CMP value, the opposing Guardian with the highest CMP is the first channeler.
8. Optional incorporation of Seven Seas cards (and card text errata).
9. Optional incorporation of Champion's Odyssey cards.
10. Instead of receiving Gold in combat, you will receive Treasure (Gold and Gold Bribery were too synonymous). You receive Treasure based on the Encounter Deck Level of each creature beaten in combat, and can spend it on Magic Items.
11. The 25 pt rule that allows you to return to a Stronghold space, from anywhere for 5 Stones, will be modified. The new rule will allow you to return to one of your Stronghold spaces at a cost of 1 Stone per creature under your Shield, from anywhere except opposing Stronghold spaces.
There may be a few other minor tweaks, but these are the major changes. I think they will really improve the flavor, depth, and challenge of the game.
Friday, February 27, 2009
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Monday, February 23, 2009
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Champion's Odyssey Card Preview #32
Ok, I'm taking this one down off the Header and giving it a preview number.
Scouring the Mid Realms (Solo version only):
Scouring the Mid Realms (Solo version only):
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Friday, February 20, 2009
Champion's Odyssey Card Preview #25
Creating this card set is hard work. It's eating up a lot of my free time. I'm at 25 cards now (26 counting the Header). Do I have 75 more ideas left? Maybe, but I may burn out soon. Don't get me wrong, I'm having a blast. But at some point, I have to pull the reins in. This may turn out to be a 50 card set, and if so, I'm halfway there. We'll see. Anyway, on to the card preview...
Witch Queen:
Solo variant:
Witch Queen:
Solo variant:
Champion's Odyssey Card Preview #23
The return of Gypsy Caravan, with new text:
Solo variant:
Nobody likes it when the Gypsies come to town...
Solo variant:
Nobody likes it when the Gypsies come to town...
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Monday, February 16, 2009
Champion's Odyssey Card Preview #19
In this Creature Class Critique, CJ asks for an anti-AOE Barnyard animal-themed idea. My first one wasn't that good, but I put some more thought into it, and I came up with this card...
Stanley the Wonder Goat:
The artwork comes from a posting Philbarfly made over on the Yahoo! Guardians Group, where he uploaded an image of Stanley as a Mortal Barnyard Animal.
I studied the picture for awhile and was struck by the fact that Stanley is wearing a red scarf, similar to Champs the Wonder Dog's red hood. In addition, Beauvais painted both images. I remember either Dave or Luke saying that there was a plan to have a Wonder animal in each set (but only Champs and Oscar were made). So I decided my homebrew expansion should have one, too. It conforms to the "Wonder" format, which is a Hand Magic Item that recovers a type of card (Oscar = Spell, Champs = Magic Item) for one Power Stone and is then discarded (well, that's the way Champs *should* work).
It was a little tricky getting the artwork out of the mortal image and into an Item template (it's a little distorted compared to the mortal image), but I think it turned out ok. What do you think?
Many thanks to Philbarfly for supplying the image and to CJ for the idea.
Stanley the Wonder Goat:
The artwork comes from a posting Philbarfly made over on the Yahoo! Guardians Group, where he uploaded an image of Stanley as a Mortal Barnyard Animal.
I studied the picture for awhile and was struck by the fact that Stanley is wearing a red scarf, similar to Champs the Wonder Dog's red hood. In addition, Beauvais painted both images. I remember either Dave or Luke saying that there was a plan to have a Wonder animal in each set (but only Champs and Oscar were made). So I decided my homebrew expansion should have one, too. It conforms to the "Wonder" format, which is a Hand Magic Item that recovers a type of card (Oscar = Spell, Champs = Magic Item) for one Power Stone and is then discarded (well, that's the way Champs *should* work).
It was a little tricky getting the artwork out of the mortal image and into an Item template (it's a little distorted compared to the mortal image), but I think it turned out ok. What do you think?
Many thanks to Philbarfly for supplying the image and to CJ for the idea.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Saturday, February 7, 2009
Bringing Homebrew Cards to Life, Part 1
Seven Seas. Event Cards. Champion's Odyssey.
