Jade's Furry

Here is a ship I designed for my Eberron campaign...

In Eberron, low-level magic is very common and has enveloped every day living, from city street lamps to a continent wide "lightning" train. This ship is one such magical powered vessel.

Instead of sails, airships have a fire elemental bound to it. A ring of fire surrounds the ship and the pilot "controls" the elemental in order to maneuver the ship.

I designed this ship with the expectation that my players would eventually take control of it. So I deliberately included elements that would be helpful and others less desirable. That said, I expected the players would modify it at some point.

Image taken off interwebs without permission.

Risk: An Unexpected Journey (part 4)

I recently started working again on my custom Risk board (and rules). You can see my progress that I started over a year ago here (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3).

The most notable change is the addition of 19 territories (up from 51). But another change is that I redrew the entire map! The continental proportions are loosely based off the Risk 2008 board, but I used various global maps for the actual drawing. Other changes are adding more regions, more "ancient map" detail, and rules/component insets.

Inspiration for this project came from the desire for a lite world domination game that can be played within 2 hours or less that has good replay value (my two biggest issues with standard Risk). I love the Napoleonic pieces that came in the 1993 edition, so that is where I started with the style of map art.

I enjoyed designing the map much more then putting all the rules together. In fact, some of my rules ideas have derived directly from the map design process! With that said, I have done very little with the rules, apart from taking notes--Nothing playable. Oh well, I am still having fun with this creative process!!

[EDIT] If you would like the hi-res files, they can be download here:

InDesign File
InDesign Support Files (Including a PSD of MAP)
PDF

Finetuning a Risky Venture

(click on image to enlarge)

As mentioned in other posts, I have been working on a map for Risk. It is loosely based on the PC game Risk II with a few additional territories (above the 5 territories already added in Risk II). Mainly I was attempting to prevent the castle strategy. But after an initial design, I wanted to make the map more esthetically pleasing and "in the style" of an 19th century map.

About a month ago, I ordered a set of Lord of the Rings Monopoly pieces to replace the (now inappropriate) modern cities and capitols from the 2008 edition (Revised) Risk. I planned on using the "hotels" (fortresses) as the capitols, and the "houses" (strongholds) as the cities, but now that I have them in hand, I am not sure.

I am also working on creating my own set of rules (beyond a 2-player variant from the last post)... I guess the most appropriate name would be Risk, Revised Edition 1.5. I am including elements from Risk II, Risk Legacy, and various incarnations of standard Risk rules (both official and variants) over the last 30 years. After I complete the map and get a better handle on the new set of rules, I will throw it out to those of you that pretend to read what I write! :)

Two Risk or Not Two Risk

In my opinion, Risk has some inherent problems, but it is still a game with a bunch of little guys (ie fun to play with).

I have managed to put my hands on the Risk rulebooks from 1980, 1993, 2003, 2008, and 2011. As far as game play, they are almost identical with only minor tweaks to troop reinforcements (how many you get per turn) and starting number of troops.

In '93 they introduced missions, and each proceeding set "improved" the mechanics to some degree. The '08 set significantly retooled of the mission system, plus they added cities and capitols. They also changed the official way to determine starting territories.

One element I thought strange was that the most significant changes between all 5 sets of rules are in the 2-player rules variant ('08 doesn’t even cover it). Within that sub-section, the biggest differences are whether or not to include neutral armies, and whether or not the allies are passive or aggressive.

I recently picked up the 2008 set because it had cities and capitols (unique to the set). But I will be playing this mostly with my son, and it didn’t cover how to play a 2-player game, I looked at how the other sets handled it. My old '78 set had 2-player rules (without allies), the ’93 set added 1 neutral ally, and the ’11 set is the same as ‘93. However, the '03 rules include a very extensive set of instructions for including multiple aggressive neutrals/allies.

After reading through all these editions, I made up my own rules!! Essentially, I blended the '93 and '03 rules in the framework of an '08 game (cities, capitols and enhanced objectives/missions). I am really pleased with how it all turned out. This is a PDF of what I came up with.


As I mentioned in a previous post, I also started working on a custom map for Risk. I like it, but have decided to take a dramatic turn in direction. I will share my progress in a later post,

(click on image to enlarge image)

I like what I have done so far, but have decided to take a completely different approach. I will share what I come up with another time.