Old-school t-shirts: Resurrection

Yes, I've been at it again! I like this one a lot -- simple but effective ;) It's sort of a secret code word which is meaningless and unremarkable to "those who do not know", and yet immediately recognisable and evocative to those who do.

(By the way, I did toy with the idea of using one of the new OSR logos, which I like a lot, but which don't have the same quality of recognisability that the old TSR logo has.)

Old-school t-shirts, the return!

I posted some time ago about my mission of creating a bunch of old-school RPG inspired T-shirts. I've been gleefully wearing my AD&D Players Handbook T-shirt since then, but the concept kind of sputtered out after the printing place told me that the dungeon map I'd prepared for my next effort was no way printable on a T-shirt. Too many complex little twisty bits, apparently. So I could have gone back to the drawing board and re-worked something much simpler, but I was kind of disheartened and gave up.

However, my girlfriend recently gave me this -- she'd secretly taken a dungeon map I was working on and turned it into a T-shirt! Amazing! I have been wearing it with geek pride :)

The interesting point came up that most "normal people" (i.e. non-gamers) probably have no idea what the image on the shirt is, and indeed have no concept of what a dungeon is, poor fools!

ps. To players in my Labyrinth Lord game: maybe don't study this image too closely, as your characters will probably find themselves in this dungeon at some point, and we wouldn't want to spoil all the surprises would we! ;)

Old school t-shirts 2

I am now the proud owner of an AD&D Players Handbook t-shirt!

Unfortunately, a couple of things didn't go quite right:

1. I'd forgotten that the t-shirt printers told me that for bitmap images like this, it's only possible to print them on light coloured shirts, ideally white (because the colours of the image are mixed additively with the colour of the shirt). I totally didn't think that image would look right on a white shirt! While I was editting it I'd been imagining it on a dark background, maybe black or purple, and only remembered the thing about the light colour shirt when it came to printing it.

2. You can't really see it in the photo, but the colours came out a bit oversaturated, which was my fault (I think) as I did the colour balancing on my laptop, which probably has a pretty dim screen, meaning that I over-contrasted everything.

Ah well, you live and learn... Still, I'm pleased with the shirt, and am wearing it proudly, albeit hidden beneath jumpers in this season ;) I'm also especially pleased that it's printed on organic fair-trade cotton. That was one of the reasons I wanted to get a t-shirt printed at this shop, rather than just buying one - that I wanted something that wasn't made under sweatshop condition labour in some exotic land!

I think next I'll get a shirt printed with a vector image, so just one colour. Maybe the aforementioned Dungeons & Dragons logo, or another idea I had which might be very cool was the map of "skull mountain" from the Holmes Basic D&D book! I think a black & white dungeon map would make a pretty striking image, and would be distinctly old-school.

Old-school t-shirts!

Due to:

1. Having a distinct lack of t-shirts in a passable condition at the moment.
2. My love of old-school RPGs, and a certain amount of "geek pride".
3. Having noticed a shop near where I work which offers printing of images onto organic cotton t-shirts.

I've decided to expand my currently extremely limited repertoire of t-shirts with some new ones featuring evocative old-school images. The first selection was the iconic 1978 Players Handbook cover, which I photographed and (somewhat painstakingly) editted. I'm pretty pleased with the result, as originally I was thinking I'd have to cut off the adventurers at the bottom of the image, as they were covered in writing. Photoshop's "clone stamp" tool is a work of genius! I'll no doubt post a picture of the t-shirt when it's printed too. (By the way, I just realised that this is a t-shirt I always wanted as a kid, after seeing it in a TSR promotional brochure... Dreams do come true ;))

Next on the list is either simply a Dungeons & Dragons logo (I'm thinking the one off the Mentzer box - which is the most iconic to me), or perhaps the Moldvay Basic D&D cover. I did try making a vector image of the former already (which would be required to make a vinyl transfer of it), but I had some trouble getting a good result without arduously tracing the whole thing by hand. I might end up doing that, when I find the time, but I'd also be very interested to hear if anyone has already done this, or knows where one can get a vector D&D logo online?