The goal of the project is to create a basic platform of hoverboard technology that other companies could build on to create actual working hoverboards. And they’re only seeking the very reasonable sum of $1 million; if you want to be among the first to get your own hoverboard, you’ll be ponying up to the tune of $10,000.

We at Doombot are not your financial advisors, but we can tell you this: There is no better way to invest your money than in the future of the hoverboard.

Except perhaps gold. Or new socks. (Seriously, yours are starting to look at bit threadbare.)

You saw it here first. (And by “here,” I mean here.)

Would you … drape hagfish goo all over your face?

Well, it’s been some months, I’m less busy with work, and I’m looking for an excuse to blog, so it’s no longer too early to say. Here are some thoughts for those of you who were once like me: Not trying to choose between different smartphone brands (which is another question altogether), but those who have been using a flip phone without a data plan for years, and are wondering whether those shiny iPhones your friends seem to love finally give you a reason to get a smartphone.

The short answer: probably not. But it’s still pretty cool.

To pick this apart a little more, I’d like to discuss the differences between what my smartphone (an iPhone) does well compared to what my primitive little flip phone (a free-with-contract Motorola KRZR) turned out to do just as well, or even better. I can’t actually say what other smartphones (like Blackberries and Android phones) do well because it turns out that fiddling with your friend’s phone for five minutes is completely unlike taking a phone to work for months on end, using it to field incoming calls and messages over the course of the day, and otherwise actually using it like a phone. But I’ll tell you what I know.

Battery Life: Motorola KRZR
By the end of my old Motorola’s lifespan, I had to charge it every day or two, or else it ran out of power. Mind you, this was after using it for over two years, and the phone had a removable battery I could’ve easily replaced or upgraded at any time. When I first got it, I could use it for days at a time without charging it. In comparison, I challenge you to find an iPhone user who doesn’t charge it every day. Mine nearly died on me on my commute home on the first day I took it to work, as it never occurred to me to disable call receiving and WiFi features in my 3 hours on the subway. Now, whenever I commute on public transit, I have to navigate through a couple screens and toggle “Airplane Mode” four times a day (assuming I remember to do it and don’t just accidentally leave calling disabled, which I have certainly done more than once, rendering me completely unreachable for hours on end). Even then, I still have to recharge overnight to get the phone through the whole next day—and if I played any games or used the phone to read during the day, I may even need to recharge it after work just to get it through the rest of the day. I see all this charging as a trivially acceptable sacrifice to be able to do more with my phone in general, but if it’s a deal breaker for you to have a phone that needs to be charged daily, the iPhone isn’t for you.

Reading Material: iPhone
This is an unfair comparison, in a way, since I don’t even know if I could’ve gotten RSS feeds on my old phone. If I could’ve, though, I can guarantee they’d have been so ugly as to be not worth it. Plus, my old phone could never have shown high-res videos embedded in feeds, and was barely capable of displaying photos recognizably. But that’s not to slight the iPhone in this category. In fact, I’ve learned that I actually like skimming RSS feeds on my iPhone (first with Google Reader, then with Reeder) even better than on my computer. It’s quick, clean in appearance, seamless in switching from text view to watching embedded videos, and way more attractive than using NetNewsWire or Google Reader on my laptop. (Chalk one up for iPhone over both my other commonly used devices, then.) Plus, the iPhone makes a passable PDF/ebook reader—not great for extremely long reads or for documents with wide columns, but good enough that I’ve emailed myself reading material as PDFs because I knew I’d be more likely to catch up on my reading on the train than I would back at home.

GPS: iPhone (assuming it’s your only GPS)
This is another unfair comparison, as GPS is not really an expected feature for non-smart phones. Clearly, I get more use out of Google Maps on my iPhone than I did on my other phone. If you already have a GPS unit for your car, though, the iPhone won’t replace it. It’s good in a pinch when you’re lost, but it doesn’t talk to you, and I’ve gotten some zany directions from the Maps app on more than one occasion (such as when I was driving alone and instructed to go the wrong way down a one-way street). Handy, but not the best guidance system in the world.

