Starbright Illustrations (blog)

By The Illustrator 　http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/2009/06/01/mech-design-gets-colour-and-d20-dungeons-review/

The drawing of my new mech design that I started in my last post is slowly taking shape. It has some basic colours now, but I do like the black and white look of the original Battletech Technical Readouts, so I hesitated a little bit before adding any colour at all. But the rest if the designs in my RPG resources sections, for Traveller and D20 are in colour, so it’ll fit in better. I haven’t created the stats for this design yet because I have been reading the D20 rules I downloaded, after I’m done I’ll be reading the RPG rules for D20 Rifts that I downloaded at the same time, and then I’ll be getting round to creating stats for this giant mech for use in sci-fi RPGs. I’m enjoying reading the free D20 stuff and the latest one I read was;

D20 Dungeons

What a cool document, dungeon designing is one of the highest expressions of the game mastering art and this document is a lovely overview of out-of-fashion craft.
It goes into excruciating detail – it includes rules for different types of door, and different hinges, locks, etc, etc – and this might not be to everyone’s taste, but my inner nerd loved it. There is so much detail that you can really imagine yourself creeping through the dungeon noticing every detail.
There are nice sections on traps and why a dungeon might be inhabited at all. I particularly liked the idea of natural caverns  full of deep subterranean creatures connecting an abandoned dungeon full of wandering monsters with a dungeon complex that was still in use by its builders, a more uniform collection of monstrous creatures who use this redoubt as a base to terrorise the local area.