The Petrel's Wing

Well, it may not be politics, but I did promise the plans for a ship, and I mean to deliver.  I've been working on these for about four hours, having stolen the originals from this site here.

I'm making this ship for my online world, to play the part of the Petrel's Wing, but the basic deckplan is for the H.M.S. Surprise (launched 1794 it says here, but I have seen 1778 and at least one other date that says it was scuttled before 1790 ... ah, history scholarship).

The website linked shows these plans ... and they are lovely:

There are, of course, a couple of problems ... no scale, there are cannon onboard, the entire first deck down would be superfluous for D&D because if there are no cannon then there's no need for a gun deck, etc.  So all I've been doing is photoshop to A) get rid of the guns; B) compress the stairs on the gun deck and the 2nd deck down so that they match up throughout, reducing it from a five-deck ship to one that's four decks; and C) get rid of the labels because, while they are useful, they spoil the use of the ship for combat.  Thus we get the final result:

Yes, not as colorful as the first group, but clean and with hexes and without guns.  It just takes a little diligent careful slicing and cutting and 'painting' to make them useable ... but I'm afraid for some of you that I've included my online party for the benefit of scale.  Each hex is 5' in diameter.  If you take the time, you can clean the party images right out of there, and make it useful.

I haven't actually run a combat aboard a ship since ... wow, 1989.  Parties in my world tend to avoid piracy because it takes just one sinking and you have a TPK.  I think its silly; I'd love to be a pirate.  In any case, last time I 'made' a ship it didn't look as nice as this.  I have to thank the originator for putting the plans online.

What a terrible plagerizer I am.  But ... I'm bibliographing my sources and I'm not trying to sell these for cash.  I just want them for the party's campaign.

3-Storey Half-Timbered House

In and around being told how to behave on my blog, I spent the day designing a three-story house for one of my offline players: Stone exterior, walls 1' thick, wood interior. As it turns out, I can use this also for my online players, who have made comments about renting a particular house.

I designed the plan based upon that book I read a few months ago, The Culture of Cities, by Lewis Mumford. He describes a very different 17th century house; one in which there are no windows along the side walls, as the house is built immediately adjacent to its neighbors with no space between. For there to be light in such a house, there needed to be an open space in the middle, enabling light from the ceiling to enter. In the floorplan below, you need to know that there are three large windows above the open space depicted on the second and third floors (I didn't have time today to design it).



I should also note that the thin dark-orange lines are railings.

I really hate this stuff. Like desking for a publication. Too niggling.