Web Browsing: iPhone, grudgingly
I think I was technically able to browse the web on the KRZR, but its browser was so basic that it was basically unusable for anything other than mobile-optimized pages. To my mind, the iPhone isn’t so much better that I’d actually recommend thinking of it as a web browsing device. Sites that aren’t designed to be used on a phone are simply a pain to use, like my work’s webmail client (which is the only way I’m able to check work email remotely), and sites that rely on Flash (like many restaurant sites and many web-based games) don’t run at all on the iPhone. It’s nice to be able to tap into the internet hive mind if you absolutely need to wherever you are, but it really doesn’t come up for me all that often in an average week. (As fun as it is to settle those “who starred in that movie” debates while out with friends, it’s really not a life-changer.) In short, iPhone web browsing works in a pinch, but if you really want to use the web, you’ll still be lugging your laptop (or iPad) around. Mind you, I imagine my criticisms of the iPhone browser would hold for all smartphones, but I’m talking about smartphones vs. primitive phones here.

Games: iPhone
My Motorola only had cruddy games on it, and the screen was tiny. My iPhone has more options, and some are quite pretty. As a handheld gaming device, I’ve already gotten almost as much use out of it as I ever got out of nearly a decade of owning a Nintendo GBA and DS, mostly thanks to Words With Friends. Most games for the iPhone are pretty poorly made and easily ignored (which is why I use Words With Friends and not the official Scrabble app), but the few gems out there will get you through a long commute.

Music: iPhone
The iPhone is slimmer than my (admittedly aging) iPod, and I could swear it actually has better sound quality. I’m not gonna toss the iPod, but it’s nice to be able to listen to music without putting another device in my pocket. My old phone was no good for that. I will admit, though, that there are non-smart phones that make it a lot easier to load music onto them than the iPhone. You have to “sync” your iPhone with a computer, and you aren’t able to download free, legal mp3s from the web onto your iPhone the same ay you’re able to download PDFs to iBooks. Apple should be embarrassed that it’s so hard to actually manage music on their devices.

Texting: iPhone (barely)
Everyone told me that you get used to typing on the iPhone touchscreen eventually. I improved slightly over the course of my first week, and hit a plateaued. Typing on this thing with my nubby sausage fingers is a pain. I’m constantly making typos, getting autocorrected to inane things unless I deliberately slow my typing, hitting “Enter” and “Send” when I don’t mean to, and flummoxing the spellcheck on what I thought would be obvious mistakes (e.g., two correctly spelled words side by side, when I accidentally miss the space bar). I’m also not a fan of the iPhone’s text messaging interface, with its colorful, space-inefficient word balloons. Plus, the time spent calling up a contact from those in my list of contacts and previous messages is significantly longer than it took to quickly start up a text message on my Motorola, and that old beast’s interface took something like three more clicks than it needed to as it was. All of that said, I give iPhone just a tiny bit more credit than the old KRZR, even despite the KRZR’s lack of a qwerty keyboard. They both require navigating through more clicks and screens than necessary to get a text message going, and having real buttons reduces errors and annoyances in typing—but even with the annoyances of the touch-screen keyboard, I’m able to text faster (and browse old texts more easily) than I once was. And all of that said, I love, love, love Android’s “swipe text” feature, and I wish Apple would pay whatever licensing fees they need to pay so I can use it.

Speaker Phone: Tie
I didn’t notice much of a difference.

Calling: Motorola KRZR
I get slightly worse call quality and reception on my iPhone than I did on my KRZR (such that I now I have to leave my office and walk into the hall when I get phone calls at work). Mind you, this is still pretty good quality and reception, and not many dropped calls to speak of. (Since getting a Verizon phone in 2001, I think I could count my total number of dropped calls on my fingers, unless you count those from talking to people who were using iPhones on AT&T.) Nevertheless, it is simply quicker to make a phone call on a device that is nothing but a phone. That’s what the thing is for. Calls can be answered quickly and easily by opening up the phone. Calls can be made quickly and easily by opening up the phone and pressing a button without even looking. And pressing keys to navigate call trees doesn’t require you to navigate a menu just to make a keypad magically appear.

I don’t make or get many phone calls, but I must admit that I feel slowed down every time I get one on my iPhone, and not just due to unfamiliarity. Answering calls isn’t that much more difficult, but for some reason it ends up being a slower, often two-hand process for me. Making calls is a bit more of a pain, as the touch-screen interface makes it harder to navigate a list of names by letter, and you can’t assign a “default” number for most contacts (so you must navigate the list, click the name, then click which phone to call). Speed dialing is replaced on the iPhone by looking at and touching a somewhat shorter list, but at least these skipped the step of picking which phone to call. My KRZR, meanwhile, had easy speed dials for nearly everyone and every take-out place I ever call on a regular basis, easily dialed up by hitting a single key once or twice. Add in time to gingerly remove the fragile little iPhone from my pocket as if it were a Fabergé egg, and it ends up feeling like a bit more of an involved process. (I dropped that Motorola more times than I can count, but it was durable and practically free to replace.)

