The random dungeon party system and the rewards associated with it have allowed me to gear up my character with badge gear faster than I ever imagined. In fact, I’m 28 or so badges away from getting the last piece of my tier armour set, hopefully just a few more dungeons! In the mean time I’ve been using the Wowhead website to come up with a wish list for my character.

Part of my wish list was a set of Black Chitin Bracers which I feel are a great item for my Paladin without getting involved with the raids. Next on my list are some Earthsoul Boots but I’m still yet to see them on the Auction House…

As anyone who DMs knows, tactical combat plays a pretty significant part of the game and nothing is cooler than having miniatures and a battle mat to illustrate the encounter to your group. The problem here is that it is often hard to find appropriate miniatures for your encounter (“Damn, I haven’t got anything to represent my fire beetle in combat!”) and when you do have the appropriate miniatures you rarely have the right amount (“These extra white counters are skeletons guys”).

Now you could just buy the miniatures you need but unless you are flush with cash this is also a problem. eBay is expensive in most cases and Wizards provides the raw product in randomly inserted boxes, not a great scenario when you only need 6 orcs and the chance of obtaining said orc is random!

There is a solution though and I am so pumped by this product that I just had to share it with anyone out there who is in a similar situation to me. D&D Monster Tokens.

I stumbled on the tokens concept while trolling the web for some other way of representing combat without miniatures. I’m sure it has been around for ages but I’ve only been playing D&D for a maybe a year or two. The ones that I grabbed were from Fiery Dragon and are a part of their “Counter Collection” line. Basically it is comes to you as a watermarked PDF and contains a bunch of images that you can print out on a grid template which they provide. All you need to do after that is cut them and there you have it, instant monsters for your combat encounter.

This is a great start but I really wanted something more 3D, something that would stand up on the battle mat and be seen by my players. I thought about this for days and then it hit me, fold-back clips. The humble fold-back clip is often used for holding together wads of paper but if you prop them upright and remove the metal arms you’ve suddenly got yourself a very viable stand for a paper token.

Let me break down the costs for you:

• Fiery Dragon’s Counter Collection 4th Edition Heroic 1 – $14 AUD
• A pack of 12 25mm fold-back clips (an inch is 25.4mm making these excellent for medium sized mobs) – $2 AUD
• A ream of heavyweight A4 paper – $16 AUD (roughly 6c a sheet. A ream is 250 sheets)

That’s just $32 not including the printing costs but even then I’d dare say you’d be ahead of a few boxes of actual WoTC miniatures. Not forgetting that you can print out as many sheets of tokens as you want!

So basically I just printed out an A4 sheet with the tokens I wanted in the grid doubled up (ie. the same image next to each other) what I then did was trim them out and score the line in-between the two tokens so I could fold it in half making it double sided. A bit of sticky tape to hold it together and then it is ready for the clip. Basically you can create as many tokens as you want and just switch the clips for each encounter.

I’ll see if I can get some photos together and show you them in action but there you go, a great prop for your combat encounters at a fraction of the price. Has anyone else got some tips for props to use in D&D?

Anyway, I was browsing around and stumbled upon a really nifty business card’ish style website done by Tim Van Damme and I thought that a site like that would definitely suit my lazy nature. So I purchased shaunchoo.com (couldn’t believe it was still available) and quickly knocked something together which I am not promoting as my main website.

I will still continue to update this blog when I have something worth writing about but for now you can head on over to my new self-titled website and check out some of the cool stuff CSS3 can do for you.

To all you folks still using IE6 I make no apologies, do yourself a favour and get a real browser like Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox or if you really must stick with IE then you’ll be happy to know we are up to version 8 now

Click here to view the embedded video.

For those of you who are interested in updating your WoW client to v3.20 from v3.13 you can expect a download of about 397MB. Full details of what the update provides can be found on the World of Warcraft website.

Despite all of the new features and content my account will remain frozen and with good reason too as Champions Online is under a month away from launch!

For those of you who don’t know about Champions Online here’s some info from their FAQ page:

Q: What is Champions Online?
A: Champions Online is a superhero-themed action Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG).

Q: Who is developing Champions Online?
A: Cryptic Studios, one of the leading independent developers of MMORPGs for the PC and next generation consoles, is the developer of Champions Online. Cryptic is best known as the creator of the award-winning titles City of Heroes® and City of Villains™, and is also developing Star Trek Online.

Q: Where did the idea come from?
A: Champions Online is based on the popular pen-and-paper Champions role-playing game created by George MacDonald in 1981. The Champions RPG is still in production today under Steve Long of HERO Games. Read more here!

Champions Online is scheduled to launch on September 1, 2009 and an open beta test will start on August 17 , 2009. If you are interested in participating in the open beta then you can get all the details on that from their website

A hot tip for anyone interested in picking this title up who lives in Australia is to consider preordering the game online from Direct2Drive. The Australian dollar is doing very well at the moment and you can save $10-20 compared to what you would have to pay if you went to buy the boxed article ($79.95 RRP). As an added bonus you actually get to play from September 1 which is over a week earlier then the expected release date here in Australia (currently September 10).

The D2D preorder also gets you in to the open beta which starts on August 17. You are also able to preload the client which weighs in at abotu 1.8GB.

Looks like finally things are starting to look up in the games department!

Features:

• Complete re-write of the TinyMCE component so it actually works!
• Added the acct_name parameter to correctly generate the “Back to…” link which is provided at the end of a slideshow

The plugin has been fully tested and is working in the following browsers:

• Internet Explorer 6/7/8 (PC)
• Firefox 3.0.1.1 (PC) / Firefox 3.5 (Mac)
• Google Chrome 2.0.172.37 (PC)
• Safari 4.0 (Mac)

You can download the plugin through the “Plugins” section of your Wordpress blog or by visiting the plugin’s page on Wordpress.org

For more details about Flickr Slideshow visit the Flickr Slideshow plugin page on this blog.

Cheers,

Shaun