The Hound

RPGtonight is co-sponsoring Cartographer's Guild's May Mapping Challenge, with first, second, and third prizes offered. The theme of this contest is "minimalist maps for virtual tabletops." When people use miniatures in their roleplaying games they love to use BIG lovingly detailed artistic battlemaps. This is fine on the kitchen table, but online these big maps mean HUGE filesizes - so huge that many are just too big to use for people with dialup connections and some even tax high speed internet. In this contest we decided to do a favor for people who are gaming online in the slow lane, by sponsoring a contest where the idea is make big maps that look great but take up very few kilobytes. Please go to http://www.cartographersguild.com for all the details, but here are the rules in a nutshell: Theme: Minimalist maps for online Virtual Tabletops. The challenge is to come up with an attractive "battlemap" for online virtual tabletop style games. Rules: * The map must have a resolution of at least 1280 X 1024 pixels * The filesize must be no more than 75kb. * The map must be useful as a "battlemap" on which miniatures (thumbnail size tokens), can be moved around. A scale of around 5 - 10 pixels per foot is a good size. * The map must depict an area on land, which could include building interiors, town areas, dungeons, wilderness areas, etc. It doesn't have to be fantasy themed...modern, western, sci-fi, etc. are fine. Entries must be posted to the Cartographer's Guild's "Mapping Challenges" section in the Cartographer's Guild forums. Please read all of Cartographer's Guild's rules and look at how they handled last month's contest. Questions can also be posted to their forums. Entries must be posted prior to the last five days of the month, after which they will be voted on by members. See http://www.cartographersguild.com RPGtonight is a free online virtual tabletop program for RPGs that works in your browser. See http://www.rpgtonight.com

The RPGtonight weekly Saturday Night Rumble officially kicks off this Saturday, November 17th. This will be a weekly rpgtonight.com site game night where we encourage GMs and players to sign on, get together via a special chat window, create a gameroom, and play their favorite tabletop style roleplaying games. The Rumble will run during the evening hours of whatever time zone you are in, from Australia/East Asia to N. America and Hawaii, but most players will be from N. America. GMs are especially welcome. RPGtonight is a virtual tabletop (VT) site. The VT is free and works in your browser - there is nothing to download. Features include text and voice chat, die roller, customizable character sheets, map display, moveable miniatures (tokens), fog of war, sound effects and more. You can check it out - and try it out - by going to http://www.rpgtonight.com at any time.

rpgtonight.com features everything you need to play a tabletop style RPG online, including die rollers, map display, moveable miniatures (thumbnail pictures), customizable character sheets, sound effects, built in text and voice chat, and a growing library of maps, miniatures, and sounds. Its free, there is nothing to download, just get on and play. You can check it out at www.rpgtonight.com

OpenRPG's main link works OK. They seem to be doing well. WebRPG is (was?) something different.

The website isn't open to the public yet, but when the time comes I'll post requests for playtesters on Enworld, which is where I post most often, and a few other places including here if the policy allows it. The first part to be tested will be a server side virtual tabletop implementation, which will be opened up for free public use to give it a "shakedown" with (hopefully) lots of users at once. It's pretty much fully functional with the usual bells and whistles including three chat modes (voice chat/ third party voice chat/ text chat), but it has never seen use by more than six people at once.

Online tabletop style RPG is a subject near and dear to my heart nowadays, since I am involved in the development of a "virtual tabletop" for use in an online living game. Of the tools listed on Battlgrounds Games site, webRPG and Ghostorb appear to be dead. The webRPG link doesn't work. I've tried to get on it several times across three days, and also couldn't find any new address on Google. I was on it not too long ago and there were only a handful of ongoing games listed. Ghostorb looks like it hasn't been updated since last Christmas (see the "news" on the front page). If you Google "Ghostorb" you can get links to their member list. I looked in there recently and found that nearly all the new "members" for the past six months were spammers who posted links to their porn and Viagra sites. Curiously, the most popular type of online roleplaying that is close to tabletop style seems to be play by post. There are lots of sites for that. I found one that had well over 100 games listed. Don't have the links because I've never been particularly interested in those.