I realize how whiney it sounds to be talking about seconds or fractions of a second lost to interface considerations, but you notice those things when you use a device. Those are the details that make for acceptable design versus great design, and Apple keeps getting touted for its great design. You know what’s great design when it comes to phones, though? Buttons. They give feedback through the sense you’re using to control them rather than relying on visual feedback for tactile control. They are easy to find and fast to use. As moving parts, they will eventually degrade—but the buttons on my Motorola were will working long after the charging port cover fell out, the battery cover started to pop off, and the plastic started to peel on the back. And that phone is a year and half past the time when I could’ve replaced it for free.

Customizability: Neither
Here’s the rub, I think: The iPhone looks like a computer. It performs like a (pretty, somewhat slow) little computer. But it is not customizable like a computer. It is sealed up tight, just like any other phone. I never minded this on my Motorola because you don’t expect those things to be customizable anyway, but it’s painful to know that it’s possible to trick out an iPhone and even improve the UI, but that doing so (through jailbreaking) voids your warranty and potentially creates problems when Apple updates the OS. Unless you want to risk that kind of thing (if you even feel technically competent enough to have the option at all), you are stuck with what Apple decides on for the size of icons (too small for my taste), the layout of SMS messages (too brightly colored and scattered in layout for me), the placement of toggles for WiFi and call receiving shutoff (buried in Settings), the sound for incoming text messages (which actually is customizable for just about every other phone on the planet), and so many other things that would really be nice to fiddle with. I might be willing to forgive the iPhone its failings as a phone if only it were everything I hoped for and more in a mini-computer, but it’s not.

In Summary
The iPhone is pretty. It’s a good iPod, a decent RSS reading device (and thus not a terrible ebook reader), a nifty casual gaming device, and a passable web browsing device. It’s half decent as a phone. If you rarely use your phone and only need one because our society still expects everyone to have a phone, then consider the iPhone as a cool gadget that includes a phone among its many features. If, however, you want an awesome phone that’s awesome because of its phone features, this just isn’t it. In fact, you’re probably out of luck entirely, as the mobile industry has kind of given up on that market for the most part. But you can still get a free phone with great call quality and passable usability, and it’ll cost you $30 a month less than an iPhone would. If cost is an issue and checking Google Maps wherever you are isn’t that big an issue, do what my girlfriend did: hold off and just date somebody else with a smartphone. Works like magic.

Finally, if this short review is using too many references to other games and movies to make sense to you, consider that a friendly litmus test: Bayonetta is full of references and inside jokes for nerds, right down to a last-minute cosplay gag. This is a game for gamers, geeks, and fans. I feel a little sheepish I didn’t like it more.

Overall, I’d say I got my twenty bucks’ worth, and I would be happy to play with friends online if we can figure out a way to actually get into the same party—what can I say, I like to pretend to shoot guys in pretty environments—but I can’t recommend paying much more than you’d pay to see a movie.

I can see why many critics dismissed it, as it doesn’t really bring much new to the table as a shooter, but it pretty perfectly captures the action B-movie aesthetic it’s shooting for, from an intentionally grainy image (which you can turn off if you prefer) right down to using old drive-in ads for loading screens (which are the best loading screens ever). There are a few really frustrating instant-death scenarios and particularly challenging fights that really hurt the sense of cinematic progression, and the game is pretty short, but overall, it really raised the bar for Jason’s test for worthwhile movies; seeing a protagonist jump from car to car on a highway while shooting people, for instance, is now pretty well covered in games.

For example:
After the players survive getting attacked by bandits on the road to Winterhaven, they meet the locals, pickup some interesting leads for where they might head next, and then turn in for the night (i.e. recharge their powers.) The next day they get to to decide what they want to do. Seems reasonable enough I suppose. However, as read the module states that regardless of what the players choose to do next, they will get attacked on the road outside Winterhaven. Well great. Not only do we remove the opportunity for the players’ choice to mean something, the module basically prescribes repeating the exact same (and only) combat encounter they just experienced, with the same battle map and so on. This seemed like pretty lazy design and a way to quickly build an expectation with new players that Dungeons and Dragon is a game about going places but it always takes forever to get there because you get attacked by Kobolds on the road every time.

