Monday 1 July 2013

Inked Adventures review and contest!

Hi everyone! Today I'll be talking about Inked Adventures. I will show you some products, write a review of one of them and there will be a chance to win a free copy of one of these products too!

Inked Aventures is a line of hand-drawn dungeon tiles for use with tabletop miniature games, such as Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder or even HeroQuest. The creative mind behind these tiles is Billiam Babble, and he has created a lot of interesting tiles and furniture. They are easy to print and easy on the ink too. All of his products can be bought from DriveThruRPG. Some of his works:


"We specialise in hand drawn printable accessories for use with table top roleplaying games."
"The fantastic line art really sets the mood for your old school style dungeon games. I can recommend this for any basic RPG player and Gamemaster who wants quick and great looking dungeon tiles for their next adventure."
"Many combinations -including "staggered" layout.  "Access" and "edge" tiles are also provided."

There are also many free sample packs you can get for free!


Review

I've printed some of the Geomorph Dungeon Tiles to try them out. They are rather large, but the PDF is made for A4 paper, and all tiles have been split in 2 parts. The package contains 64 unique tile designs and their mirror images. After printing them, you need to cut them out and glue them together. The best way to go is to glue the printouts on some cardboard or White Poster Board. You can also glue tiles on the back of the tiles, so you have double-sided tiles. This is even encouraged, as the pack includes mirror images of all the 64 tiles, totaling 128.
The pack also includes JPG versions of all tiles, so you could also print those directly on A3 paper if you have an A3 printer available to you. Plus, you can downsize them, and print smaller versions for map making and quest building. Inked Adventures also has a PDF pack available of all these tiles in smaller format for a cheaper price if you only need them for map-making, and aren't planning on using large tiles for playing on with actual minatures.


I found these tiles to be very pleasing to the eye. In truth, I wish these were in full colour, like the modular and square dungeon packs shown above, but the greyscale has its charm, and does save on printer ink. Because of the clever way these tiles have been designed, you can connect them in countless ways to create unlimited dungeons. You can place them in straight squares, but you can also "stagger" them like so:

My playing group enjoyed these tiles a lot. It was a welcome change from the usual HeroQuest board we use, and they worked very well with the basic HeroQuest game rules. I used the furniture and doors from my game to add some flavour, which makes it all the more appealing. Our group had a great time exploring the dungeon I created, and I added doors to many connecting corridors, placing the next tile only when a door was opened (the pictures here are a reconstruction). This way, my group never knew where the dungeon would end, and how big is was. This adds another fun factor, as the HeroQuest board is always the same size. The only variation you have is which rooms to use. But with these tiles you can go on and on! The possibilities are literally endless.
Even just planning a quest and designing a dungeon with these tiles is great fun. Actually playing on them makes it all the better. I suggest you give them a try, they are well worth it! Some other people's pictures can be found here.

Contest!

On to the fun part! You can WIN one FREE download of these Geomorph Dungeon Tiles!
How? you ask? Easy:
- Download the FREE sample pack here.
- Design a dungeon with these tiles. You may use multiple tiles of the same design if you wish.
- Print them out, and take a picture of your dungeon. (Populate them with your miniatures and furniture!) You can upload images to sites such as imgur, photobucket or flickr and then post the link in the comments here.
- Write up a (short) explanation or story about your design. (Does this dungeon have monsters, treasure, some evil liche hiding inside? Who will venture inside? What would you use these tiles for? How did you like them?)

Post your story plus a link to your picture(s) or image(s) in the comments section here, and I will select the most original, exciting, funny, whatever, entry and that lucky person will win a FREE download of the full set of these excellent tiles! (Well, honestly I will choose at random, but do your best to impress me!)

Rules:
- Contest is open to all viewers and followers of this blog.
- The web location of your image(s) must be publicly viewable, and the pictures must be original.
- Maximum of one (1) entry per person.
- This contest is open until the end of july 2013.

Please let your friends know about this, and share this post!
All  rights  to  the  art  shown  here  and  in  these products are held by Inked Adventures (Billiam Babble  2012-13)   Permission  is  given  for personal  and  non-profit  use  and  limited distribution to own playing group – preferably without any perceived commercial competition to Inked Adventures.

