Crosshead

Hasbro and the Orb of Gratuitous Leeching! A free 5E adventure where you get to stop the Big Bad Evil from destroying the Wizards of the Coast OGL

3rd Party creators are who introduced me to Tabletop Games in the first place, the fact that WoTC & Hasbro found it necessary to change the OGL in order to make a some extra change (in comparison to the millions they already make from their content) by ripping of those creators is just insane. 

Watching Puss in Boots 2 last week with my kids sort of put two and two together and I put together this adventure piece to do a whole play on what is going on. I’d love to see people share it, would love to see people play it!

Special thanks to Pim, Lashy and Luke who helped me with the inspiration, art and statblocks!

I had been reading up on shorting in the stockmarket,  as GME: Reddit vs Hedgefunds was going on, trying to find a layman's summary when I came up with the idea of translating the concept to a fantasy universe.

Not just the concept of shorting, but the whole history of how a group of Redditors wanted to take on the big hedgefunds on trading platforms like Robinhood. A story that started taking on this aura of a Kurasawa's Seven Samurai. People taking a stand against the forces that had been wreaking havoc against society, referring to the 2008 stock market crash, and would hold their ground no matter the consequences.

With Gemhold I wanted to make an attempt to retell that story as a 5E adventure. Transforming the terminology and phrasing used into a fantasy setting.

The basic layout for the adventure would be that the players either find a Tome of Scryddit of their own and are able to read for themselves that the city of Gemhold is under siege, or that they become entangled in some other way. You could even play the game from the side of the Hedge Sorcerers, taking part in the siege and killing all the Diamond Dogs and their followers.

The game being set up as a how many lvl 1 sorcerers would it take to fight off a party of lvl 20 sorcerers. Or just even one for that matter.

www.crossheadstudios.com

Who needs this the most?

A holiday tale of how cloaca-cola co. embodies the persona of a saint to spread its infectious liquid all over the world.

Witness the birth of Sinistraclaus!

Bring out the best in your boy with the Band of Boops!

I’ve been working this design for a city called Zoolatra, where all the pets have turned into humanoid and the original humanoid inhabitants have all going missing. It’s basically me doing a play on some popular animal tropes from different sources of media. Going with a formula of one creature, one magic item and one map (of a building) for each type of pet as I puzzle together this city. I started with dogs, and had originally planned on doing a one sheet like I did last time, but in process of doing the art I came up with this fun idea for a short “comic” that ties together my item and creature in a fun way that you could introduce into your own games as well.

I’ll be posting more about the city and it’s lore on my website if you’re interested later this week which is www.crossheadstudios.com. 

Also love getting tips for the other pets I plan on doing. Starting with cats most likely, but haven’t decided just yet so might get inspired to do something else.

BRANDED BY ADVENTURE

Since I currently can't make the time to really sit down and write full modules or illustrate series of items or monsters, I decided to try on something new and create these "single page" adventure prompts in the style of the DnDified monsters I used to make.

Each adventure would be centered around a single "brand", which can basically be anything going from a company to a person that I would turn into one of these prompts featuring one magic item, one monster and one battlemap for 5th edition D&D.

AZAMON

First in this series is Azamon, an adventure starring Jeff Bezos as Beelbezos, the archdemon who runs the distribution center of hell. He tries to gain dominion over mortals by tempting them to use his cursed creations, known as the boxes of Azamon, and be eternally bound by them in debt to him.

Beelbezos' true form isn't just a dragon that is obsessed with his hoard, he is the actual embodiment of his hoard. Growing more powerful as the hoard grows, which happens each time someone uses one of his boxes.

The design of Beelbezos was originally a lot more focused on illustrating the individual coins, something I translated in the story as the coins growing larger as they were absorbed by the construct. The only issue being that I felt it limited me in the design of the actual dragon. Form over function and all. I had a similar journey in designing the box, only the other way around. The first version was more of a treasure chest, but I realized it didn't translate the concept of the amazon box into fantasy properly. Just like the actual box it needed to look like a simple shipping crate, something cheap and not engraved with gold symbols.

REFERENCES

When I first started doing items and monster I did most of the work building the stats myself, generally only using other stats as a building block or reference to help me figure out the balance of my content.

