Silhouettes XXXIX

A special Halloween mashup edition.  These are all public domain, use them however you wish.

Happy Halloween!

Simple Pack Elephant +

The idea is that players can load their elephant up with cargo or passengers.  Each square is equal to one manifest sheet worth of cargo.  Players can write the names of characters riding in those boxes, or they can put an identifying manifest label for a portion of cargo like "provisions" or "caving gear."

Each manifest sheet has 60 slots at ~7.5 pounds a piece, or 450lbs.  That means a rider is figured at an average 225 pounds.  I'm okay with that figure for simplicity's sake.  For every big armored knight, there might be a hobbit or practically naked mage.  That also means old jumbo here can carry ~1800 pounds.  An elephant might carry more but with the mahout and howdah I think it's a reasonable figure.

You'll need to print out four manifest sheets for every riderless pack elephant.  I divided them into two halves for further convenience.  I'm hoping that will make tracking supplies for a big expedition easier.

The four silhouettes are meant to show the normal limit of riders.  Players could potentially double the number, but the pictures of tiger hunts I kept seeing didn't have very many riders per elephant.  I think I would keep the limit four for un-impeded combat and such.  More riders might have negatives to missile fire or be unable to cast spells because of the press of bodies and jostling.

Here is an attempt at a mammoth, as requested.  It isn't quite as symmetrical because I was trying to avoid obscuring the silhouette:

I feel like the silhouettes should be scruffier-- prepared for ice age conditions.  (Did I ever tell you that I loved the Dragon magazine article about Ice Age D&D?  Makes me want to create a blizzard/Arctic travel mini-game.)

Simple Pack Ape +

  Every time you want to stow something on one of your many pack apes, just fill in a slot.  Once the slots are all full, the poor thing can't carry any more.

  The slots are meant to be roughly 7.5 pounds, or half a stone.  There are 45 here which works out to ~337 lbs.  This is based on someone with 18/00 strength in 1eAD&D being unencumbered, with the idea that the ape will be able to climb, swing, and move around freely with this much weight packed on.  Thanks to Darnizhaan for that strength suggestion. 

The grey checkboxes can be darkened when you determine the beasts hit points.  Then if it happens to take some unfortunate damage, cross off a box for each point.  There should be enough boxes for the hardier carnivorous apes (~5HD) if that's how you roll.

And here is a bonus simple pack Donkey:

Donkeys come in many breeds, but this is aimed at the smaller, burro types to distinguish it from the mules.  With 12 slots they can hold ~90lbs.  They should also be able to get by with very little food, though stubbornness might be an issue.

In talking about the possibilities making these pack animals less abstract could open up my buddy said "Man, I'd love to play a game where I had to eat my donkey."  I'm working on it, haha.

I'd prefer to give you tools to make your own beasts of burden.  But I can't think of an easy way to do it.  I thought of just making up a sheet with slots on it that you could darken to the number you want but 1) that's essentially lined paper, and 2) it gets rid of the main point of these-- letting players tell easily what beast type it is documenting and how much it can carry in comparison to the others.  So for now I guess I'll just keep making beasts that tickle my fancy or that you mention.

Serendipity XIX

Sometimes I find cool pictures when I'm looking for something else. These are all public domain, which means you can use them any way you wish.

This actual primate looks too Sword & Planet to be real. I like the colors.

 From something titled Adventures in Skitzland.  Saw it on the OBI scrapbook blog.

Guar, musk ox, American bison.  These bring back good memories of reading encyclopedias in my grandma's junk-filled garage.  I'll leave it to someone more skilled than me to remove the old paper color without messing up the rest.

Conan's end.

Praise for an old Flash Game

Caravaneer has been around for years.  I don't remember if I started playing this again recently and then thought to make the simple pack animals posts, or if it was making those posts that reminded me of this game I've played for hours in the past.  I think it is the most sophisticated flash game I've ever seen.  Even though it has simple graphics it offers a play experience that is reminiscent of Fallout 1 with less dialogue but more trading infrastructure.

In a nutshell, you're in a post-apocalyptic world and can take items from one little town to another for a profit if you can make it past the ubiquitous bandits.  In the early game you'll be limited to livestock as transport.  There is a pretty good selection with camels, donkeys, mules, horses or oxen and various carts to be pulled by the non-camels.

All these creatures require different amounts of food and water as well as travel at different speeds.  So you have to decide whether you want to travel more efficiently but slowly and have to fight all the bandits, or less efficiently and fast enough to outrun some of them.

Travel is abstract on a overland map that zooms in to a top-down battlefield.  Each character has a certain number of Action Points to expend each round and different actions, like firing weapons or reloading, take different amount of APs.

I'm a sucker for the dromedarys and their supper low food and water requirements.  So, I'll usually have a long train of them and then have to fight every step of the way to get from one town to another.  One good thing about this is that you can train up the number of APs and the gun accuracy of your people in these low risk fights for when you need them later in the game.

The game, like D&D, changes as you progress.  As you trade with towns it allows them to progress and grow out of the need for the very product you were trading and it becomes necessary to reach farther, to newer towns, to make money.  Eventually you'll need to upgrade your weapons and hire more caravan guards to even survive.  And then you'll probably want to upgrade to vehicles-- atvs, jeeps, hummers-- to outrun the deadliest bandits.

The game gets a little grindy (this is partially because of the slow travel I tend to use) and I think could do with less frequent bandit attacks.  It also feels like it rushes a bit to push you from one stage of the game to the next; you barely make 2 trips on your first trade route and the towns don't need those supplies any more.  A big flaw is that bandit partys drop all their gear.  It's cool to be able to sell some stuff when you defeat robbers, but It undermined the excitement of upgrading when bandits were dropping stacks of guns better than I'd seen in any shop yet.  I think all the detail spent on handguns is wasted because their window of usefulness is so small.

The game, though, is a perfect example of a computer being used by a game to do what it does best.  Water requirements, food usage, trading prices, all the number crunching is taken care of by the old mechanical brain.

Caravaneer was made by Dmitry Zheltobriukhov and is available from Sugar-Free Games as ad-ware.  I hear it is possible to find an ad-free swf file to downland. I could go on, but you should try the game out on your own.  And, Dmitry, if you see this, I'd buy a PC game like this, if you made one, maybe with the addition of setting up your own shops in towns so I could sell all the dang glass bottles robbers drop.