My available timeslots have filled now. I could put you on my waiting list if you want but would advise finding another tutor if you need help within the next month or so.

Well, it’s that time of the year again!

As students move on with their lives, tuition places open up. It’s a shame to see them go but also exciting to see who I can help next!

Head over to the tuition page if you want to know more.

I thought I’d embrace this Black Friday sale madness and reduce the Inn and Tavern Companion to a crazily low price of under $5. I don’t plan to keep it that way for long, so get it while you can!

I’ve taken the Inn/Tavern content from the RPG Encounter Companion, added some more tables and released this as a pdf on DriveThruRPG.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/431987/Inn-and-Tavern-Companion

Here is the blurb from the listing…

The Inn and Tavern Companion is all you need to make your players’ stay a memorable one.

The tables within allow combinations to generate:

• Inn/Tavern names – thousands of combinations
• Food – hundreds of combinations
• Drinks
• Staff
• Standard of accommodation
• Patrons who frequent the establishment
• Quirks that make the inn/tavern unique

The rest of the book has hundreds of adventure hooks for events and characters that should spark your imagination and give you that starting point for a memorable stay for your players.

Using the content in this book, after a few rolls we have…

The Drowsy Donkey. Tonight it is serving a choice of steamed carp or seared badger with onions and mushrooms. Amongst the usual ale, mead and cider is a strange concoction known locally as Troll Sweat. Accommodation is good, well known for their comfy beds but the landlady is quite deaf. This may be due to the patrons loving a good sing song. One thing that strikes the party is the faint outlines of a summoning circle that the locals think is just a pretty pattern. 

Looking for a character hook, a roll turns up…

Dragor, until recently, was a member of the renowned Order of the White Cloaks. Unfortunately, after a nasty blow to the head, he developed a fear of swords, restrictive clothing and horses. His last battle saw him take the field on a large goat, donned in a sarong and wielding a broom before abandoning the fight all together. He took up a lute and began preaching peace to those about him. Although seemingly suffering from mental trauma, the power of a god is growing within him, giving his wandering words a supernatural force.

or possibly an event…

The tavern is bustling with trade when the adventurers come in. The food and ale are cheap and plentiful and the landlord offers a discount for ‘the brave adventurers’ A while later a man walks in with what appears to be two minders. He is holding a document in his hand and walks straight to the bar speaking with the landlord in fairly polite tones at first. When the landlord appears to argue, the man signals to the two minders who go around the tavern emptying plates of food onto the floor. They then proceed to the kitchen where shouting can be heard. The man clears his throat and speaks to the angry customers. ‘Twelve people have died of poisoning in this town in the last three days and each one of them was a patron of this tavern. Until we discover the cause no one will leave and no one will eat!’

I should post here first but I always forget to let you know about the actual plays we release. Currently, we release one weekly, alternating between Rolemaster and Adventures in Middle-Earth.

Both are played using the Fantasy Grounds virtual tabletop (VTT) software. The AiME one follows Tales From The Wilderland and the Rolemaster Classic campaign is based on the 1989 Shadow World adventure, Demons of the Burning Night. It’s just a bunch of middle aged blokes blundering their way through things so don’t expect anything too serious!

One of the players also streams it live most Fridays at 19.30ish UTC:

Watch live video from MajykFngrz on www.twitch.tv

In these times of lockdown, maybe these might help pass the time?

Stay safe and be well.

Happy gaming.

The RPG Encounter Companion breached over 2000 installations last month! Looking at my app vitals there sure are a lot of active users now! Hope you’re enjoying the app!

The software used to develop the RPG Encounter Companion is to be made open source in the next few months which makes it all the more important to migrate it across to Unity.

Looking more into Unity, it looks like sending requests via the internet the way it is done currently for submissions and bugs is not possible. They are in between network APIs which means, if I move it across, those features will have to go. I’ll still offer an email address to be used for submissions/problems but it is a bit of a step backwards in ease of use of the app. On the upside, the look of the screens will be much sleeker thanks to way Unity handles that!

The Actual Play podcast ( https://wolfshield.podbean.com/ ) for both Rolemaster and Adventures in Middle-Earth gain more listeners every month. Imagine sitting down to a tabletop session and 20-30 people filed in to observe you and your friends play! Exciting and scary to think about!

It’s also on YouTube though that is not as popular, probably because there aren’t many visuals other than the Fantasy Grounds client!

Well, that’s it for a bit!

Happy Gaming!

Work continues on the new (non RPG related) app using Unity. There hasn’t really been much to update you on, hence no November or December updates and January looks to be the same.

The C# language is easy enough to learn, as is Unity, it is just, well, there is so much more to it! You could easily lose yourself in the Unity engine!

So how did 2019 go? Better than expected really! We have over 1500 downloads of the RPG Encounter Companion! Alas, 46 paid app sales haven’t really justified any more development time for content so that will be it for updates until I port it over to Unity which will be after the new app ships. As mentioned earlier this year, website, developer and software costs meant I spent more on the app this year than I made but luckily I have another revenue stream that pays the bills!

This year I started recording then editing the actual play sessions we do for Rolemaster and Adventures in Middle-Earth. ( https://wolfshield.podbean.com/ ) That has been fun but I’ll probably need to cut one of those in 2020 to make more time available for development of apps.

Speaking of 2020…I’ll launch the new app, move the RPG Encounter Companion over to Unity, continue with one of the actual play podcasts and start on a new mainstream app. Well that’s the plan anyway!

And finally…

I get very few submissions from users for the RPG Encounter Companion, so few in fact that I’ve toyed with the idea of removing it completely but I got one this month that decided the issue…

Location: Ham Sandwich
Event or Character: Character istics are
Description: I pedal to the lake and I play Xbox

Yeah, I’m keeping it in.

Hope you have a great year.

Happy adventuring!

It’s been a month of learning for me whilst I get to grips with Unity and C#. Luckily C# is very Java like so that hasn’t been too bad to understand as I’ve programmed in Java before. Unity is all new to me so that is slower going but I’ve manged to knock up a simple app with buttons and images by the end of this month. Next month will see me experiment further.

I’m happy to welcome another 148 user downloads of the RPG Encounter Companion this month! When we hit 2000 downloads I’ll add some more content as long as some technical issues between Google and Corona ( the development platform I use ) get resolved.

Happy adventuring!

This month, for the RPG Encounter Companion, I finished the coastal shore location which brings the total up to 8 travel areas. I also fixed a submission bug where large amounts of text would not be sent. Finally, I fixed some typos and grammar errors that I noticed when testing this update.

Going forward, I want to use Unity to create this and future apps. This will require me to spend time working out how to do that and learn another programming language, C#, which will be used for the advanced scripting I’ll need.

Well that’s it for another month. Happy adventuring!

We now have OVER 1000 ACTIVE USERS!

Not much done on the app this month as I’ve spent three out of the four and half weeks of August on holiday abroad! Alas, not from the proceeds for the RPG Encounter Companion! This app actually costs me money! Annually, I spend £80 for Apple’s developer licence and almost £150 for website costs. We currently have 34 users who unlocked the Inn premium content (thanks for the support by the way, you’re brilliant). After tax and Google/Apple/Amazon’s cut that is not even £100! Once I release the final free content for the Coastal location, I’m going to have a serious think about whether to put time into more premium content for other areas as that will run into 100s of thousands of words. I may just support the free content and add more to the Inn premium features. Let me know what you think.

During September, I’ll hope to finish the Coastal location.

Happy adventuring!