For these short prompts I decided that I would do whatever helps me move the process along instead of wanting to do everything myself. My teleporting box had to be rather specific in design, making the actual reference to size and cost of shipping used by Amazon and having it work in tandem with the rest of the designs. The coin animated dragon however was not as important to get perfectly right, in another world I would have made sure to fill the statblock with references as well, and that's why I got on DnDbeyond and found myself the perfect fit for my concept in this GARGANTUAN COIN ANIMATED DRAGON by Farseer2020.

I would love it if DnDBeyond had a way to contact creators so I could ask people to help me translate their designs to make it even a better fit, but this will do.

VISUAL REFERENCES Another reference I made in the design of my creature is of players fighting a bald humanoid who presents himself as Beelbezos, just so you can have your players actually fight the man himself for a second, and explode into coins the moment he's struck. This is a reference to the amazing stylings of Edgar Wright in his adaptation of Scott Pilgrim in the titular movie.

I also like this idea of fighting this humanoid, who basically functions like the fin ray of an angler fish, as the coin animated dragon remains hidden underneath you attacking from the pile of coins. It would look like the humanoid is in control of the coins instead of the other way around.

If you like what you see step by my website www.crossheadstudios.com for more or support me on https://www.patreon.com/Crosshead for more creations!

A couple of weeks ago I made my first attempt at introducing some 2D animated elements to a map I made. The result was a bit underwhelming for the work I put into it and although I had planned on dropping the idea for other projects instead, I decided to give it one more try. The goal was to start with an animation battlemap standard and see how I would fare doing my own spin on it.

A ship at sea.

(Here is the full HD loop on my youtube channel)

When the final result came out much better than I had imagined, I decided to take to the skies and build 2 more. One in the air and one in space. Then I decided to finish up the interior of my original ship as well.

Seeing as I am currently deconstructing all my illustrations for use in mapbuilders such as DungeonDraft, I decided to export the animated background layers of my animations as separate files as well, so that "anyone" (Patrons of mine) can use these assets to build their own custom animated map as well.

It's a bit of an experiment and depending on how it's received I might return to animation again, especially doing animation that can be repurposed to create your own content. If you'd like to follow along, see what else I've been working on you can check out my website

www.crossheadstudios.com

Wrote a free adventure with Swampland Games based on a map I designed. We put together a story, I did all the art and Swampland put it to writing. 

You can download the PDF for the adventure HERE

If you like it be sure to leave a comment, or if you’d like come support our work:

My Patreon

Swampland’s Patreon

I’ve been creating content for D&D and sharing it online for quite some time now. When I first started I was inspired by a lot of the artists I had come across. Coming into contact with some of them over time, I started doing minor collaborations to create content together. Not just with other illustrative artists but also writers, developers, statwizards etc. In doing these I started looking for thinking of ways of making these collaborations easier and that’s where Dungeon Draw was born. A web platform where artists can very easily share work with other creators and users to build custom content together. Content they can have professionally produced/printed and sell it on site. By creating tools that split up the work (illustrations – card layout – stats – production – shipping) they could focus on their own art and keep creating instead of marketing.

 What’s also great about building tools like this is that anyone can use them to create their custom content. Use our card templates as a base, upload your own creatures or items *– or use art packs we have on-site*, fill in your own stats *– or use homebrew you find online*, name the cards and export digitally *- or have them professionally printed on demand*.

Building tools to make creating reference cards easy is the first step in this project. In order to showcase what we could do with this I teamed up with 4 other artists including PrintableHeroes, Paper Forge, ItsaDNDMonsterNow, Julio Bencid, James Perrett, putting together enough content for 6 decks with a total of 400 premade reference cards (both items and creatures). This is just the start though, once we launch and have built the tools we’ll be able to create hundreds more.

