DUNGEON TILES

Awhile back I created some Dungeon titles using Photoshop, and thought this would be a perfect spot to share them.

I even made a few example maps using these designs.

ELDER SIGN AND HOMEBREW

Last night the wife and I played Elder Sign, and sampled the Homebrew we started a few weeks back.

The Homebrew is starting to come along quite nicely, A few friends said it seems a bit to bitter for an Oktoberfest, but other than that has nice flavors.

As for the the game, we were up against the Ancient One Ithaqua . Online Ithaqua is ranked as hard . We were able to seal off this Ancient One, but by the skin of our teeth (there was only one Doom Tracker spot left for him to awaken).

PATHFINDER BLANK SPELL CARDS

First, I absolutely love the spell cards being created over at rpgbooster , the only issue I have is they do not appear to provide blank spell cards.

In order to allow the creation of special spells, or alter the appearance of existing cards I’ve went ahead and cleared a few out. This will allow them to be used as a template in the editor or your choice.

USING TOR WITH PYTHON

Using tor with python’s urllib2 is pretty easy, you just need to setup a few things before hand.

First off what is tor? Tor stands for " The Onion Router " and allows you to anonymously browse the internet by bouncing your request through multiple tor nodes.

I’m going to be using a Fedora 17 machine to demonstrate, and show output.

First lets install two packages from our package manager:

PATHFINDER EQUIPMENT IN JSON FORM

While reading through the Pathfinder Core Rule book I notice there is a specific way to randomly generate magic items for town shops.

I thought about possibly creating some code to generate magic items. However, to start I needed the basic data found in the rule book for equipment.

Below I give you a JSON file I created of the SRD 3.5 equipment:

• https://nessy.info/equipment.json

In [1]: from urllib2 import urlopen

In [2]: from json import loads

In [3]: data = urlopen('https://nessy.info/equipment.json')

In [4]: equipment = loads(data.read())

This JSON if a list of multiple equipment items, each item has attribute keys for stuff like cost, reference, and name:

SANDPOINT AT A GLANCE

I’m still relatively new to Pathfinder and tabletop RPGs in general, but being as I’ve just started running The Rise of the Runelords Adventure Path Anniversary edition I’ve created a few handy helper files.

One of this files is the Sandpoint at a glance document .

This document has been exported as a easy to print PDF, and includes all locations of shops and key points in the town of Sandpoint.

Enjoy and let me know if you’ve found this useful for your Rise of the Runelords sessions.

MAGTEK USB CARD READER HACKING 2

So back at it, now with some code to decode the common financial card:

Let start out by showing the end results of scanning my Freebirds card:

# ./main.py
Please swipe your card now:

Raw String: %B???????????^FANATIC/FREEBIRDS^4211?;????????????=????????????

Card Holder: FANATIC/FREEBIRDS
Card Number: ????-????-????-????
Expiration Date: 11/42

As you can see we still have our raw string, this is being decoded from the code I used last time. However now I have the Card Holder’s name, Card Number, and Expiration date, this format was all outlined quite well on Wikipedia .

MAGTEK USB CARD READER HACKING

So just the other day I received my MagTek MSR100 in the mail, this unit only cost me about $20 and I have to say I’m very satisfied with it. After opening the box it was delivered in I quickly noticed no documentation was provided. No worries I figured, this will make hacking at it that much more fun.

I started out by connecting the USB device to my Gentoo Linux laptop and swiped a card, I noticed on my console prompt the card data was spewed out. That is because this device acts like a HID Keyboard:

PYTHON DEVICE HACKING (KEYBOARD)

After spending a bit of time hacking at the gamepad I decided to take a deeper look in to how /dev devices worked in Python, the easiest device I could get my hands on of course was a keyboard.

First things first I needed to discover which device name represented my keyboard, to do this I used the virtual /proc filesystem at /proc/bus/input/devices :

I: Bus=0011 Vendor=0001 Product=0001 Version=ab41
N: Name="AT Translated Set 2 keyboard"
P: Phys=isa0060/serio0/input0
S: Sysfs=/devices/platform/i8042/serio0/input/input3
U: Uniq=
H: Handlers=sysrq kbd event2
B: PROP=0
B: EV=120013
B: KEY=4 2000000 3803078 f800d001 feffffdf ffefffff ffffffff fffffffe
B: MSC=10
B: LED=7

From the above output I can see my device is event2 within Handlers, which I know is the block device /dev/input/event2 .

PYTHON DEVICE HACKING (GAMEPAD)

So today I was reading an article on Hack A Day about a user who wrote a Python script to interrupt his USB Gamepad, I watched the video and realized I had a very similar gamepad laying around. One thing led to another and I found my self attempting the same sort of project.

The Gamepad I am using is a Logitec Dual Action :

Using some of the code posted on Hackaday I quickly realized my Gamepad returned quite different result and thus needed different code.