Love Nest

Correspondent Diederik Van Arkel made a request for more nitty-gritty posts on how I produce graphics, in response to my post about 1-bit images. I expect I'll do a lot of that over time, but I'll begin by describing what my Life Cycle of a Simple Risus Map only hints at: the way I construct a Risus map-graphic by working back-and-forth (and back, and forth, and back, and forth) between rasters and vectors.

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In Toast of the Town, a Risus fantasy module you can snag for free if you'd like, the PCs are likely to meet a group of NPCs trapped underground in a place called the Nest, a repurposed room accessible from the town's sewers. Toast of the Town isn't a dungeon-crawl, so there's no real need to map the tunnels, but I felt a simple diagram of the Nest would be useful for the Game Master.

All Risus graphics are stick-figure drawings, which gives the game and its support material a goofy warmth I enjoy, and leverages my own absolute inability to draw. Like, I really can't draw. I do drafts of the stick-figures. And then sometimes the final stick-figure is a composite of parts of the drafts, because none of the individual drafts were tolerable. It's that bad.

So, while I have a decent visual sense and can make a pretty map if I want to, a Risus map needs to feel like Risus, which means it needs to be more like a "doodle" than a "drawing." With that in mind, let's follow the steps, to see how I use both Photoshop and Illustrator in a funky back-and-forth to get the doodle I want.

Step One: Scribble in the Art-Hole

Since this is a minor map and doesn't rate a full page, I wanted to fit the map to the page instead of the other way around. So, working with a draft of the laid-out module (you can see bits of copy poking in at the edges), I doodled the first draft directly onto the page, so I'd be 100% sure it would fit the aspect ratio of the "art hole" (what a lot of us call copy-spaces left empty for forthcoming illustrations). The original plan was to have the map where the hole was situated. As in all other creative pursuits, the plan didn't survive to the end, but that's usually a good sign.

It's Supposed to Be a Circle. My High-School Art Teacher Coddled Me.

As you can see, the very-basics are present: a round room with crushed radiating corridors, and two ways to get in: the secret door from the "sewers," and the tunnel leading to a kitchen basement that plays its own role in the adventure. Note my perfect handwriting. Even I'm no longer sure what word I'm labeling the radiating corridors with. Robe? Pole? This is why I'm a good typist.

Step Two: First Pass in Illustrator

In Adobe Illustrator, even a yutz like me can draw a circle and perfect straight lines, so the next step is a simplistic line-drawing using the Pen tool and some basic shapes in pure Illustrator vectors. While I want the map to be a doodle, I want it to be a better doodle than my doodle. I want the circle to be circular and the radiating corridors, crushed though they are, to be a uniform width in their non-crushed places.

In Illustrator, Even a Schmuck Like Me Can Almost Draw

Step Three: Tracing it to Pieces

I print out the Illustrator drawing, and trace it using a Flair marker (all Risus graphics are drawn with a Flair for consistency, and because that was the pen I chewed the most in grade school). At this point, I'm doing the actual doodle I'll use for the module, so the perfect circle acts as a guide, but I'm adding little notches to indicate grooves or supports in the walls, and I'm adding speckles of texture, and furniture and things: everything I know should be there ... sort of.

All Secret Sewer-Temples Available Pre-Furnished.
Ask Your Leasing Agent.

Because this is a planned process, I know I don't need to draw every piece of furniture, and I know I don't need to draw everything in its correct place, so I don't. I know I'll need more than three bits of bedding, for example, but I know that three different bedding symbols will be sufficient, in the final graphic, to make the whole thing feel hand-drawn, so I only draw three. What I'm doing is creating pieces, that I'll later be able to copy-paste and rotate and place correctly. I don't even attempt to draw the door in its correct place, because I know I'll only mess that up!

Step Four: Digital Tracing and Layout

I scan the Flair doodle at high resolution, and, in Photoshop, I simplify it to a 1-bit raster, and clean away any schmutz I don't want. I leave the lines in their rough, natural state for now.

At This Stage It's Just Like Playing in a Mapping Program

I leave Photoshop and bring the image over to Illustrator, where I use the Live Trace feature (Illustrator CS2 to CS5) or Image Trace feature (Illustrator CS6 onward) to trace it. When I first developed this technique for A Kringle in Time, I did the tracing in Adobe Streamline, and you can also use Corel Trace or the Potrace function built in to InkScape, or other methods. In digital graphics, "tracing" programs are those that create vectors from rasters. Tracing can be messy and fraught, and it's only a good idea in very specific instances ... but a simple line-drawing like this map is one of them.

Once the trace completes, I can expand the tracing and group together lines into sensible objects: crates, distilling gear (there's some alchemy, of a kind, happening in the Nest) bedding and so on. Since each object is a group of vectors, I can grab them with my mouse, move them around, duplicate them, spin them, mirror them and so on - they're now just symbols I can use at my discretion, including some stacking (that little pile of three crates I make). In this step, I use the vector-pieces to assemble the map into its final configuration.

