This Week: Alchemy, Gnomes, Elba, and Strahd!

Welcome to This Week, a weekly series where I discuss all the gaming (both video and tabletop) content I've played, made, prepped, run and seen that's cool this week.

Let's jump in with what I've done This Week...

What I've Played

We purchased a copy of Dominion: Alchemy expansion, and have now had a few games using it. Despite my continued confusion with the Golem card, I am really enjoying the new meta it creates, and the interesting choices it's brought back. A lot of people claim the base game gets boring (though I never found that to be the case), but Alchemy definitely livens the game up a lot!

(Image from Board Gaming.)

 I've also (though this is hardly a new thing for me) have been playing a lot of Mount & Blade Warband, as I eagerly await Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord! If you haven't checked out M&B before, it's a third-person medieval combat/management game where you slowly grow a name for yourself, and hire a group of soldiers who you train into a (hopefully) powerful army. I play with the mod Floris Evolved because I think the base game is pretty bland - but Bannerlord looks like they've learned a lot from their modding community, and have brought in some of the bets parts!

(Image from YouTube.)

What I've Made

Something I've been working on, called A Gnome's Tale, has made some significant progress, and I'm now going to show you a little bit of it (note: this is the first time any part of it has ever been seen online :D) In short, it's a system neutral random encounter drop-table/art book...

(Image from... US! WOO!)

We're hoping to continue to develop A Gnome's Tale and I'll let you know as more comes out that I can talk about!

I've also been working on my ability to Blades in the Darkify photos to make character portraits for my campaign. I think I've got a pretty good system, which is:

1. Find a photo.
2. Go to Image > Adjustment > Hue/Saturation, and set the Saturation to -100.
3. Go to Image > Adjustments > Curves, and select the Strong Contrast Preset.
4. Go to Filter > Filter Gallery > Cutout, and set Number of Levels to 8, Edge Simplicity to 3, and Edge Fidelity to 3.
5. Again, go to Image > Adjustments > Curves, and select the Strong Contrast Preset.
6. And, you're done!

(Original image from ComingSoon.com, edited by me.)

This process is very simple, quick, and easy to tweak (just adjust any of the above values). It even works better with lower quality images, so you don't need to worry about finding the perfect HD shot - even screenshots from Netflix have thus far rendered great results!

What I've Run

I finally got to run Curse of Strahd again (and reminded myself of the crushing weight of being behind on the campaign diary!) which was amazing. I won't go into details here, but I got to use my Strahd voice for a lot of it, which was a lot of fun!

(Image from Wizards.)

I promise I'll be updating the campaign diary ASAP!

That's all for This Week this week. I'll talk to you next week, and tell you of all my adventures again! In the mean time, fill your own week with as much awesome as possible.