10 comments:

  1. Last week everyone! Please make sure your entries are ready before the end of the month!

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    1. The Barrow
      [img]http://www.flickr.com/photos/herr_gnu/9411318743/[/img]

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    2. The Barrow
      [img]http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7408/9411318743_7690c87a34.jpg[/img]
      I was dissapointed with the Taiwanese print shop--they always reduce about 20% to fit on the smaller paper they insist on using here :(
      I used two sets. My goal was to get something different, so I combined the rooms to make a large burial chamber. Something moldy will no doubt arise if the sarcophagi are disturbed (my undead are at my friend's place at the moment). Meanwhile, the Heroes will have to first dispatch some of the new tenents. They are an early painting effort by my wife.

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    3. I'll post the picture link here.
      link
      Very creative use of these tiles! Thanks for the entry ;)

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  2. Why? Why did the barbarian have to be so stupid? That was Charles' biggest question. The dumb barbarian had to run straight into the group of the Chaos Warriors without even thinking. Well it was at least partially his fault; he had cast bloodlust on him. He had a good reason. They were supposed to get in and out as fast as they could. It was so Procopio would quickly tear apart the goblins and kobolds. How was Charles supposed to know they were just fodder to delay them? The spell was just about to wear off when that blasted Warrior came in and Procopio couldn’t help but charge in headfirst. Procopio wasn't as tough when he lost his weapon. *Sigh* Well at least he did his job and kept the wizard alive.
    Now Charles had to go back to down there with Father Nathan, and his assistant Gerald to get them resurrected. He didn't even want to mention Manong Stoutfoot. The Dwarf couldn’t even disarm the trap correctly. Charles felt a little blame. He never mentioned he could have unlocked it for him because Charles was told explicitly not to open or even try to open any chests. But STILL… He never asked for any help and boasted of his own ability when he told Manong he should listen to him as the leader; a lot of good that did him. The consolation was the fact that Manong did hew down those Orcs just as fast as Porcopio. That’s what they were hired for, their muscles and not their brains.
    Charles knew from the look on Father Nathans face when he walked in it was bad. Nathan sent his personal informant in to the catacombs as soon as the explanation began. Charles would pity him if he were to be caught. ‘You were to have only retrieved the tomes on the altars and as many books as we could carry back from DroolFang’s study’ Nathan reminds his apprentice. Now they would be going to face DroolFang at full strength because if his fool apprentices actions and haste. After a few moments gathering Nathan had his gear ready and was hurrying Charles with Gerald trailing right behind. They were returning immediately before Droolfang would have much time to reinforce.
    The moment they arrived at the entrance Nathan headed down the left corridor to gather the tomes. 'Valkan Chadungal VRAAK!' He had already completed the summoning and had just bolstered them as hellborn undead. Nathan rounded the corner to be confronted with DroolFangs unholy creations. And here begins the tale of the apprentice hero as they are to face DroolFang.

    Well now that the little story intro has finished I figured I’d explain the dungeon I came up with for this contest. I laid the tiles in such a way that the entrance would have a few ways to start out at and open up from there. Giving players the option to split up from the very beginning always tells you a lot about them. The central path if taken would give everyone a free field of vision of anyone entering. This would give plenty of opportunity to take them into an ambush or surprise them into a direction you’d prefer. I chose a Necromancer for this because who doesn’t like smashing undead? The simplicity was to not confront the villain but instead to pull off a grab and run. In almost every group I played in or was running this invariably never happened. That’s how the Barbarian and Dwarf somehow both died in this instance. Natural 1’s really take their toll at early levels.
    The tiles I liked because they naturally lined up when you put them next to each other and made for an easy expandable map. I’d use these for a staggered dungeon crawl or an on-the-fly type of dungeon if a group say lets to some gaming and I didn’t have anything planned. The only downside is there isn’t an ‘easy’ way to wall off or to make a section end. I figured you could print out an extra sheet and cut out the wall or trim of what you don’t need and paste the new wall in. Overall I’ve been looking for something like this for a long time and would love to use more of these in an actual well thought out setting to see how it goes.

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  3. Just noticed I did'nt get my link in there. http://s1307.photobucket.com/user/IvenBach/story/84573?#

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    Replies
    1. I didn't think about that as I was rushing to get it finished.

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  4. I will definitely use your information. Thank you.

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  5. Thank you for this post.This is very interesting information for me.

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