A Puzzling Map

A quick hark back to the previous month's prop making.  I wanted a combined treasure items and puzzle for the players in our D&D game so I came up with this puzzle.

Its supposed to be made from squares of gold, but I needed something lighter (and cheaper).

I used two squares of foam board with the card peeled back.  I drew the map shape onto one of them and then cut it out.  I began using a hot wire cutter, but it broke so I had to finish off with a sharp craft knife.  The hot wire cutter did a better job though and there is quite an undercut on some of the pieces cut with a knife.

Then it was a simple matter to glue everything together before cutting the individual squares apart.

Finally an undercoat followed by successive layers of bronze, brass and gold paints, then the detail added.

If you're interested the map shows the Empire of Y'hog at its peak, and it has a few arcane properties, thus I can give some historical information to the players.

It didn't take them too long to work out, though it took rather longer for them to identify where it was (the land forms have changed somewhat since it was made).  The players thought it was great fun.

Prop Progress?

So how did 'prop May' go?
Pretty well. I haven't posted much because most of the props were printouts from the adventure or pictures from the internet. Very useful for player immersion, but not very interesting to show here.

Moving on; New month, New project.

As I mentioned previously I went to the Mantic open day, there I picked up a pathfinder set for the new version of Deadzone. It's not the full retail box load (and I'm still waiting for my kickstarter stuff), but is great for running demos.
I've been planning the terrain and looking through my old DZ stuff putting together a few 100 points forces.

Last night we managed two consecutive games using my stuff alongside T'OtherOne's stuff (mine is teh unpainted grey stuff in the foreground, his is the rather excellent yellow stuff behind; more about it on his blog, link below).

We all had fun and got both games done in around two hours. No surprise then that June looks like Deadzone month.

Props

As I mentioned, I will be running A Time to Harvest so I have been thinking of props to add that little extra to the game.
The campaign starts with the investigators on a university field trip, so I thought note books would be appropriate. Besides, note taking is an important part of Call of Cthulhu.
Propnomicon, an excellent source of ideas and techniques, has designed several Miskatonic University note books, so I adapted his design and simply stuck it onto an A6 note pad. I couldn't find any reasonable pads that weren't spiral bound, unfortunately, but I think it does the job.

Here's another prop I made for a Delta Green game earlier this year.  It's a ritual stone found on an archaeological site in Orkney, actually made from a piece of slate picked up in a local car-park, engraved, and a leather thong tied round it.  The thong is supposed to look new.