Having a platform like this, where we plan to combine custom content like creatures, maps, modules, etc. aims to make it possible to put together your own campaign packs of goodies. With options to have it digitally, print it yourself or have us print it professionally for you. If you’d like to know more about the first step in building this platform and would like to back it, I’d love for you to check out our Dungeon Draw Kickstarter HERE.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/crossheadstudios/dungeon-draw

To help get word out about Dungeon Draw and the Kickstarter I’m launching in Mid November I decided to do a huge giveaway of DnD prizes, with over $1000 worth of content:

ENTER HERE

All I’m asking for you to do is just check out the website, and if you feel like it, to share it on some of your social to get a leg up.

WWW.DUNGEONDRAW.COM

I’ve been creating content for Tabletop RPGs for quite some time now and ever since I’ve started I always wanted to launch a platform that made customization of said content a possibility. Not just customizing it but also producing physical copies of this content.

About a year and a half ago, I started talking about the basic concept of building a platform like this with people that I had met in the RPG community online. Finding web engineers was key, obviously, who helped me figure out what the possibilities were of actually bringing to life some of these concepts and where it was best to start. Building maps had always been high on my list, as it was my main focus for quite some time, but as it seemed rather complex to build as a launching platform, after quite some time of research and trials & error, building a playing card builder was the next thing I looked into. The idea seemed much more viable as a starting point and thus began the quest to build our first proof of concept.

Now second on the list was getting this stuff produced. It’s fun to be able to create your own stuff online and have a digital version of your creation, but getting to have them at hand while you're at the table is just so much better. I had been talking to several local printing companies, and some big-name card companies as well, who all required a minimum bulk of a rather large amount. Selling content on some of the popular print-on-demand websites, however, I realized they were able to produce single versions of a product for a reasonable rate, which made the idea much more viable. So I started looking for companies who specialized in this and found a couple in the US, and after some digging, in EU as well. 

Now that I had finished the groundwork for the project, after months and months of research and prep work, I got to the third step of building my project and that knocking on doors of some of my fellow fantasy artists in an effort to see if they’d be interested in offering up their creations on this platform as well. As a creator myself I was focused on making sure that we’d have a fair deal to offer them, as part of building this system isn’t just about building a cool tool but also a place where creators can sell their work for honest pay. Looking to team up with a selection of my favorite artists that I’d met in the DnD community specifically in an effort to create some premade decks to showcase what the system is all about. Having their content to fuel the system would mean that it wasn’t just hundreds of drawing people would be able to use, but thousands instead. This as just a starting point of our planned launch, in the hopes of getting to collaborate with many more in the future.

I was very fortunate to get an overwhelmingly positive response from my colleagues. Joined by creators like PrintableHeroes, Paper Forge, James Perrett, ItsaDnDMonsterNow and Julio Bencid I had a perfect mix of premade cards to start off with: Combining both popular 5E creatures, NPCs, beasts from the SRD and custom made magic Items + creatures.

Now the next step in this journey is to get the word out for the upcoming Kickstarter that will help launch this platform. Get to talking about it with people interested in what we're trying to build. Both fantasy artists & stat wizards who’d might want to get their work featured on our site and the DM’s & GM’s who want to use it to create content for their favorite RPG system.

If you’re interested, be sure to check out our prelaunch website:

www.DungeonDraw.com 

and sign up for our mailing list if you want to help us get this project launched.

About three months ago I posted a design for stat cards featuring 5E beasts, something I had been playing around with for druid players and DM’s alike and the feedback was really great. It was basically just started out as a way of getting more out of the tokens I was drawing for VTT, combining them with simplified versions of the MM statblocks using icons I made.

In the last three months, I spent a lot of my spare time going through the design and trying to streamline it even more. Combining icons to visualize attack options like multi-attack, types of damage an attack does and alternative types of speed. The layout was reshaped to fit simple poker size cards and the text about the same scale as standard MTG cards so that I could fit up to half of the page of text (in some cases) on a single card. I used MTG cards as a reference, not just for the lettering but also for the scale of the card. That way people can reuse the foils they have for those cards for these cards too.

I also spent that time drawing unique illustrations for the 88 beasts in the back of the manual, including the dinosaurs in the front of the manual. What came out was this full deck and I’m pretty proud of it. If it’s a success I might try my hands on doing more simplified stat cards, a task that might seem pretty straight forward: just reuse the design I have for these, but in reality is actually much more difficult once you start taking into account spells and more complex actions than what beasts fall back on.