All are homebrew creations, in that they do not exist as an official release by FPG, and do not exist in the physical world. They exist only as virtual images.
The purpose of this post is to document my efforts to bring these cards from the virtual world to the physical world.
I started with the Seven Seas cards I downloaded from Phil's site. I downloaded the 3x3 pdf files, and also the jpegs of each card. I was ready to start printing, right?
Well, not quite. If you want them to look and feel like other cards, you need thick paper. A trip to the local Office Max was fruitless - the thickest paper I could find was glossy photo paper. The cards have a sheen to them, but they are not glossy, suggesting they have more of a matte finish.
Luckily, there was a FedEx Kinkos not too much farther away. There I found card stock, made by Neenah Paper. The part# is 04961. It is Ultra Bright White, with a Smooth finish, 28.76 M weight, and one pack has 250 sheets. Total price was somwhere between $20-$40 (I can't find the receipt).
I got home and immediately printed a sheet on my Canon MP210. This is a combination inkjet/scanner that helped me save desk space and up until now had suited my needs. Imagine my disappointment when the black levels printed out poorly, giving the image a washed out look. The black background of the Seven Seas Guardian Kam'ron actually looked dark gray when compared to a Guardian from the game. Poor black levels seem to be a common problem for inkjets from reading around the internet. No amount of changes in Photoshop could make it better
My roommate has a high-end inkjet, an Epson R1800. So I tried that, thinking my printer was too cheap. Same problem - terrible black levels, although the images were not as washed out. Bummer!
The next day I went into work early, and when no one was around, I printed the images on a HP color laserjet. Success! Great black levels, and the finish had the matte look I wanted.
But now a new problem had occurred. The printer gave me a warning that the Acrobat 3x3 sheet would not fit on the page (this seemed to be unique to the HP because my Canon never gave me that message). Changing the margins when printing still gave me the same warning. Cropping the image would cause some of it to be lost, so I had to use the "fit to page" option. The printed images showed that they were noticeably smaller than regular cards, probably due to choosing fit to page.
I decided to make my own template for printing, making the layout 2x2 instead of 3x3 to make sure I had plenty of room to print without the fit to page issue. I have Photoshop installed on my home computer, so I had to bring my old unused copy of Photoshop Elements into work and install it on my PC. Once I had Elements running, I created an 8.5" x 11" new image (use 300 dpi, not the default 72), then I opened up 4 of the jpegs.
Starting with the first jpeg, I used the retangular marquee tool to select the entire jpeg and selected Copy from the Edit Menu. Then I selected my new image (I'll call it my image template) and selected Paste from the Edit menu. I repeated this for the 3 remaining jpegs until all 4 were in my document. Each jpeg was a layer in my template (this is by design - do not merge layers). I turned on the Grid (in the View menu) and Snapped them to the grid (Also in the View menu). At this point it looks something like this:
Printing worked great! For some reason I still got the "some areas are outside the print range and will be lost" message, but I printed anyway and the results were perfect. I saved the template as a photoshop image so that the layers would remain intact. I called it "Seven Seas sheet 1".
Next, I opened 4 more jpegs, and repeated the steps above. I pasted each new image into the template, giving me 8 layers. Using the Move tool, I would drag a new image over the top of a previous image. When I was done I had only the 4 new images visible, as the 4 previous images were hidden underneath. I then deleted the first 4 layers, leaving me with only the new images. I printed and saved as "Seven Seas sheet 2".
I kept creating sheets, but stopped printing them. Once you do the math, printing 4 cards per page will take almost 50 pages for Seven Seas, and then there's Event cards and my homebrew cards...in other words, I'll get in trouble printing that many pages at work (they keep track of that sort of thing). So I have 2 options: take it to Kinkos, or buy my own color laserjet. A friend once told me Kinkos refused to print images he brought in because they were copyrighted. If so, buying a laserjet is my only option. Also, how much does Kinkos charge for a color print? $0.10? $0.50? $1.00? If it's that high, it might be worth it to buy a color laserjet, as they have become pretty affordable.
After a trip to Kinkos, my efforts continue in part 2...
