Bits and Bobs IX

I love bloggers who show how they make the amazing props they come up with. For example, these spellbooks made by Janet from It's A Little Like Magic:

If you're anything like me, you've wondered how things could survive in a megadungeon environment. The tortoise Manuela managed to live trapped in a cardboard box for 30 years. So maybe not so crazy after all...

"Mad Jack" Churchill was a British soldier who fought in World War II wielding a braodsword, longbow, and bagpipe.

Joey of Metal vs Skin has a Bastard Class for Old School games. It's something of a re-imagined Bard class, and it's fantastic!

Delving Deeper has a series going about Class Guilds. I rather like his take on them, and want to point you to the Mage's Guild as a solid example.

Sticking with the arcane, Monstrous Television has a selection of house-rules for wizards in his home AD&D game that are worth checking out.

Noisms has been spending some time thinking about hexes and wilderness maps. He took those thoughts, and explored a real island, about 2.5 x 1.5 miles that would easily fit within a 5 or 6 mile hex.

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The news is now about a week old, but Google is killing off Reader July 1. I have over 400 blogs that I follow, and Reader was where I read them all. I've moved my feed over to The Old Reader, which is a stripped down version. It's running slowly, but all of my feeds are there, and they're still organized into the different folders I had them in on Reader. I think once the tidal wave of new subscribers settles down, and the servers get reinforced, it'll work really well. For the moment though I'm going back and forth making sure that The Old Reader is actually catching everything.