So your PCs will walk through the woods and encounter some craps of clothing resting on top of some blood stained dirt or..better yet, they see a large blood trail on the floor of a dungeon leading around a corner where they can’t see. Its great to be able to imagine these findings, but with Gametable, we can SHOW it to them.

Here’s the bare-bones section of a dungeon..or it could be a town. Either way, we have an opportunity to add some map elements to jazz up the scenery. Perhaps there’s a blood pool with some clothing scraps in it. Lets make some! Open up your copy of The GIMP and make a new transparent image that is 128 x 128 pixels.

Take your new image, choose the paint brush and pick a red color to use with it. I used the “Circle 15″ size for the brush. Then draw a few lines on the new image. try to stay somewhat away from the edges.

With that done, select the Smudge tool. Its the the pointing index finger icon under the brush one you just selected.  I set the size to “Circle 15″ and the rate to 50. Then you`ll click and drag the tool around on the red lines you just painted. Try not to get too close to the edge or else your image will not look natural. You`ll have hard lines where the image ends and the blood will look like its confined to a square. If you don’t like the way it looks when you’re done, hit Ctrl+Z to un-do it and try again.

Save it as a .png file. Drop it in your Underlay folder. Open Gametable (or hit F5 if its already open to refresh the library) and check that new pog out! I also had a sprite I found online that I use for representing torn clothing on the floor or dead bodies.

Lastly, Lets say we want to make a blood trail going around the corner. The trick is to identify the smallest  square or rectangular region that you`ll be using for the corner trail.

I’ve outlined in white the size of the underlay I’m going to make but when I draw the blood trail, I`ll want to keep my blood to the bottom and right hand sides of the image so it doesn’t look like there’s blood on the wrong side of the wall. The image should be 4 blocks wide by 5 blocks high. Multiply each measurement by 64 and we have 256 x 320. Go ahead and make a new transparent image with those dimensions.

Draw your blood in the proper areas, trying to stick to the bottom, and smudge it all up (within those imaginary bounds). Save it as a .png file, drop it in your underlay folder, open Gametable (or F5 to refresh your library) and give it a look.

For slime or ooze, just change up the color. Here is an area of difficult terrain covered with mold and other slippery fungi.

Please feel free to share your Gametable masterpieces!