Driver's side front. Saw this wet spot, but couldn't identify it from smell. Not condensation as the car hasn't been driven today. Nothing obvious looking from the engine down toward that area.
I've got a drip pan under it right now to see if I can catch it and identify that way.
Not sure about the rest of you that wonder about the scale of the map, but I really don't care how many kilometers/miles this is as long as what's in it feels somewhat real and can be populated with NPCs and factions that make sense. Obviously RTG has done all the heavily lifting in that regard. And yet...the wodering persists.
Specifically, the Hot Zone. For it to be and feel post-apocalyptic while being in the center of an incredibly dense urban area, being able to see the other side of it from one edge doesn't really feel big enough, right? Especially as described in our wonderful new sourcebook, NC2045. There's got to be some space for to breath a little. For some distance between Maelstrom and the CoE. To be too far away from any help from outside the Hot Zone.
I wanted to see what .5 miles north/south and .75 miles east/west would look like. And to get a good feel for it, I put this together very sloppily :)
Saint Louis MO, downtown (southern view, 500 ft altitude). Second pic is where I think you might agree that's big enough.
Even if you've never trod The 'Lou, I think it's pretty obvious there's some decent amount of space there. I was surprised. Didn't think it would be. I can see a strong argument for 1 mile north/south and 1.5 miles east/west based purely on the side of a six-lane urban highway, but what do you all think?
Full disclosure! I'm a complete and utter Inkscape newb.
That out of the way, I'm working my way through various guides and loving it so far. I'm definitely not the artistic type. My creativity is more in the narrative vein, but this a lot of fun so far.
My original goal was to take a 2D near-future urban street map (Night City from Cyberpunk Red) and start filling in the blocks with believable/realistic 2D building shapes and footprints. Simple shapes, no flare or style here. I'm looking for quality over quality. I was hoping to find a procedural way to do this in Inkscape and, after learning the basics, think something like this might work if I go block by block.
Build a palette of shapes that will represent the buildings. Or several palletes. One for aparment blocks, for instance, one for larger commercial areas, etc.
Then some process or method of using the spray tool + clip path and align & distribute. I know that even then it will involve a lot of tweaking, but that's why the vector approach is better, my untrained mind tells me.
I'm not trying to do the entire city in one swoop :) As someone pointed out recently, fictional map-making is fun in and of itself. Remains to be seen, but I'm game to try!
Thoughts?
Curious as to what everyone is using for overall campaign management in regards to...well...everything in your Cyberpunk Red world. Not just battlemaps and NPCs, etc, but the impressions, emotions, and bodies your edgerunners are leaving behind week to week. I'm old-school on the D&D side, but hadn't run any games in any systems for a looooong time. Regardless, I fell back on old habits with a GM set of folders and sub folders and a seperate shared folder for myself and players. We're using Roll20 for the VTT, but we're playing in person with it up on a big TV in the same room. Everyone is using Demiplane for characters.
I'm not recreating any wheels in terms of making lists weapons or corps or anything like that...using as much source material as is available...and we've bought all of it :) To make it easier, we're using NotebookLM with all DLC and sourcebooks converted to markdown. Asking a lore or rules question was cut by 3/4 compared to all PDFs. Converting the larger PDFs was non-trivial though :)
Just wondering what you're doing to, for instance, through the process of your players interacting with the world, taking sides, or not, how you're managing things like how factions feel about each other and how that might change over time. Who the players owe favors to and visa versa. That kind of thing.
World Anvil is certainly impressive-looking. I have whatever their highest tier is but have never used it. My daughter has been running her own D&D group for years and they use it quite a bit. I wasn't sure how that would work with CPR, though I know it's system agnostic.
Just...how do you meaningfully track everything to keep the world as alive as possible to your table? I'm not worried about the rules. Not worried about my creativity in prep or gigs. Not worried about my ability to improv or do voices. I'm more worried about, and, frankly, more interested in, lol, managing a living, breathing world. Too many years of city management PC games, I'm betting LOL
I realize the answer to "how do you know when to sharpen" is usually, "if you have to ask, sharpen" (lol). Just got a nice set of Easywood medium carbine tools and have been putting them through their paces.
If you're using carbide cutters, what are your guidelines for turning the carbide tip or turning it in the case of a round head?
In another thread about the slow pace of overall progression, a couple of side convos got going about what it's like to play characters at these ranks. Dunno about all you, but from my experience in D&D, most campaigns rarely get beyond level 13ish, at least according to what I can remember anecdotaly and what WOTC said...if you can trust them about anything, lol.
So it's not all that surprising that I haven't come across content designed for those levels. I've got my own takes on how hard that would be regardless.
Does anyone know of content that's available? Or have you run anything for players at those ranks?Any insight would be appreciated.
From Cyberpunk Red. Not what we normally talk about here :)
Attached is their excellent, high-res city map. Running a CPR campaign, I obviously wanted to get a lot more granular than that, so I messed with Gemini a bit to get the second image, which, frankly, suits me just fine. I had asked it for that area and that area it gave me. Perfect zoom level, looks good, granular enough for me to populate buildings with whatever I want.
BUT...no matter how many times I try or how many different prompts I use, I can't get it to do that again or, if it gets close, do another area of the city with the intent to do the WHOLE city.
SO...I'm sort of resigned at this point in taking the first image and just going nuts with a vector illustrator to do the building infill. There's a certain fun in that going all the way back to when I was a teen making D&D maps on paper :)
If any of you have suggestions on shortcuts that would keep me from having to do it by hand, I'm all eyes. If any of you have good suggestions on the best way to do it by hand, ditto.