Instead I decided that the players would just get to go wherever they sought to explore. The two main leads the characters had to explore were: 1) their mentor told them about a dragon burial site nearby which promised treasure, or, 2) seek out the Kobolds who have been attacking travelers, which seemed to promise advancing the story. I was kind of surprised that the players quickly chose the dragon burial site as their destination. I supposed I made that lead a bit easier to follow up, but I was really just trying to balance the possible level of interest for what seemed like a vestigial plot path vs. the direct path for progressing the story.

I think this actually worked out nicely as I had a story hook planned for the dragon burial site where the players stumble upon hired thugs of Kalarel (the big bad) excavating an artifact as part of his nefarious plans. The other nice part of the burial site encounter being second is that it allowed for the players to deal with antagonists that weren’t just more/bigger Kobolds, and also lay the groundwork for there being more than just a simple bandit problem to solve. In this way the first “chapter” of the game basically presents two stories: kobolds abducting anyone who travels on the road, and suspicious characters skulking around. By the end of the first chapter these stories will have converged  presenting the characters with a greater challenge they must solve by exploring the Keep on the Shadowfell itself

• Lord Ernest Padraig –  The lord of Winterhaven (the players immediately took to calling him “Patty.”) He has information about the people of Winterhaven and begs for help with his bandit problem. Padraig has little to provide in the way of physical resources or information on how to solve the problems at hand. At first I played him with a pretty lousy scottish-esque accent but I couldn’t keep that up and dropped it altogether. He is always friendly and outgoing to the players, though at time concerned with their lack of progress. After the second conversation Padraig had with the players I started to see him as kind of a blustery politician: charming and outgoing, but providing no real solutions and somewhat helpless.
• Salvana Wrafton – The proprietor of Wrafton’s, the only tavern in town. Her role is minimal beyond providing food and lodging, she also directs the players to other NPCs that hang around in her tavern.
• Valthrun the Prescient – A scholar and sage, he will provide some critical information later in the story to help the player piece together what might be going on at the Keep on the Shadowfell. I envisioned him as kind of an absent minded academic: well versed in the history of the area, but completely unaware of current events. In conversations Valthrun is likely to trail off without finishing sentences and is usually too distracted to offer all the information players need without some additional coaxing from them.
• Elian the Old – an old farmer and Valthrun’s drinking buddy. So far he has zero dialogue but I always mention that he’s hanging around the tavern. I guess he’s kind of Keep of the Shadowfell’s Morn.
• Ninaran – I decided to introduce Ninaran the elven ranger later in the story, with the idea that she would only be able to get to Winterhaven after the roads were safer. Once there she wouldn’t be particularly friendly to the players but would be the prime source for information on the surrounding area that they would need to locate the Kobold’s base camp.

So in the end more than half of the townies named in the module make no appearance. Even with this cut down list my players would still mismatch names and roles and make other silly mistakes. Having a smaller cast or characters just seemed more practical for the player’s sake, but it also let me create more personality for each of the important NPCs.

A scaly figure drags a peasant roughly across a stone floor, shoving his captive forward in front of a large dais. A cloaked figure approaches the trembling peasant. The peasant has already been badly beaten and shakes with fear. The cloaked figure pulls back his hood, revealing a pale, sickly face. “This will do nicely, may this offering speed Orcusâ€s arrival.” The peasant is dragged to his feet by several green scaly creatures. The cloaked man rocks back and forth chanting to himself louder and louder, he stop abruptly, draws a long silver dagger, and plunges it into the heart of the peasant.

Meanwhile:

Itâ€s a bright spring day as you assemble outside the home of your mentor Douven Stahl. You are all aspiring adventures who have been honing you abilities training under Douven these last few months.

I’m not entirely sure how successfully my attempt at a prelude was, it may have been the slapped together writing, my delivery, or even just the mechanic in general. My goal was to foreshadow sinister happenings in the story that the players would not actually encounter for sometime and has been part of the general theme of my remixing of the Keep on the Shadowfell module to inject more story and character motivation into what is otherwise just a disjointed sequence of combat situations.

After a conversation with their mentor Douven Stahl the players head out to Winterhaven. As read the module basically starts the game with the players getting attacked on the road to Winterhaven, but I wanted to spend a healthy amount of time setting the stage, chatting with their mentor, and describing their travel before we jumped into the first piece of combat.

