csammisrun

Hello anyone who is still looking at my blog! Sorry about the four-month posting hiatus, I’ve been somewhat busy with life lately.

When I was in college I played Dungeons and Dragons with a group of friends (forestalling the inevitable question: no we weren’t the group who dressed up as their players and acted out battles). It was a great time, but when I moved to Kansas I never found anyone who was interested in playing. A few months ago I started to gauge interest in the idea of a D&D group at Perceptive. There were a few people who wanted to play or learn but no one wanted to run the game. Well fine then. I AM STEPPING UP.

When a person gets into D&D the first thing they may notice is the price tag. The core rulebook? $30. A set of dice? $5. A miniature representing a character? I haven’t looked lately but as the game leader I would theoretically require many of them. The cost only goes up. I have three core rulebooks, something like six sets of dice, and a wedding in eight months that is exhausting pretty much all of my cash monies. How does a fellow in such a situation run a potentially expensive game?

Homebrew! Courtney and I just finished making a very nice homemade battle grid, which for the uninitiated is the board on which miniatures are placed and terrain is drawn to represent battles.

We bought a 22×28 poster frame with glass and removed the glass. Courtney marked off 1″ intervals and drew lines with a black paint pen. My job in all this was to hold the yardstick.

Lines are drawn the other direction for the 1″x1″ grids used in D&D.

For the next step, we set up our spray-painting station in the garage. Unused cardboard is something of a rarity in our house so my oil change mat got re-purposed.

The glass is laid out, painted-on side up. Rather than lay out a piece of colored paper between the glass and the backing board, we opted to paint onto the glass directly.

First of four coats of Rustoleum’s Ivory Silk (read: yellowish white).

Four coats later, the board is looking great and our brain cells would dying in droves if it weren’t for frequent breaks outdoors.

The end result is an off-white board with black lines that works great with dry-erase markers!