Just a guy, bout to get my PhD in experimental particle physics. I like hockey, basketball, DND, science, and audio equipment.

Go Nuggets! Go Avs!

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  • 23 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • An old granny bard, based in no small part on my own grandma. She doesn’t channel her magic through song or dance, but through her sassy remarks, telling stories about her childhood, and making baked goods, sweets, and presents for her adopted grandkids (the adventuring party).

    Bardic Inspiration? Reminding you how much she loves you and is proud of you. Alternatively, giving you some candy for later or promising that if you do well, she will bake you a pie or take you out for icecream for being so brave.

    Healing spells? Blown kisses, band-aids, and warm cookies.

    Hypnotic Pattern/Hold Person/etc? Telling a rambling story (that she forgot what the point/moral was before she even started) but the enemies are too polite to interrupt her.

    Dissonant Whispers/Visious Mockery/etc? Asking when you are going to get a boyfriend/girlfriend, graduate, get married, or get a real job. Telling bad (and slightly innapropriate) jokes, for her own amusement, often messing up the punchline. Asking if you have talked your mother recently (“You know, she won’t be around forever, and I am sure she wishes you’d write more.”) Simply saying “Bless your heart.”

    Party Buffs? Giving you knickknacks, homemade gifts, or old hand-me-downs she really thinks you’ll like. Passing down age-earned wisdom and giving encouragement to just try your best. Making breakfast for the party, using far too much butter, cream, and other artery clogging goodness.







  • Joke answer: I am a young burnt out academic who is putting off writing his PhD thesis, so I fit right in the sweet spot for this sorta thing.

    Real answer: I learned to do this as I was doing this. I had a solid idea of what I wanted and just started going through the LaTeX documentation to find the things I would need. Really it is just three new tricks I had to learn:

    • The standalone document class, which crops the pdf to the content inside
    • tcolorbox, which usually adds a blurb in a colored box for text inserts
    • Logic gates for LaTeX

    Everything else was just formatting. I was inspired by this template that showed that LaTeX would be good for dnd stuff.













  • I printed the map using a poster/plotter printer in two sections that I split up in photo shop, scaling the map size and resolution to fit a 1in player grid (the grid marks are there, but faint).

    I then taped 12 2ft×2.5ft foamcore boards together and glued down the map, using gluesticks for the majority and hot glue to keep the edges down. I taped it so that it is a trifold, condensing down to a single 7ft×21in panel for storage and transport.

    Someone else here in the comments suggested cottons balls for fog of war, so I am gonna get those and some poster tack to keep it all vertical. I am gonna track their progress by making player tokens and using poster tack to keep them on the board.