A Pack of PocketMods

Ok another idea: what if you made a master sheet to hold, not business-size cards, but pocketmods themselves?

Now, the whole point of the pocketmod is its convenient size so it makes no sense to then go and put them on a normal size piece of paper . . . unless sub-organization that doesn't require flipping through pages to utilize is somehow helpful.  In the pic I imagined having a different set of wandering monsters for night, day, and rainy weather.  Yeah, you could probably still have separate pages for those things, but it was fun and maybe you can think of an even better use.

Programmers . . .

So, the original PocketMod was about customizing your own booklet by plugging in your choice of a bunch of different pages.  How hard would it be to make a tool like that for wandering monsters cards?  If you had a directory full of images, one for each monster, you could select whichever ones you wanted to appear in the booklet pdf that is created.

Alternatively, how about, not a pocketmod booklet, but a single page, something like Dave's Mapper, but instead of geomorphs it pulled up from a pile of different wandering monster cards.  How hard to do that?

Wandering Monsters PocketMod

Okay, you're hanging at you friends and they say "Hey, let's play some D&D!" and you're all "Dude, I don't have any of my books."  But then you remember you have Citadel of Evil in one pocket and your custom made wandering monsters booklet in the other.  Game On!

Hah, it could happen.  Okay, as before, this is a proof of concept-- you could put more info on each creature (dmg, AC, HD).

Wandering Monster Cards cont.

Continuing my project of trying to streamline the wandering monster process in my game.  I thought of a few things since the last post: 1) I love the simple white HD number on a black silhouette, nothing easier for me to read, but I realize different systems might have different numbers for creatures or that you might want to tinker as a DM with variant and such.  So we could leave a blank circle to write in HD like this:

I don't think I would even need explicit spots for attack and defense #s, you can just write attack high and defense low. But if you think it is necessary I think a greyed out sword and shield would indicate where to write the numbers.

2) I realized the silhouette of a creature might not give you important information without more context. I was thinking mostly of how traditional D&D has different sized spiders. Sure, the HD number might give you the tip off but it isn't going to be easy to read at a glance. So how about something like this, with multiple sizes and the one for this encounter is darkest:

Update: How about a master sheet that looks something like this:

It assumes 2d6 with a variety of probability categories.

Update2: Here are cards cut out and placed in the master sheet:

Of course I haven't put any of the HD or stats for the critters or rolled hit points, just wanted to see how they'd look. Pretty good if I do say so myself. I'm using 32 lb paper for the master sheet and the cards, and a razor blade to cut the places the cards slip into. Easy and sturdy. I realize this may be too fiddly for everyday gaming, but maybe not. And if nothing else it could be handy for con games or beginning DMs.

Update3: I realized the card corners were unused space anyway, so no need to scrunch the numbers on the side.  Also, the little ear icon is showing how you might put the kind of explicit triggers mr. Zak mentioned (sound, magic-use, pull the lever) next to the encounter they would bring.  Of course you could just scribble them in.

Wandering Monsters Mock-up

So, combining the ideas from several recent posts, here is a mock-up of how I'll try to do wandering monsters (disregard the little house pictures that's from a previous unrealized idea and I'm just using them because they're business card size).

The page on the right will have the map and most of the info I need will be on the map.  Of course some charts will be necessary for magical pools and stuff, but they will only become important when they're fiddled with so they can be put behind the map.

I'll write in numbers beside the cards.  If a wandering number is called for I'll roll and the first card in that slot is the encounter.  I can have a coupls cards in each slot.  I'd like to have a silhouette of the creature on the cards with their hit dice in white.  Then a bunch of checkboxes for hitpoints for each creature, tallied xp, etc.  If I make the numbers beside the cards correspond to broad categories of probability: common, rare, etc-- then I can just re-use this same sheet for every adventure, just change the cards for what I consider encounters in that place (hmm, it would be good to record which creatures somehow, so if I come back six months later I won't have to remember what cards I'd used, and what I said was common in that dungeon).

Update: Here is what a card will probably look like:

 Also, one of the cards could be "Monster roaming from room 12" etc.

p.s. my computer hasn't crashed in a few days (knock on wood) so maybe I can get back to silhouettes soon.

Update2: No way anyone is going to create unique cards for every batch of creatures, so I put a grid that you can use to outline hp amounts with a marker or pencil after you roll them but before play.  (I suppose you might use these little grids to draw a micro lair too if these are wilderness adventures).  Anyway, here is an image of a few more silhouettes with grids.  I'm using a business card template in OpenOffice and Gimp: