What better to do on a holiday than burn rubber through an irradiated wasteland, crushing the ancient bones of silver screen C-listers! This hexographer map is a chunk out of my vision of a future California coast (uploaded in a previous post). I'm working on encounters for the sandbox format, with some known locations filled in and some local monster threats named. Some details and notes:

1) The primary settlement of "Morrow" men, 29 Palms, isn't on the map. The character "base" is a lone fortification known as Sunshine Depot, named after the raisin company logo emblazoning semi-trailers used to form the perimeter. This is the barter-based machine shop and armory for agents and explorers of the wasteland.

2) Inyo Oasis is a priceless lake of fresh water, needing brave fighters to defend it from the rampant Reno Morlocks and dangerous Cisternaworms (Puddle Worms in the MF rulebook).

3) The Filter-Face Gang are outlaws from 29 Palms, soldiers that refused to cooperate with friendly mutants from Shasta Dome. They stole the best anti-radiation gear from the stronghold, and rarely remove their filtration masks. They live to hunt subhumans and mutated "big game".

4) Poison Pasadena & Septic Simi are the only southern ruins where structures from the lost ages survive. However, these hot spots are filled with vermin, like exploding Ozo-Crows and giant insects.

5) Tehachapi Tower is a defended gas well and communication tower. Men armed with flamethrowers patrol the grassland for swarms of Glowcusts, ravenous 16" grasshoppers that require population control.

6) The Miracle Forest of Kern is a new wetland of petrified juniper and edible giant mushrooms. Unfortunately, the strange bio-weapons known as Prop-Dogs remain here from the Sectoid War. Grown in underground cyber-vats, these canine creatures have had their skulls replaced with a bullet-shaped metal case. Blender-like blades rotate around the circumference of the robotic "head", mutilating any humanoid target the dogs find. 

7) Boracic Jellies are sea-creatures hunted for their unique salt compounds that are used to make energy weapon power cells.

8) Lepdalids are the rabbit leeches from the MF book, and Steeranosaurs are ox-headed livestock with dinosaur bodies. The latter are occasionally used as riding mounts.

After these words you'll find a link to a free dungeon map I'd like to share. This isn't a holiday sale or limited time offer, just something small to thank those that visit and also provide gaming sustenance. The 1-page PDF is a real castle plan transformed into a mesa-buried catacomb, or whatever you think would fit your sandbox. If you find a good use for it, visit again and leave a comment.

http://www.mediafire.com/?yqtm1td53z4

About a year ago, I promised a friend from the West Coast that I'd run a THUNDARR-style game session during his next holiday visit. I'm setting the sandbox in his home state, since I think it would be a more exciting place than post-apocalyptic Ohio. Reference material is being mashed together from the cartoon (with many stats from Savage Afterworld), the Fallout and X-COM series of video games, plus Goblinoid Games' MUTANT FUTURE rulebook. Below is a bit of the geography altered and notated in Photoshop. Some of the things pondered while working on this:

1) Humans that have been kept safe in "vaults" are known as the Morrow Men. The populations that survived on the surface have devolved into barbarian Morlocks.

2) The techno-wizards that arrived after the Moon Disaster are the classic saucer-flying Sectoids. They turned the recovering Earth into a battlefield, creating mutant slaves and death machines. Eventually, most of them were overthrown by human commandos from secret bases in the Southwest.

3) Rad-Bugs and alien creations from the video games will be combined with the THUNDARR and MUTANT FUTURE bestiaries.

4) Thunderdome...is now Shasta Dome (built over Redding, CA)

5) The American West is no longer in contact with the East, since the Mississippi River is gigantic now, running from the Great Lakes to the Gulf. Europe and most of Asia were obliterated by the gravity-pulled debris from the Moon impact/explosion.

DISCLAIMER: I know "Project Morrow" is its own game...I just love the title. Also, please forgive any map errors, I'm not local or a vulcanologist.

Back in a March posting at Jeff's Gameblog, I learned of a board game with an ideal map, called Divine Right. Since then, I've been on the lookout for more data, especially bigger images of the world map. My random surfing paid off a few days back, when I found a page with a RPG conversion for the game by a Michael Gemmell (?) Pictures of the geography were available, although they were photographed instead of scanned. After absorbing some of the data there, I decided to make one section of the map my "sandbox" for a B/X convention game. In order to have something to hand to players, I re-drafted the zone in Hexographer (and Photoshop). Sadly, when I tried to return to the online material for name checking, the site was dead. Therefore, some of the location names are of my own imagining, and some are transplants from areas I could read easier. Since my adventure will be light fare, I don't think 100% accuracy is required. Here is the result:

While out on a home improvement shopping trip, I spied a sturdy binder for wallpaper samples in the trash. After a quick conversation with store personnel, I took the discontinued book home and gutted all the pages - soon it would be reborn as a game screen! The "panoramic" dimensions would require notes inside to be clipped horizontally, but that wasn't so bad. In order to hide the vendor cover elements, I used a combination of paint and glued clippings (suitable for old skool Fantasy).

Long ago, my copy of Jim Fitzpatrick's THE BOOK OF CONQUESTS had fallen apart, but I salvaged many of the art pages. Given that two illustrations fit perfectly on the screen panel, I adhered a pair of characters that I liked. Even though the screen itself is plenty sturdy, the decorations can't be thin magazine or copier paper. Only card stock art will survive abuse and sudden expose to soda pop. Hence, the classic module artwork on the back panel is cut from originals I happen to have multiple copies of. The Drow picture is from a PC-CDROM sleeve for Hordes of the Underdark.