Step 5: Smoothing

It's time to leave Illustrator and go back to Photoshop. I rasterize the map at a high resolution, and I apply a nice Gaussian Blur filter to it. Then I "harden" the blurred image by using the Contrast sliders (refer to the graphic for the slider settings). This trick is essential to the Risus look, which always has that kind of smoothing applied to my rough Flair ink-lines. Everything I'm doing to this map, I do to the LCBs (the stick-figures are called the LCBs; it means Little Cartoon Bastards).

To finish this step, I once again drop my bitmap to 1-bit, that magical, lovely format.

Step 6: Tinting and Finishing

So far, we've done a doodle, then an Illustrator drawing, then a physical tracing, then a cleaned-up scan, then a digital tracing, then some "refurnishing" in Illustrator, then rasterizing and smoothing in Photoshop. So we've gone from vector, to tracing, to raster, to vector, to raster again. Yikes. And now it's time to go back from raster to vector!

Vectors are Cold, Doodles are Warm.
When Combining Them, The Warmth Wins Out, Overall.

Back in Illustrator's cold embrace, I digitally trace this new 1-bit graphic, resulting in a new vector. But this time, the goal isn't to arrange the furniture, just to color it. Toast of the Town has a very specific "pale chocolate mint" color palette, which every stick-figure/doodle graphic conforms to, and I begin the finishes by hand-selecting each part of the new trace and applying the relevant color swatches. I finish the finishes by applying the labels, complete with label "halos" to keep the label text from blending too cleanly with the mappity background.

Amusingly (perhaps) the part I'm glossing over is that I create those halos with an entirely separate series of vector-to-raster-to-vector techniques (in photoshop I thicken the label text with a crude application of the Minimize filter, and then smooth it out with that same Gaussian Blur followed by extreme contrast).

Eventually, I end up with a nicely-layered Illustrator document, with map layers underneath label layers, and every visible thing a result of these multiple passes between raster and vector.

This is a Raster of the Final Vectors,
Which Means I Did it AGAIN. I'm Cruel to Doodles.
Click to Embiggen, if You're Into That.

Now, obviously, this is a lot of planning and a lot of steps to end up with a doodle map, and you're probably too cool for doodle maps. I get that. You are super cool; I've always said so. But if your brain is a creative brain, you're already seeing how this technique can apply to many other kinds of carefully-constructed graphics, and you'd be right about that.

If you're an experienced wizard with these tools, you might also be thinking: couldn't this be simplified by smoothing the raster before moving between Steps 2 and 3? It's true that I can, technically, shave a step there, and Risus Game Masters might never notice the difference. The reason I don't is the (beautiful) way the Gaussian technique smooths overlapped lines. Just a moment of reflection should reveal what I mean, but if you're still doubtful, try it yourself, and compare both methods using symbols that you overlap in Step 4. Look carefully at the overlap points in the final image. It's a tiny thing, I know, but this is what I get when I combine my zeal for excellence with my focus on ... badly-drawn stick art. If nothing else, this is how we get our recommended daily allowance of irony. Stay healthy, folks, and remember: my inbox is always open.

Five Elements of Commercial Appeal in RPG Design

Would-be reader Jeff Bernstein, from the inbox today: Hello. I'm reading an essay on convention game session design and there's a glowing reference to your "Five Elements of Commercially Viable RPG Design". Is this available anywhere for download? And that, dear readers, is probably going to be how I decide which old articles are plucked from the wreckage of the Blue Room.

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Here's a re-posting of a distilled re-telling of something I wrote more than twenty-five years ago in a letter to Loyd Blankenship, and related nonsense I was spouting on convention panels and in emails with friends and colleagues for a few years thereafter. It is, in some circles, mildly infamous, mainly for my determination never, ever, ever to publish it. Ever-ever, amen.

As you'll see, it's pretty innocuous. Like the Necronomicon or Monty Python's “Killer Joke,” it's something that's only sinister if you keep it off-stage. I never intended for it to be sinister, it just became so because - well, mainly because one of the nice folks who attended one of the convention panels never forgot it, and brought it up every now and then online. He even offered to pay me to write it into an article, once (guess I should've taken the offer - d'oh). Also, some colleagues (Bruce Baugh, Kenneth Hite, others I'm forgetting) have talked about it to others.

I finally published it to the web in 2008, after fifteen years of avoiding it. Why? We'll get to that after. Here goes:

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If we examine the games and game-worlds that have come and gone, patterns emerge and it becomes easy to spot dozens of elements shared by those with the widest appeal. Here are five I consider crucial:

 

Cliché

The value of cliché - the use of stock imagery and other familiar elements - is accessibility and mutual understanding. If the Game Master tells you the new campaign is to be set in the "Duchy of Crows" and concerns an evil priest gathering the Hill Ogres to his cause, that may sound a bit threadbare, but it also provides a reliable common ground. Everyone can jump right in and focus on what the game is really about: the PCs and their adventures. If, by contrast, the GM tells you the new campaign takes place in the Shining Tertiary Plane of Tsalvanithra, a science-fantasy blend of Mayan mythology, Depression-era satire, 16th-century French politics and Japanese courtly manners, you're in for some research before you dare put a mark on the character sheet. The most popular games rely on stock images as a language for skipping to the good parts (and for sharing in a celebration of things gamers enjoy celebrating). Games that make a point of shunning cliché tend to be more niche.