Looking at getting a slow-speed grinder to keep my chisels sharp. I'm not going to have the budget for multiple grinders (lol) so I'm planning on a decent-quality grinder and a good jig system (Wolverine comes highly recommended from my local fellow turners).
If you only have two grits to work with, what should they be?
We've got an older deck we're trying to get another few years out of and it's developing a slight shimmy.
I'd like to try a V-brace solution before bringing in a pro, but have one question about the process.
How do you attach the apex of the V to the house?
I understand the rest of it. That's the one piece I've not been able to find an answer to and my google-fu is usually pretty strong :)
Physical copies are supposed to ship in mid-July. Nothing yet...:)
Aside from Smasher, the gist of the video is making fun of regular vs legendary weapons in CP2077.
Confusing enough for ya? (lol)
We did our seshzero and ran our first full session yesterday. Outside some Roll20 learning curves to smooth out and one newbie to the hobby figuring out the character sheet, we're pretty much golden and ended on a good cliffhanger.
We even had our inaugural in-game use of the custom netrunning app we created to make netrunning go a lot faster and off the table. Worked great and I (GM) was able to let the netrunner do his thing while other characters were doing their stuff out of turn order. Basically, they were searching an office and the netrunner was hacking the desk computer while the rest of the group found other things, did perception checks, streetwise checks, etc, all while Reba, the netrunner, was pawing through the computer.
Here's a demo of the app our fixer player created. We're still looking for playtesters. This is the 1.0 version, but there have been some significant updates very recently: https://youtu.be/gEqsfUNk3Pw?si=v8n30vrPerIjOrv9
TO THE POINT: one of the potential players doesn't have the time to commit to a weekly session, but still wants to be involved. We're utilizing 2020's (Wildside) option rules for fixer contacts and have them fully fleshed out as NPCs. My initial idea was that I could run a mini-session with her in between actual group sessions. She, as a fixer contact or henchman or whatever, could do tasks or try to source items the fixer needs.
Looking for any and all ideas along those lines because right now it's just sort of a nebulous idea and I'm kind of bogged down smoothing out the rough edges we ran into yesterday for session 1 ;)
We had our session zero last weekend and will kick things off in earnest this Sunday. I'm looking forward to it as it's my first non-oneshot GM attempt. We're leaning into whatever tech we can to increase immersion and fun, to the extent that one of our party members has spent the last month coding a netrunning app between the player and GM :)
I'm wondering what sort of shenanigans you've gotten up to using player agents, whether during the session or during downtime. The inclusion of them in the game world seems to be begging for use.
For context, we're using 2045.
Just had session zero for a new group/new campaign. They decided that they all live in the more seedy parts of The Glen. No problem, I can work with that.
We're going for an in-person Roll20 setup with each person using Demiplane character sheets on a laptop or tablet, with the Roll20 board up on a wall-mounted 4k at the end of the table. I'm clawing my way up the learning cliff there...
The new sourcebook is great! Hats off to the folks at RTG for making it happen. Dense with both hard data and flavor. Given all the different maps and POI, I was wondering what other GMs are doing to utilize all of this info.
Do city maps play a part at your table (remote or in person)?
If so, how are you going to use them/implement them?
Are you going to lean into the security and utilities given for the districts?
And the cast looks fantastic. I'm reading it for the first time in a LONG time and seeing all it's influence on subsequent media is pretty amazing.
I have Virpil Ace Flight Pedals which are confirmed working (Elite/Star Citizen, no issue). The previous time I had X4 installed and was working through the control setup, I don't remember it having any issues with the flight pedals. They simply don't appear on the list of "joysticks". Both Razer Tartarus gamepads as well as a Logitech Flight Quadrant and even the Joystick Gremlin V-joy show up.
I'm working my way through the tutorials and trying to figure out my HOSAS setup for this :)
Probably just me.
I conquer a non-spacefaring world (atomic) and try to enslave with 20 armies sitting on them. They revolt. I crack down and start sending armies there from my nearby homeworld. Never gets below 2.7 and maybe eight armies landed (in addition to the twenty that conquered). Seeing revolt was inevitable, I destroyed all buildings on the planet.
So they revolt. They get FOUR star systems all the sudden and a 943 strength fleet. Them revolting and getting those star systems forces my armies that were lifting off and my fleet that was in the system to go emergency jump, taking them out of the game for a while.
Meanwhile, their magical 943 fleet takes two of my systems. And, poof, there's a 625 space station on the nearest one all the sudden.
Double-u tee eff?
Conquered half a rival's stars next door and ended up with two of their planets. I set the species there to undesireables/displacement in order to drive the planet to uninhabited. Works normally, but in this case, two of the three species stopped dropping by 50 or 100 per month and now there's just a - symbol there.
Any idea what's going on with that?
Got into woodturning last year, but have shied away from HSS tools because of the sharpening demand. In the meantime, I'm learning basics using carbide tips.
After doing research into lathe tool sharpening, where usually the first thing mentioned is to a) not use your standard bench grinder on quality lathe tools and b) get a slower speed, dedicated grinder with a CBN wheel, usually running 2000 rpm or slower.
It then occurred to me that I already have such a machine and just lack the CBN wheel. I'm considering options to use a miter channel and figure out a way to build a jig. It's all abstract at the moment. I'm just brainstorming, but think it might work.