Mesa Games

Just wanted to give a quick mention of a board game my friend John developed and produced himself: Venus Needs Men

It’s a great game at a great price with some fantastic artwork.  Each player is an alien race trying to get the earth’s population for their own reasons (for food, reproduction, slaves, etc.).  Players can also choose to be the Earth and try to defend themselves against the alien ships.  It’s a board game but also has a number of cards you can use to help seal your destiny.  So go check out the site and order your own copy!

As I’ve played D&D for the last 6 years or so, I’ve noticed how I’ve had both my DM and Player session notes all over the place: scraps of paper, sticky notes, the back of a character sheet, in the margin of spell sheet, etc.  In an effort to organize my notes as both a player and a DM, I’ve gone and created session sheets for each role:

• D&D DM Session Sheet (PDF - 28KB)
• D&D Player Session Sheet (PDF - 30KB)

The DM Session Sheet has spaces for your name, the campaign name and the date of the session being tracked.  There’s a large notes area for keeping track of general information during the game and a Attendees section to track which players played which characters, the XP they were rewarded and a space for notes about each character.  Finally, at the bottom is a section for leaving yourself any notes for the next session.

The Player Session Sheet has spaces for the character name, player name, campaign name and session date.  Below that, like the DM Session Sheet, is a space for session notes.  The next section is divided in two: one area for keeping track of any treasure gained during the session and another for keeping tracking of your money (rewards and expenses) during the game.  The Player Session Sheet also has a space for notes for your next session, where you can leave yourself reminders about what you want to do in the game - useful for when your group can’t get together that often.  At the very bottom are three space to track your XP: one for your previous XP, one for rewarded XP and a spot for the combined total.  The last section is a Hit Point Tracking area.  This is presented in two columns, one of which you could use for a familiar or animal companion.

If you have any comments to share about these session sheets, feel free to email me: mesagames @ spilth dot org

I decided to move my D&D Miniatures Database from my personal site to this one.  Although the data isn’t 100% right now, my friends and I find it useful for finding a mini of a particular type for either the minis game or RPG usage.  You can filter them by a number of properties (faction, set, rarity, type, subtype, size, setting, source, CR) and use a “shopping cart” to generate a list of minis you might need for an encounter or a warband.

I’ve leeched data for it from a number of places (WotC’s Warband Generator and KB Warband Generator), but what I’d really love to see is a XML source of data that any minis tool could use as it’s source of data.  That way people could focus on getting the data 100% in the XML source and then others can just build tools on top of that data.

I decided to start a d20 Wiki.  The main purpose right now is to collect a list of software and online resources for d20 games, but hopefully that will expand to other information.

Feel free to join up and help contribute.  If you have any ideas for new sections, email me and let me know.