Friday, July 15, 2011

Custom B/X DM's Screen

I made this custom DM's screen for B/X DnD for my castle amber game in december, I have used it now for 4 sessions and I really like it, it drastically reduces the amount of looking up I do in the books.

Starting off with a picture from the DM's side, I took 4x 8"x11" pages and taped them to the inside of the Castles and Crusades GM's screen. I never DM castles and crusades in person so I don't ever anticipate using that DM's screen for what it was intended and using it for BX allows me to use a screen with amazing art by Peter Bradley!



Now from left to right, what the heck did I paste on the inside of the board. I started with the saving throw sheets. Monsters typically state that they save as a "fighter 3" or a "magic user 10" so this page worked when I was rolling saves for monsters or when I was rolling a secret save for a PC.

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After that, I added the death and dismemberment table. This was only used about 4 times total - but it was fun showing it to the PC's once in a while to freak them out.



After that page was the variable weapon chart, the armor chart, and the ranged weapon ranges with modifiers table. This was nice to have in front of me. DM's who use the d6 damage for everything rule, would probably be able to replace this with the ranged weapon table and maybe the EXP for monsters table or the random treasure tables? I didn't have either of these at my finger tips but it wasn't necessary since I was running a pre-generated and populated module. I'm thinking about changing this page up and adding those tables since in the future if I do get a campaign up and running I will be running more "on the fly" encounters. I really didn't need the armor table and I could make the other tables smaller to make space.



The final page was the most used, it had the attack tables for PC's and Monsters - nuff said.

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And finally, here is a crappy phone photo of the awesome artwork by Bradley.



I was pretty darn happy with this DM's screen overall. I'd love to see something like this professionally done up, but my scotch taped version will work for me until that day ;)

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