~ ENTER, TRAVELER, AND BE WELCOME ~
THE WYRM'S HOARD
Free dragon graphics for fantasy pages, with castles to follow
wrought by Emmett Crowder, called the Wyrmwright

Hail and well met. You have found the lair of a dragon who is, for once, willing to share. Everything in the hoard below is free for your home page, so long as you keep the Code, which is short and fair and written further down this scroll.

A word about your host. By day I am a draftsman at a civil engineering firm in Wisconsin, which means I spend eight hours drawing storm sewers in AutoCAD. By night, every Thursday for going on six years, I am Dungeon Master to five grown men and one grown woman who have yet to meet a locked door they didn't want to kick. In 1997 I built a web page for our campaign so the players could read the session notes, and I drew my own graphics for it because everything I found was either a clip-art wizard with a bathrobe or a dragon that looked like a sick iguana. The players liked them. Then strangers started e-mailing to ask if they could use them. So here we are.

Every piece was drawn by me in Paint Shop Pro 5, most of it with a mouse and some of it with a secondhand drawing tablet I bought with my tax refund. The scales on the background took eleven evenings. I'm not proud of how many times I said words the players would recognize.

THE HOARD
Set the First: Scale & Flame. Seven pieces, 11,012 bytes all told.

	The Scales (background) bg.gif · 64 x 64 · 826 bytes Deep green dragon hide, every scale rimmed in gold. Tiles without a seam; you are standing on it now. Don't put words straight on it. See the smithing notes below.
	The Brazier (bullet) bullet.gif · 16 x 16 · 426 bytes · animated A little gold brazier with a flame that flickers. Four frames. Lovely in front of a list of links, or a list of the fallen.
	The Banner (88 x 31 link button) linkme.gif · 88 x 31 · 2,590 bytes A grinning green dragon on scales with DRAGON GRAPHICS in gold. Fly this one on your links page to point folk back to the hoard.
	The Plaques (three buttons) home.gif 2,137 bytes · email.gif 2,134 bytes · next.gif 2,056 bytes · each 100 x 30 Green marble set in a beveled gold frame with clipped corners and a rivet at each corner, the kind of plate you'd find nailed over a door in a great hall.

The Braid (divider) · bar.gif · 400 x 12 · 843 bytes
Two strands of gold braid with an emerald set in the middle. See-through behind, so it sits on anything.

HOW TO CARRY TREASURE HOME

Point at the piece you want and press the right mouse button. Choose Save Image As in Netscape, Save Picture As in Internet Explorer. On a Macintosh, press and hold the one button you've got.

For the scales, right-click any bare patch of the background and choose Save Background As.

Upload them to your own space with the File Manager or your FTP program. Send GIFs as binary, not ASCII, or they'll arrive scrambled like a failed fireball.

Then tell your page where they live. The banner goes on your links page like so, changing the file name to whatever you called it:

SMITHING NOTES

Dragon scale is a busy pattern, and busy patterns eat words. If you set text straight on the scales, nobody will read past your first line. Do what I've done here: lay the scales down as your background, then put your words inside a table with a dark bgcolor. Black-green (#0B1A0B) is what you're reading now. Parchment (#F0E6C8) for the words and old gold (#E8C15A) for the headings, and it looks like a page from a spellbook instead of a lizard's belly.

Set bgcolor="#285420" on your body tag as well, so the page is dark green while the scales are still coming down the wire, and not a blinding white.

THE CODE OF THE HOARD
Keep it and you are welcome back any time.

THE CASTLE KEEP

You were promised castles, and castles are coming. Set the Second, Stone & Banner, will have a gray fieldstone wall for a background, a row of pennants for a divider, a round tower for a bullet, and buttons shaped like arrow slits. The trouble is the stone. A stone wall that tiles without showing a seam is the hardest thing I've ever tried to draw, harder than scales, harder than fire. I have redrawn it four times and every time the mortar lines stagger at the edges like a drunk mason laid them. I'm aiming to have it done by the solstice in December. My players say they've heard that before, usually about the next session's dungeon.

FROM THE MAILBAG

"Our faire troupe put your scales behind our cast list and now everybody wants to be the dragon in next year's parade."
— the captain of a Renaissance faire troupe in Minnesota

"Can you do a red one?"
— about forty of you. Under Law V, you may do a red one yourself. The Paint Shop Pro command you want is Colors, then Adjust, then Hue/Saturation/Lightness. Slide the Hue till the green goes red.

Treasure-seekers who have entered the lair since the spring equinox of 1998:




Send a raven (or an e-mail) to the Wyrmwright: [email protected]
Last updated: Sunday, September 12, 1999
© 1998-1999 Emmett Crowder. The dragons are mine. The dice rolls are my players' fault.