All are homebrew creations, in that they do not exist as an official release by FPG, and do not exist in the physical world. They exist only as virtual images.
The purpose of this post is to document my efforts to bring these cards from the virtual world to the physical world.
I started with the Seven Seas cards I downloaded from Phil's site. I downloaded the 3x3 pdf files, and also the jpegs of each card. I was ready to start printing, right?
Well, not quite. If you want them to look and feel like other cards, you need thick paper. A trip to the local Office Max was fruitless - the thickest paper I could find was glossy photo paper. The cards have a sheen to them, but they are not glossy, suggesting they have more of a matte finish.
Luckily, there was a FedEx Kinkos not too much farther away. There I found card stock, made by Neenah Paper. The part# is 04961. It is Ultra Bright White, with a Smooth finish, 28.76 M weight, and one pack has 250 sheets. Total price was somwhere between $20-$40 (I can't find the receipt).
I got home and immediately printed a sheet on my Canon MP210. This is a combination inkjet/scanner that helped me save desk space and up until now had suited my needs. Imagine my disappointment when the black levels printed out poorly, giving the image a washed out look. The black background of the Seven Seas Guardian Kam'ron actually looked dark gray when compared to a Guardian from the game. Poor black levels seem to be a common problem for inkjets from reading around the internet. No amount of changes in Photoshop could make it better
My roommate has a high-end inkjet, an Epson R1800. So I tried that, thinking my printer was too cheap. Same problem - terrible black levels, although the images were not as washed out. Bummer!
The next day I went into work early, and when no one was around, I printed the images on a HP color laserjet. Success! Great black levels, and the finish had the matte look I wanted.
But now a new problem had occurred. The printer gave me a warning that the Acrobat 3x3 sheet would not fit on the page (this seemed to be unique to the HP because my Canon never gave me that message). Changing the margins when printing still gave me the same warning. Cropping the image would cause some of it to be lost, so I had to use the "fit to page" option. The printed images showed that they were noticeably smaller than regular cards, probably due to choosing fit to page.
I decided to make my own template for printing, making the layout 2x2 instead of 3x3 to make sure I had plenty of room to print without the fit to page issue. I have Photoshop installed on my home computer, so I had to bring my old unused copy of Photoshop Elements into work and install it on my PC. Once I had Elements running, I created an 8.5" x 11" new image (use 300 dpi, not the default 72), then I opened up 4 of the jpegs.
Starting with the first jpeg, I used the retangular marquee tool to select the entire jpeg and selected Copy from the Edit Menu. Then I selected my new image (I'll call it my image template) and selected Paste from the Edit menu. I repeated this for the 3 remaining jpegs until all 4 were in my document. Each jpeg was a layer in my template (this is by design - do not merge layers). I turned on the Grid (in the View menu) and Snapped them to the grid (Also in the View menu). At this point it looks something like this:
Printing worked great! For some reason I still got the "some areas are outside the print range and will be lost" message, but I printed anyway and the results were perfect. I saved the template as a photoshop image so that the layers would remain intact. I called it "Seven Seas sheet 1".
Next, I opened 4 more jpegs, and repeated the steps above. I pasted each new image into the template, giving me 8 layers. Using the Move tool, I would drag a new image over the top of a previous image. When I was done I had only the 4 new images visible, as the 4 previous images were hidden underneath. I then deleted the first 4 layers, leaving me with only the new images. I printed and saved as "Seven Seas sheet 2".
I kept creating sheets, but stopped printing them. Once you do the math, printing 4 cards per page will take almost 50 pages for Seven Seas, and then there's Event cards and my homebrew cards...in other words, I'll get in trouble printing that many pages at work (they keep track of that sort of thing). So I have 2 options: take it to Kinkos, or buy my own color laserjet. A friend once told me Kinkos refused to print images he brought in because they were copyrighted. If so, buying a laserjet is my only option. Also, how much does Kinkos charge for a color print? $0.10? $0.50? $1.00? If it's that high, it might be worth it to buy a color laserjet, as they have become pretty affordable.
After a trip to Kinkos, my efforts continue in part 2...
Friday, February 6, 2009
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