Against the Orcs

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RPTroll
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Against the Orcs

Post by RPTroll »

Your standard "save the village from the orcs" freebie scenario from Savage Worlds.

IT WAS A BLAST!!!!

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Post by RPTroll »

OK. Now for more.

You can get this free adventure here.
http://www.greatwhitegames.com/Games/Sa ... antTKa.zip

The maps are right click and save-able so creating a maptool adventure is a piece of cake. If anyone's interested I can zip up the tokens and campaign properties for distribution.

Next week we have a huge battle. I'm going to try to forgo the mass combat rules and run it via maptool and macros for large sets of tokens.

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trevor
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Post by trevor »

If you'd be willing, I'd love it if you made a time-lapse video of your mass battle next session, check out desktopexporter if you are interested:

http://rptools.net/tools/dexporter-0.2.jar
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Post by RPTroll »

I'll give it a shot.

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Post by trevor »

For info, I set up the snapshot for every 4 seconds
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Post by RPTroll »

I tried the screen capture app. How do you merge the screen shots into a movie?

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Post by trevor »

well, I was going to post the command line I use to encode the files with mencoder, a nice, well tuned one liner, but when I opened up my KnowledgeBase document, all that was there is:

>c h;mhj k, k,lukyuyukmuikmkkl:k/hn6um5nui

My kids have a knack for destruction. And like to bang on my keyboard mercilessly when I'm not looking :P

I'll have to do some digging now. If you have XP SP2 it comes with a movie maker that I believe will load up all the images and export it into a movie.
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Post by RPTroll »

I have the same kid problem. :-)

I'll give it a shot with movie maker.

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Post by RPMiller »

I have used the Movie Maker method quite successfully. I recommend it if you don't have anything better.
You're just jealous 'cause the voices only talk to me.

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Post by RPTroll »

I used this command but had to install mencoder from the Ubuntu(Linux) pacakge manger.

mencoder mf://*.png -mf w=800:h=600:fps=1:type=png -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:mbd=2:trell -oac copy -o output.avi

Here's the result. If you have a slow connection I would recommend doing a right-click save. Its a bit largish. Note that MapTool bombed a couple of times. It seemed to be from chat overflow as the player selected a larger number of tokens to tmacro at once. So you'll see my son at least once since he's my background photo. :-)

I'll do the adventure write-up as I have time.

Cheers,
Troll

http://www.rptroll.com/AgainstTheOrcs.avi

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trevor
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Post by trevor »

Downloading now.

One of the fantastic benefits of generating a movie from a bunch of frames is that you can selectively remove frames you don't want. Mencoder is smart enough to go by filename sorting and not a sequential finder, so it skips missing files.

What I do is open the directory in windows explorer, turn on thumbnail mode, then scan for images that aren't interesting to the movie.
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Post by RPTroll »

New version uploaded. And now for the session writeup.

We're playing the 'Against the Orcs' freebie by Wiggy of Savage Worlds fame. The characters had a great time fighting Orcs so I decided to deviate a bit from the adventure. The scenario calls for a battle between the Orcs and the Village using the mass combat rules out of Savage Worlds. I decided to see how Maptool would handle a large army combat.

So I placed 250 Orcs and an Orc Chieftain against 12 Villagers, 6 PCs, 30 Bowmen, 10 Spearmen, and 10 Medium Horse and Riders. The village of Roxbury is on a hill and has a wooden palisade around it. The Villagers are yellow, the horsemen and their horses are blue, the PCs are green, the bowmen are cyan, and the spear men magenta. The Orcs, of course, are red. The white mark on the mud field represents the longest range of the long bows.

The opening scene of the move depicts the Orcs marching through the mud which greatly slowed their advance The bowmen took positions on the village buildings and waited for the orcs to enter range. The spear men and PCs manned the wall nearest the orcs while the villagers were given the duty of watching the Eastern gate. The knights decide to sally forth from the Eastern gate attacking the Orcs on the firmer ground near the fort.

Two of the Villages, Nimneth Orcslayer and Chubby, leave with the knights. Nimneth landed a killing blow against an Orc Cheiftan in the previous fight and has been haled throughout the village as a hero. Chubby wants to be a hero as well and so charges out with the horsemen.

The first volley of arrows stuck the advancing Orcs killing one of them. The rest continue their slow motion run through the mud. The bowmen continue doing little damage until the Orcs enter medium range. At that point Orc blood begins mixing with the mud in greater quantity but the main body of Orcs draws ever nearer.

The knights charged into the leading ranks of Orcs devastating what remained of that arrow-filled squad. Other Orc squads quickly surrounded the leading knights as human and equine blood also falls upon the killing fields. Chubby goes down to an Orcish short sword.

The two Wizards, Bladesinger and Radin Moore, come over the six foot walls running towards the Orc hoard but staying away from the engaged knights. Both launch Fear spells at the advancing hoards. Bladesinger suffers backlash from the spell and becomes shaken. But Radin Moore's spell goes off and an entire squad of Orcs becomes panicked.

The hand-to-hand combat continues as the Orcs attack man and horse but the knights have successfully regrouped and countered the Orcs. The mages fire another volley of Fear Spells panicking two more squads of Orcs which is where the current session ends.

As this gaming session ends, three squads of Orc are panicked and running away. The remaining 100+ still advance.

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Post by RPMiller »

What codec does this use? I'm unable to play it back.
You're just jealous 'cause the voices only talk to me.

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trevor
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Post by trevor »

I'm having trouble running it as well, could you try encoding it with the xvid codec ?

Something like:

-ovc xvid
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Post by RPTroll »

It got an error when I tried that saying unable to initialize video driver. I think (form the command above) that its spitting out an mpeg4 codec I've had several guys from my gaming group say it works for them. I assume all of them tried to download it first.

I'll futz with the options a bit to see what I can get.

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