JordanGreywolf

Adorable!

The bulk of my gaming has been pretty good, but somehow I spend a lot more air on talking about what went WRONG. That applies to LOTS of things with me. (Get me to talking about Star Wars -- even BEFORE the Disney sequel era -- and you might come away with the idea that I hated the franchise simply because I spend far more time articulating any petty little detail that bugs me, and far less time to point out what's awesome.)

There are a lot of things I need to do differently.

1) Deliberate janky offsets! To get that cheap retro comic look, I need to have misplaced color Zip-a-Tone sections.

2) Better order of steps. I tried filling an area by basically having one layer filling in the area to be colored with an underpaint of white, then filling in the color SOLID on another layer, then adding a new layer on top of that with the screentone set to "lighten," and then selecting the entirety of the painted-in area and "snipping" the screentone pattern to fit (i.e., erasing all areas outside the boundary). If I merged layers, though, that resulted in a mess at the edge of the screentoned area, because the dots were still black and white, and Photoshop handles "soft" edges by just applying graded opacity. Since the graded opacity is applied to EACH LAYER and not to the overall shape (as would happen with masking), when I merge them, ugly stuff happens, such as the edges of the dots looking black/grey rather than sticking to the color. What I really need to do is to make a colored version of each screentone layer, and THEN "cut out" the segments for areas I want to color in.

Furthermore, by doing it as "true cut-outs" (and not cheating by having a white "underpaint" layer for subsequent screentone layers), I can get away with selecting all instances of a particular "ink color" and shuffle it over a few pixels this way or that way for a deliberately "misaligned" look.

3) I need to figure out what to set the layers to. If they're "Normal," then a blue dot over a red dot will yield ... a blue dot. If it's set to "Multiply," then blue over red gives me something pretty close to BLACK. It should definitely be pushing in that direction (i.e., the old CMY overlay instead of K trick), but the colors shouldn't be that opaque. Maybe what I need to do is to boost the color/intensity of the color, but then set the layer to something less than 100% opacity, and then combine that with Multiply. I'll have to experiment with it to see what comes out all right.

4) I need to play around with brushes to get some better "worn edge" looks.

Ha! We had our own run-in with "suspiciously empty room Syndrome" in college: a Palladium campaign where the GM was really only there so he could create the ultimate awesome "GMPC" who could lead the PCs around by the nose and be more awesome than them (and that he'd want me to draw a portrait of), in a largely featureless environment that lacked any details that were not expressly spelled out in the room description. (Multi-story office buildings were curiously devoid of such features as fire escape stairwells, utility closets, spaces above the ceiling tiles, or even bathrooms, because those weren't on the map and the GM wasn't about to scribble it in just because it was suspiciously lacking.)

In a proper D&D 3.0 campaign, as low-level characters we spent a lot of time running away screaming from things we couldn't even possibly harm, most infamously a werewolf that popped up and seemed to have no connection whatsoever to the plot, and we hadn't a single magic weapon or silvered weapon among us. The GM would describe his damage reduction as super-fast healing rather than "your weapon bounces off" so we ended up doing crazy stuff like trying to dog-pile the werewolf, wrestle it up against a wooden wall, and NAIL IT TO THE WALL with iron spikes in hopes of holding it long enough that we could run away. (This did not work.)

I was hosting, the GM would occasionally be a no-show, lost interest, and eventually left the books to me, markups and all. I then discovered a critical detail: In the DMG, there was a section that listed types of monsters that might be found in different regions -- forest, caverns, deserts, etc. This ranged from CR 1/2 stuff such as goblins, all the way up to whatever sort of DRAGON might be found in that particular terrain. Next to each one of these *lists*, were penciled-in numbers going down ... 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9-10. (Etc.) It dawned on me that for random encounters, he had simply looked at this list of possible creatures to find there and turned it into an encounter table. We were as likely (actually a bit more so) to find a RED DRAGON as we were to stumble across a group of goblins. And "werewolf" was on one of these lists, with a checkmark next to it. (I guess he was marking off which ones had been used, so we wouldn't keep running into the same thing, but that was hardly reassuring, since it meant we couldn't get lucky and keep running into goblins. Eventually we WOULD be facing that dragon!)

So ... random horror! XD

A long time ago, one of the best adventures I played in -- using, of all things, Advanced HeroQuest! -- was a one-shot run by my SO that was a sort of fantasy-horror scenario that had shades of the Portrait of Dorian Grey. I really wish I had taken notes of the original game, as it was unexpectedly creepy (we were used to just doing your standard "go into a dungeon, fight monsters, get loot" routine), and would probably work in a number of different settings. I once ran a Ghostbusters game inspired by it, but I couldn't recapture the same vibe. (With "Ghostbusters," you walk in EXPECTING supernatural shenanigans with a dose of goofiness, so it doesn't hit the same.)