Here is the description of the travel I wrote:

Your march for several days, resting at night as the road takes you through fields and forests. The road beneath your feet is level. An occasional ancient cobblestone peeks through the dirt road, indicating decades of neglect. As you get closer to Winterhaven you start to notice some unusual things, every farmhouse you pass is abandoned, and in some cases only the burnt timbers of a home remain. You are filled with a general sense of unease as you realize you havenâ€t passed any other travelers in several days.

You press on, and after many days you find yourself within a single dayâ€s march of Winterhaven. The wind is cool and comfortable, and you are eager to reach your destination.

My hope here was to establish Winterhaven as being an isolated locale, and that travel there represented a substantial undertaking not just a waving of hands and “it takes you three days but now you’re in Winterhaven.” This also allowed me to foreshadow the nature of the bandit problem around Winterhaven, which the players are already guessing is more serious than described by their mentor, even before they get jumped on the road by a gang of Kobold.

I felt that the introduction, combined with a conversation with their mentor, and then some discussion of their travels helped ease the new players into the game in a way that the module as presented does not. Rather than just jumping the players right into combat this lets them get a sense of the world they are exploring.

]]> http://doombot.com/2011/01/03/adapting-keep-on-the-shadowfell-starting-the-adventure/feed/ 4 http://doombot.com/2010/12/19/short-movie-review-tron-legacy/ Sun, 19 Dec 2010 07:08:33 +0000 http://doombot.com/?p=2210 Fun, appropriately retro-futuristic Daft Punk soundtrack. Striking, generally interesting visuals. Bland, relatively inoffensive plot. Unobtrusive, probably unnecessary 3D. Confusing, surprising lack of attention to the title character.

Tarantino appears to think that methodical pacing makes horrifically violent scenes even more striking when they do finally occur. Unfortunately, as we learned in Death Proof, slow segments without tension, humor, or necessary narrative development are still boring. Personally, I am no longer willing to sit through a movie this long unless it is a freaking masterpiece, or at least full of hobbits and magic.

The Players:

• Mercado the Half-Elf Cleric
• Full-Ling the Halfling Rogue
• Rockbottom the Dwaren Fighter
• Magical Trevor the Human Wizard
• Liraka the Dragonborn Paladin

I think that being able to start right away was important; some of the player had not bought into the concept as much as others, and the potential tedium of character creation seemed like a major roadblock on the way to the “fun” part of the game. The downside was that it took a while for much to emerge in the way of personality for the characters. Magical Trevor did take form more or less immediately as an  of an exuberant singing wizard with the personality of an over caffeinated twelve year old. Other characters are still establishing their personalities, by the time we started our forth session I made the conscience effort to only refer to people in game by their character names.

Another advantage of the prebuilt characters was that the character sheets created for these are for more readable than the generic D&D sheets. There’s just too much noise on the page and it isn’t well organized. The prebuilt character sheets may be a bit over simplified, but they do a good job of organizing the necessary information for beginner players. When we had a new player join us for the forth session with a new character I actually chose to create a custom character sheet based on the design of the prebuilt character sheets.

Things to consider:

• What context does one need to provide for the characters knowing each other before the start of the adventure?
• Character creation can be a barrier for getting started, but can new player be coached to create back stories?
• Even if using pre-gen character without backstories, can choosing character names and referring to players by those names help ease players into roleplaying?

To the game’s credit, a few of the characters are fun, and the combat is occasionally interesting in the latter half of game—but I think I was over 10 hours in before I had a full party of NPCs and fights started being somewhat more interesting. The story had a great deal of potential, but rather than simply tell a story that makes sense from beginning to end, the game leaves a lot unexplained after one playthrough; I’m reading now online about how you need to play through two or three different ways for different endings and to actually get the subtext of what was going on (i.e., some characters’ dialog is undecipherable until your second playthrough). I wish I could say that I’ll endorse any game with a cast of characters as bizarre as this one—including a talking book, a foul-mouthed and seminude woman, and a friendly skeleton/magician—but I’ll withhold that endorsement until the sale price drops below twenty bucks.

• Your mentor goes missing near the town of Winterhaven.
• A scholar  hire you to map the ruins of the Keep of the Shadowfell
• Death cultists have been spotted near Winterhaven and you should investigate.

