I also made a video of the custom D&D terrain set up with miniatures and props.

I can wait to use this stuff in a session of my Forgotten Realms – Mysteries of the Moonsea D&D campaign.

Having recently seen some tutorial videos on Google Sketchup, I decided to download it and give it a try.

My first attempt was at a gaming table that’s bigger than the one we currently have. The idea was to get 6 players around the table instead of 5:

The table is 60×48, which was proving difficult to find at furniture stores. The larger width meant it was also be a tighter fit in the basement gaming room.

I decided to make another version, this time using the dimensions of the table we already:

It would certainly cost less if I didn’t have to by a new table. And considering the price of glass panes, forgoing a $100 to $200 table would help a lot.

I’m waiting to hear from a few more players in our group about the idea and will be talking to my friend Stu about how to build it. Then it’s a matter of adding up the parts and labor and deciding if I want to spend the time and money.

Even if I decide not to make it, at least I’ve learned how to use a new program.

My character did not survive…

I put the list into a text file called “monsters.txt” and then fired up the Ruby interperter “irb”.  irb is neat because you can basically write code on the fly and figure out what you want to do without having to write a program.  The first step was just opening the file:

File.open("monsters.txt")

That returns a File object for the file “monsters.txt”.

Now I could assign that to a variable and work with the variable, or I could just send the return object a message.  Ruby’s File class makes it very easy to grab all the lines in a file and stuff them into an array:

File.open("monsters.txt").collect

Gets me:

["Orc Warrior\n", "Orc Warrior\n", "Orc Warrior\n", "Orc Brute\n", "Mountain Orc\n", "Mountain Orc\n", "Orc Beserker\n", "Orc Brute\n", "Orc Warrior\n", "\n"]

That’s my unsorted list with repeats.

The first thing I wanted to do was get rid of the duplicates, but I couldn’t remember the name of the method to do that.  I also discovered that I didn’t have any Ruby documentation installed on my laptop.  Fortunately Ruby has a neat way of finding out all the methods an instance of class has:

Array.instance_methods.sort

Which returns an array of all the instances methods for an Array object and then sorts them.  But even with that, I couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to call.  Was it “compact”?  Was it “pack”?  Was it “flatten”?  I tried all those using irb, but none of them did what I wanted.

I ended up using the Unix “sort” command with the -u option, in the end.

Once I got to work, I looked up “ruby array” in Google and got to this page: http://www.ruby-doc.org/core/classes/Array.html.  That’s when I saw the “uniq” method.  It was in the list of instance methods I generated above, but I just didn’t see it.  One of my gripes is that it’s called “uniq” instead of “unique”.  A quick Google search now reveals that there’s a Unix command called “uniq”, so I guess there’s historical reasons for choosing that name.  Or maybe they were trying to be cute and make it look like “unix”

Still, this gives me shivers of PHP where function names are all over the place and don’t follow a convention (array_revers, asort, array_keys, key).  That’s one thing I really like about Java – it feels like they took the time to make sure methods have names that make sense and follow a convention.

So the final solution to my problem would be:

File.open("monsters.txt").collect.sort.uniq

Into just this:

20″ x 30″ x 1/2″ Foam Board

This will hopefully become some re-usable terrain. I’ve tried before to make some terrain on foam board and it work well minus the fact that the board ended up bending from all the glue and paint I had put on it. I’m hoping that half inch thickness will help prevent that this time.

Transparent Pockets (5 colors)

I recently started assing some of my RPG pictures to a Fantasy Roleplaying Games Photos and Artwork Group on Flickr and saw somebody using cut transparencies for spell templates, so I decided to give that a try myself.

7 foot 1/8″ Cable Extender

So the DM laptop can hopefully plug into the stereo system against the wall for sweet ambient RPG music.

Wet Erase Markers (8 colors)

For use on the good old battlemats.

Reindeer Moss (Light Green)

I can hopefully use these to accent the foam board terrain above. Or maybe make some movable bushes or something.

13 x 1″ Square Wodden Blocks

I had wanted to get clear plastic cubes but these will do for now. I plan to use these to elevate minis that are flying.

2 x 2″ Wooden Squares

Same as above, but for large creatures.

8 1-1/4″ Wooden Doll Head/Knobs

These are basically spheres with a flat bottom. I thought these would be cool to paint and use a Fireball and Stonesphere spells.

32 Color Acrylic Paint Set (Primary Colors)

To paint the item above.

Brushes

To paint with. I already have a bunch of brushes but I feel like those are dedicated to painting minis, which I haven’t done in a long time anyways…

25 Metallic “Marbles”

These are actually more “counters” than marbles, since they aren’t round. I have bunch of these already (clear, green, light blue, black) but I thought these metallic ones looked pretty cool. Not entirely sure what I’ll use them for yet.

25 1″ Square Mirrors

I’m not sure what I’ll be doing with these they’re mirrors and they’re 1 inch square!

I’ve been working in the city for over two years now.  My daily commute includes walking from Grand Central to 6th and 51st.  This morning, for the first time in two years, I actually paid attention to all the stone tiles I was walking on in Rockefeller center and the surrounding areas looking for ideas on how to make my fake ones look more realistic.