Let the good times—and dice—roll, adventure fans! Episode 97 of the Icosahedrophilia podcast presents “The Valley of the Shadow of Death, Part 2,” played and recorded on August 14, 2010! Please listen now or subscribe via iTunes, Zune, or plain old RSS. This episode features the following segments:

• Weighing Anchor: Erika Lieberman of Sonic Legends calls for your initiative roll. You can hear Erika’s music in the background throughout this episode.
• The Staging Area: I briefly summarize the campaign backstory (referring listeners to the “Story Thus Far” recap episode for a more detailed history of the campaign), giving a more extensive summary of “Well Met in Markathesh” and part 1 of “The Valley of the Shadow of Death.”
• The Weather Report: The combat between Gnash and the crew of the Broken Promise—which Gnash had previously commandeered—continues.
• The Prop Shop: I describe the miniatures I used to represent Gnash, Kuurog, and their allies, and confess to two rules errors. My Noble Knight picks of the episode are two miniatures from Reaper Miniatures’ Dark Heavens line: Gronk Spliteye, Bugbear Hero (whom I used to represent Gnash) and Skrug, Bugbear Shaman (the miniature I used for Kuurog). See pictures of my painted versions below.
• Sea Shanties: This episode features the following theme and background music, used by permission of the copyright holders:
• “Racing the Wind” and “Gallows Jig” from the album Phantoms of the High Seas by Nox Arcana, ©2006 Monolith Graphics
• “Desert Battle” by Erika Lieberman, ©2009 Sonic Legends

As best I can recall, here are the goblins and hobgoblins that I used to stage the fight:

And here are front and rear photos of Gnash and Kuurog:

I hope that you enjoy(ed) listening to “The Valley of the Shadow of Death, Part 2,” and that you’ll join us when the adventure continues in “The Valley of the Shadow of Death, Part 3″!

I forgot to mention this in the audio, but if you shop at DriveThruRPG between now and September 10 (my brother’s birthday), enter the coupon code DTRPGAugust2010BlogPCast to receive a 20% discount on all products from the following publishers:

• A Terrible Idea
• Aethereal Forge
• Bailey Records
• Crucifiction Games
• Dream Pod 9
• Fantasy Games Unlimited
• Final Redoubt Press
• Gold Rush Games
• Goodman Games
• Highmoon Games
• Morbid Games
• OtherWorld Creations
• Palladium Books
• Rogue Games
• RPG Objects
• Savage Mojo
• Tricky Owlbear
• Vigilance Press

This is, in my opinion, absolutely the best lineup of publishers who have offered such discounts since the blog/podcast discount program began a few months ago. Don’t miss out on this great offer!

The following picture drew a flurry of “how’d you do it?” questions on Twitter this morning:

In case you don’t recognize the tiles themselves, they come from the old Dire Tombs set of Dungeon Tiles by Wizards of the Coast. The higher platform is an 8×8 tile from that set; the lower platform—slightly hard to see in this particular photo—is a 2×8 tile depicting stairs with the braziers at either end.

To form the columns, I bought a bag of 1″ wooden cubes and 2″ wooden dowels at the Michael’s craft store in my neighborhood. I drilled holes the diameter of the dowels through some of the blocks. Then I inserted dowels into the holes:

I then threaded another wooden block onto the exposed part of the dowel to form a pillar 1″ square by 2″ tall. I used a dowel instead of glue so that I could pull off the base to form a column 1″ tall as needed.

The little white clips are cord organizer clips manufactured by 3M. I found mine on the hardware aisle at Target. The gap in these clips is just right for lightly securing tiles the thickness of WotC’s Dungeon Tiles. They come with double-sided self-adhesive strips. I used these strips to attach the clips to the wooden blocks that would form the tops of the columns.

And that’s pretty much it! I just slid the cips onto the appropriate tiles and arranged the whole scene on the table. Simple, cheap, effective.

During week of July 11–17, 2010, I reviewed the following products for DriveThruRPG:

• D100 Discoveries Series: Temple, Castle, and Wilderlands Vol. 1 by Jarrod Camiré for Zodiac Gods. If you take this product’s name as an indication that you’ll get a list of 100 possible discoveries for your fantasy RPG, think again; you’ll actually get 600 possible discoveries, since the product presents six different tables of 100 discoveries each. (Read more at DriveThruRPG.) ★★★
• d66 Objects Orbiting a Planet by Dale C. McCoy, Jr. for Jon Brazer Enterprises. Of necessity, perhaps, this particular table offers a bit less variety than you might at first expect from a list of 36 options. Over 1/3 of the entries are ships of one kind or another, and a similar number are artificial satellites. (Read more at DriveThruRPG.) ★★★
• Gamescapes Story Maps: The Crypt of Darkness by Jason Engle and Aaron Acevedo for Savage Mojo. This entry in the Gamescapes Story Maps line strikes me as a bit less creative than some of the others, although it is highly detailed and beautifully drawn. (Read more at DriveThruRPG.) ★★★
• Leather Ancient Army Tents by Billy Bones Workshop. This collection of print-and-build tents gives you three sizes in each of two scales (28mm and 15mm). (Read more at DriveThruRPG.) ★★★★
• Poisoncraft for D&D 4E: The Codex Venenorum by Justin Jacobson for One Bad Egg, now distributed by Highmoon Media. If you want to add a comprehensive and robust yet elegant rules subsystem to deal with poisons in your D&D 4e campaign, you can’t do better (as far as I know at the time of writing this review), than the 4e version of One Bad Egg’s “Poisoncraft.” (Read more at DriveThruRPG.) ★★★★★

When I recorded the audio commentary portions for the adventure “Enter the Dragon,” I couldn’t find any good close-up photos of the Huge Fiendish Spider that I had repainted brown to distinguish it from the standard black model. It turned out that I had a pretty good photo on a different camera, so I gladly share it with you now!

I’ve just updated my Dungeon Tiles Index to include the one and only set of Star Wars Galaxy Tiles. A good portion of those tiles could be used in D&D or other fantasy games as well as sci-fi games. The D&D Dungeon Tiles don’t have much in the way of metal floors, so the Galaxy Tiles make an intriguing supplement if you need such.