I decided that none of these felt particularly interesting. The first two just felt dull and the third skips a lot of the exploration and discovery in the first quarter of the module that I felt had the strongest story opportunities. The alternate scenario I crafted was that the players mentor would ask them to deal with a bandit problem in the town of Winterhaven to repay a debt to Ernest Padraig, the lord of Winterhaven. This decision necessitated that I create an actual character for the mentor, he needed to be more than a quest item or a mission generator. Since he is the first character the players will interact with he needs to be real, especially if there is chance her could appear later on to aide the players.

This is the description I wrote for the mentor:

Douven Stahl is an aging paladin with a flowing white beard, who has spent much of his life as a warrior. These days he spends him time teaching those who seek out his instruction in the ways of battle.

I envisioned Douven as kind of a friendly coach, he doesn’t have a lot of information about what’s in store for the players, and he might even be downplaying the seriousness of the situation to try to keep the confidence of his pupils elevated.

Here is some sample dialogue I wrote for him in preparation for the first session:

“Hello friends, thank you all for assembling”

“Today marks an important day in your training, for today is the day I send you out into the world to prove youâ€ve actually learned a thing or two working with me for so many seasons.”

“You see, Iâ€ve just received a message from old comrade of mine, Ernest Padraig, heâ€s the Lord of Winterhaven a village about a weeks travel from here, and it seems heâ€s been having some problems with bandits. I figure a few bandits will be no match for you lot, a good opportunity for you to sharpen your skills, not to mention clearing my debt with Ernest, heh.”

“Winterhaven is a grand old place, Iâ€m sure youâ€ll find plenty to entertain yourself after you help out my friend, thereâ€s even supposed to be an old dragonâ€s tomb somewhere south of Winterhaven you might explore.“

The Premise

The dark priest Kalarel seeks to reopen an ancient rift between our world and the Shadowfell, an ethereal realm home to the undead. Kalarel’s base of operations is a haunted keep, but his influence over the area has expanded and he now controls local tribes of goblins and kobolds that harass the town of Winterhaven.

The Problems

As presented Keep on the Shadowfell provides some useful materials but suffers from a variety of issues both major and minor, including:

• The overall story of Keep on the Shadowfell is well enough, but the way it is revealed to the players is awkward if not broken in places. The pacing is odd and very few actual choices are presented for the players.
• The non-player characters that are to be encounter are numerous to the point of bewildering, but lacking in actual personality.
• Kalarel, a villain who appear for the first time in the final fight is otherwise only known through trite letters he sends his henchmen that reveal far to much about his evil plans.
• Combat vs. Story: of the 70 pages of the module, approximately 15 cover story related content, with the rest dedicated to details of a whopping 25 different combat encounters.
• D&D 4th edition relies heavily on combat, and the combat relies heavily on battle map grids. Keep of the Shadowfell provides 6 maps, and suggests you reuse one of them, leaving it up to you to figure out maps for the other 18 combat sequences.

In general my frustrations with Keep on the Shadowfell are two fold: there are many places where there is a lack of advice that a veteran game master could likely work around but for a beginner module seems like a failure, but also many places where there is what appears to be poor advice. In preparing for each session I spent several hours planning story, determining physical resources I’d need, studying combat mechanics, and reading critiques on the web.

Resources I made use of

• Eleven Foot Pole – Dungeons and Dragon Design Criticism. Lots of blogs on the internet mope about Keep on the Shadowfell or specific 4th Edition D&D mechanics, but the quality of the critiques and the suggestion for improvement on this blog were the best I found.
• The Alexandrian – Remixing Keep on the Shadowfell. Offers some nice adjustments for the story and provides some combat encounters and story hooks that takes things in a different direction.
• Wizards updated Keep of the Shadowfell available as a free PDF. Not only do they provide the entire module as a free PDF but they’ve made a variety of fixes, some typographical, other for balance, and they reworked one encounter in a way that enhanced the story that I sadly overlooked.
• Cartogrpahers Guild – BattleMaps for Keep on the Shadowfell. The supplied maps cover the first and last few combat encounters with the presumption that the DM would draw out the middle ~20 encounters on graph paper or such. Instead I used these beautiful maps and the program PosteRazor to make large 30″ by 40″ maps out of 8.5 by 11 printouts. This took more time that just sketching hallways on graph papers but ended up with results more like a published game board.
• Fiery Dragon – Castle of Shadows free counters. These free counters worked great in lieu of miniature for the first few sessions until I was able to get my hands on some actual figurines. Printing them on card stock was easy enough and met my needs.