Announcing the House of Lisport
Welcome to the House of Lisport! It ties in slightly with Illustrious Castle and The Lost Castle of the Astronomers.
The House of Lisport is suitable for 3 to 6 adventurers of fourth to fifth level.
Maps and other resources
This adventure is the first Gods & Monsters book to come with a complete resource file. All of the maps, character sheets, and other resources are created using open source software such as Inkscape, Scribus, and GIMP, so you should be able to open them no matter what platform you’re using or software you’ve purchased.
Because I’m no longer able to use the PICT vector graphics format, I’m using the EPS format instead for embedding images into the main document. This is why there are no image previews for vector graphics images in the RTF file in Word or OpenOffice. You’ll need to print from the PDF files to view map images or other vector images.
New print size
I’m also experimenting with printing in landscape. The House of Lisport is 11 by 8.5 instead of 8.5 by 11. I did this because I’ve found myself using the Traveling Books format exclusively. I don’t like making a printed version available that I’m not using myself, so I’ve been looking for a good way to make the printed versions smaller. The House of Lisport will print at 9 by 7 at Lulu. This will be slightly larger than the 5.5 by 8.5 I’ve been using (the text on the traveling books was tiny), but significantly smaller than the 8.5 by 11 I’ve been distributing. I think it’s going to be a much more useful size for gaming.
No images in HTML
The version of Word that I’m using doesn’t save EPS graphics when saving as HTML. I’m most likely going to be switching to Nisus Writer Pro, but I need to redo the conversion script. I’ve got a proof of concept working that indicates it will be possible (and possibly much better than my current workflow). Nisus does convert images, and can even do so within the conversion script. But for now, you’ll need to use the PDF or download the resource file to get the images.
- The House of Lisport
- A brutal family murder left Lisport Manor empty and the town of Lisport undefended in the great war. Today the last holding of the Earl of Lisport is Lisport House, an inn in the bustling and dangerous gambling town of Fork.
- Illustrious Castle
- The Order of Illustration once guarded remote Biblyon. Today, Illustrious Castle is deserted, long-since looted of anything valuable. For second to third level characters.
- Lost Castle of the Astronomers
- This dungeon crawl is suitable for three to six characters of first to third level. This is the basic adventure that Charlotte, Gralen, Sam, and Will went through in The Order of the Astronomers.
- Inkscape
- “Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor. Supported features include shapes, paths, text, markers, clones, alpha blending, transforms, gradients, patterns, and grouping. Inkscape also supports Creative Commons meta-data, node editing, layers, complex path operations, bitmap tracing, text-on-path, flowed text, direct XML editing, and more. It imports formats such as JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and others and exports PNG as well as multiple vector-based formats.”
- Scribus
- Scribus is a very nice open source page layout application and includes full PDF creation. It is also scriptable using Python if you need to automate page layout tasks. Scribus is very useful for making documents that need to be shared with other editors, since anyone can get the Scribus application unrestricted.
- GIMP
- The GIMP image manipulation program is one of the best free software packages of any kind. Fully multi-platform, the GIMP “is suitable for a variety of image manipulation tasks, including photo retouching, image composition, and image construction”.
- Traveling books
- You can trick your printer into printing 8.5 x 11 pages at 5.5 by 8.5 for portable books.
- Nisus “clean HTML” macro
- The Nisus macro language is Perl; this means we can use all of Perl’s strengths as a text filter scripting language in Nisus.
More adventures
- The Adventure Guide’s Handbook
- Weave fantasy stories around characters that you and your friends create. As a Gods & Monsters Adventure Guide you will present a fantastic world to your players’ characters: all of its great cities, lost ruins, deep forests, and horrendous creatures.
- Kolchak: The Big Creep (a Daredevils adventure)
- Inspired by The Powers of Dr. Remoux, The Big Creep is a Daredevils adventure for The Night Stalker set in the autumn of 1976.
- Skin a module 3: Thracia to The Lost City
- The Judges Guild module Caverns of Thracia is one of the classics of the old-school. It’s also eminently reskinnable by changing the names of gods and expanding on some of the magic items hidden inside.
- Skin a Module 2: The Fell Pass becomes Mansio Solis
- Karl Merris’s The Fell Pass, from Dragon 32, became the border between dusty desert death and the lush green jungle of the new and magical world of the City.
- Three ways to skin a module 1: from Chagmat to Dowanthal Peak
- I’ve always been a fan of explicitly reskinning adventures; here is how I skinned Larry DiTillio’s Chagmat.
- 13 more pages with the topic adventures, and other related pages
As usual, if you’ve subscribed to the Biblyon Broadsheet RSS feed in iTunes or another RSS reader, you should have the House of Lisport PDF waiting for you in your reader already!