Austin Calkins – Project 1

Posted bycalkinsa

For my first project, I decided to focus on a hobby I have grown to love, table-top roleplaying games (TTRPGs) such as Dungeons and Dragons and Starfinder. However, the hobby didn’t start as one at first.

A variety of dice. The first one is a one to represent the unfortunate start of my hobby. The other dice sets belong to characters from then that I love, but they never got to their full realization. I have a different dice set for each character I have played.

I started playing TTRPGs a few years ago with a group of people from the Fusion gaming club at Canisius. I did have a good time with it in the moment. However, I learned that some of the people who introduced me to the games were not the best of people. After that, I didn’t think I was going to play much anymore. The games had associated themselves with these people and a bunch of my friends and I stopped playing them.

Some of the “hardware” of TTRPGS that I have recently gotten for my own games.

I still wanted to play the TTRPGs, but no one else really wanted to. So I made the decision to take it into my own hands. I wanted to dissociate it from the people from before and make it fun again. I bought myself the Starter Set for Dungeons and Dragons and rallied a group of friends to play. We loved it. They thought I was a good DM, and I loved doing it.

These are things that represent my reclaiming of TTRPGs for myself and my friends. The top row contains two character sheets for two of my characters and the pawns I used for my first campaign. The second row contains a map for the new campaign I created and two commissions of my character, Fulgur. He was originally from the time I played TTRPGs with those from the past, but I have also reclaimed him as my own. He’s my favorite character ever.

I’m now currently writing and DMing a campaign with the same friends that I have made myself. TTRPGs have quickly become one of my favorite hobbies that I cannot wait to play with my friends every week.

I learned how to use Photoshop and InDesign to touch up, color-correct and resize photos and scans and organize them into a document. The project was not that hard, only tedious. I did enjoy doing the levels and curves on the pictures, especially for the Fulgur drawings. They look so much better and brighter than the scans of them were by themselves. I think I did the best that I could with the assignment. I did improve it from its original by changing the picture of the dicebox. I think it can be improved by making the amount of pictures smaller, but forcing the theme to be more strict. Some people’s projects might have way too far of a spread to have a “theme”. I think a smaller set of pictures with a more strict theme requirement would be. Overall, I did enjoy the project. I was happy to show off my love for TTRPGs and my characters, specifically Fulgur.