Last year as I prepared to run the next D&D campaign for our group, I decided I wanted to make it more like a board game. No electronics would be allowed at the table, just paper and pen, printed paper maps, and any handouts were printed and ready to go. Here’s an example of the cards I made:

When you start a new game at level 1, there’s very little your character knows how to do. Everything is just the basics, then as you level up you get more skills, better equipment, etc. The group is up to level 5 now, and keeping track of everything they can do is getting more complicated. We’re starting to go more electronic with players using tablets to reference their character sheets, and I’m running so many enemies in an evening I’ve started using a laptop to keep track of them all.

A week or so ago I found some gorgeous maps to use from Etsy.com. Many were on sale, 1,500 maps for $3 from one creator, another was selling access to his entire library of 50,000 maps for $13:

I’m excited to use these maps, but as I thought about it, I felt they were going to lose a lot if I printed them out. Shopping around, I stumbled across shops like this:

So very cool! But also close to $2k for the cases that include the TV! I checked on Amazon and yeah, 50″ TVs are now about 3 inches in depth and weigh less than Jax! I discussed the idea with the group and everyone was interested in seeing what we could put together.

First we tried playing with a projector and it actually worked really well. The only drawback was we had to keep the lights really low which made it hard to read any papers we had. Also, with a projected image we can’t get into using a touchscreen feature that will update the map as you move your character miniature along. Converting a normal TV into a touchscreen requires getting an InfaRed Overlay, they’re about $200 from Amazon and there are several software options to choose from for running the map. The one I’ve been looking at is only $35 to buy it outright, no yearly subscription.

This last week I won a $50 gift certificate from work, and the 50 inch TV I was looking at on Amazon for the project was on sale. Together with some of my credit card points, the total price was $195. I couldn’t resist and now we get to try playing with a TV for a while. Here it is, set up under the protective acrylic sheet on my gaming table, running the $35 software for the animated map:

You can see the water moving and the torches flickering. Also, if you turn the sound up you can hear the sounds of the ocean, and a crew working on the boat.

If it all works out we’ll look at getting the InfaRed Overlay added, then eventually building a case for the whole thing. All for much less than the $1,600 bundle from Etsy! 😁

Not a lot else going on. I saw “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” last weekend and enjoyed it. I guess Winston Churchill’s papers on the operation were only declassified 8 years ago! Did make me want to read up on the whole thing. 🙂

That’s about it! Lots of rain the last couple of days, everyone’s lawns look great! The flowers in my walkway are really happy:

Take care! Hugs!