If you like these cards you can get them on DriveThruRPG or try your luck on my Instagram where I’m doing a free giveaway of three decks for my followers.

www.crossheadstudios.com

For a while now I’ve been playing around with the concept of these pseudo-isometric dungeons, a combination of top-down and isometric style dungeon of sorts. Now doing modular type maps, ones you can piece together yourself, reusing fragments of something and making it your own, was something I think is really great about standard top-down maps but it seemed a bit tricky to convert when working with 3-d elements. You’re either going to get an odd perspective when working with separate vanishing points for each fragment or going to have trouble matching up the walls when connecting them.

Not just that but you also need to figure out how to make connections between tiles work. In topdown there not only easy to create but also pretty easy to delete, just drawing a line over them and coloring in the path. Doing it for a more 3-dimensional map makes it harder because you need to fill in each blank you create with 3-dimensional walls that need to match up with the walls that are already there. If you create multiple exits for each fragment, you need to design multiple coverups for each exit too.

With Fragmented Dungeon I wanted to experiment with this concept and figure out what was possible and what were the limitations. I’ve chosen to keep the work digital, for now, making multiple tiles every week and posting them on my Patreon but in due time I think it could also be interesting to have these tiles printed. Cardboard or thick paper tiles you can store in a box and just assemble quick dungeons with on the fly for a short session or create more extensive and complex dungeons for a bigger crawl.

My big ole dungeon map. Biggest I’ve ever created!

You can find more info about it on my website www.Crossheadstudios.com including some images you can zoom in on!

As a fan of both Heavy Metal and DnD I’ve always been fascinated by the connections the two have shared. Both using a lot of the same imagery and themes, both caught up in the satanic scare and both been looked at as outsiders (also sharing quite a large overlap in their audience). So creating a heavy metal style campaign isn’t anything new obviously, but what I was trying to achieve was to tell a story that reflected the concept of the heavy metal subculture in a more standard DnD type setting instead. Try to present it as a believable adventure that just includes a bunch of references to history and ideas of that culture.

Not only will I include a bunch of anagrams, references to places and people, but I will also include lyrics to specific songs that have a connection to anything I’m crafting, whether that connection is just in name or in context. This first page has one referring to the song Metalhead by Saxon.

The adventure that I’m writing was part of this expanded goal I had on my Patreon, an adventure I had planned on putting together for quite a while but couldn’t find the time for until I got some backing. An adventure I plan to release for free as soon as it is finished. I’ve been dropping some of my art on reddit already, mainly of the maps I’ve made for the story, and now I’m working on finishing the other custom content like this Metalhead race. All of it will include these references to the culture, custom monsters, spells and items, and try to have the feel of a genuine DnD module. I wanted DM’s to be able to drop it into their own games, or just run it as an adventure on their own, using basic DnD handbooks.

If you’re interested in this booklet, I’ll be releasing it for free on websites like DrivethruRPG or DMsguild, and I will send anyone a reminder who drops me an email at [email protected]. Adding you to my mailing list.

For a long time I’ve had this idea of putting together a Heavy Metal inspired Nordic campaign for my home game. The notes scribbled down a long time ago, hiding between piles of notebooks filled with random ideas. When I recently reached a set amount of subscribers on my Patreon, and the attached goal of putting together a small campaign booklet, I decided to go back to that idea and finally put it to paper.

After visiting the town of Slumberhaven, the players will find themselves on a quest headed for a snowy outpost and the dungeon hiding underneath. Like most of the battlemaps I create, I wanted to make sure the players would have multiple approaches to securing the outpost. They can take the direct approach, or try and sneak into the camp unseen by crawling underneath the main building in the North of the camp. They could also just circumvent the entire camp by following the river into a cave that leads directly to the dungeon underneath. If things go awry during combat in the camp they also have the opportunity to just drop down the water well, dropping into the dungeon below.

Like I’ve mentioned before I am putting this entire campaign module to paper and as soon as it is finished I am thinking of uploading it to some place like drivethrurpg or the dmguild for PWYW/free, if people are interested.

For all the high resolutions of my maps visit my Patreon