Combat

Nothing's very dramatic (or funny, or scary) without some kind of conflict, and RPGs thrive on every sort. But the specific value of combat depends as much on game-structure as the visceral appeal of a fight scene. In gameable terms, most forms of conflict are best defined as a single instant (sneaking past a guard, casting a healing spell) - we gain nothing by breaking the action down into its component steps, because the steps themselves are seldom infused with drama without forcing the issue. But in a fight - whether it's swordplay, a tavern brawl, a superhero slugfest or a psychic showdown - every swing of fist or sword, every blast of energy, is something dangerous and potentially important. That packs a fight with a series of choices and consequences, providing fertile ground for enjoyable game mechanics. What's more, it provides a stage on which the PCs can cooperate and act as a team. Only a few other kinds of action can rival this under the right conditions, and none can trump it with any consistency.

Fellowship

RPGs are an ensemble medium; the core experience is that of a fellowship of PCs cooperating (more or less) toward a common goal. The most successful RPGs embrace this, provide tools to enhance the group experience, and build system and setting assumptions around it. This means providing for variety, both in terms of character concepts and their viability (it's well and good to say you can play a Librarian, but the game-world must also provide opportunities and challenges appropriate to the Librarian's skills). This element skews the genre-leanings of successful RPGs to some extent, because there are some popular genres (espionage and mysteries, most notably) that require some re-tooling before they comfortably support the concept of a half-dozen diverse PCs working together. Similarly, some stock character types (lone-wolf vigilantes, burglars, assassins) become notably chummier in RPGs, seen more often clubbing with a team than brooding indulgently in the shadows. RPGs gain a lot of mileage and color from the ubiquity of "strange bedfellows."

Anarchy

RPGs need rules at the table level, but they thrive on anarchy at the character level. The most successful RPGs are built on the assumption that - once the adventure is in full swing - the PCs are on their own, free to make their own solutions. Games that impose chains of command, or require PCs to check with "headquarters" before they do anything questionable, limit their audience in the process. Even a Call of Cthulhu session set in the straight-laced reality of 1920's New England is traditionally an exercise in the ritual abolition of order - In the early stages of the adventure, it's all urbane wit and let's-call-the-police, but once the tentacles start dragging people screaming into the dark, propriety and legality evaporate to irrelevance, and it's an anarchic fight for survival and sanity. Games with a military or pseudo-military premise likewise benefit from this kind of collapse. This taps into what may be the most unique feature of RPGs: tactical infinity. In Chess, the White Queen can't sweet-talk a Black Knight into leaving her be; in Squad Leader, a group of soldiers can't sneak through an occupied village dressed as nuns. In an RPG, you really can try anything you can think of, and that's a feature that thrives on anarchy.

Enigma

The quality of enigma is - inevitably - the most elusive of these elements. In literal terms, it means any quality of the game-world that the Game Master is presumed to understand on a level the players never can. In many worlds, this means magic. In others, it may mean an alien society freshly met from another galaxy, or the labyrinthine mysteries of conspiratorial politics. Beyond the enduring appeal of a mystery, this is a quiet, foundational tool for the Game Master, who can exploit this consensual "shadow zone" as a spawning ground for scenarios that play fun even if they wouldn't otherwise make sense, and a place where plot-threads can vanish if they become distracting instead of exciting. From within the enigma the GM can pluck both questions and answers, making adventure design and campaign management less of a chore. The benefits to a game's appeal are vast, because any RPG that eases a GM's stage-fright (and opens up his creative latitude) is an RPG built to please.

These elements aren't keys to quality ... a game can be crummy with them and excellent without them. They are, though, a useful window into the appeal of RPGs as games, into the conventions of RPGs as a fictional medium, and into the considerations that make the design of a game world a beast distinct from other kinds of world design.

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Okay, the original was a lot longer, a lot ramblier, and went on at the end into some of the many other elements (power-climb, exploring social fantasies, etc). The original was a mess - a fun mess in its way, but a mess, and I don't feel like digging into my archives for it anyway. Worth noting, though, is the absolute lack of the word "the" in the title. There are a lot more than five such elements; these are just five I feel are worth attention in that special tummy-rub way.

The reason I'm finally publishing it is because Kenneth Hite is basically outing me on it. I got an email recently [this is me back in 2008, you understand] from a guy publishing a - I guess a kind of coffee-table book of game-related observations. Mostly pretty basic stuff, but it looks fun enough. Might be a good conversation piece. Anyway, the guy had asked Ken to provide some digestible insights, and Ken told him about this thing (among others), and -- in a nice way, I'm sure -- basically threatened to contribute his own version if I wouldn't agree to contribute mine.

I'm pretty sure Ken didn't mean it to feel so ultimatum-ish (Ken maybe just wanted to get me included - we may not be buds anymore but we maintain a mutual respect for each others' writing). But, regardless of intent, it did create a bottom line: see someone else say it, or say it myself. Okay, then.

So, that's why it's here. This is the micro-distilled version I wrote by invitation for the coffee-table thing. But why did I never want it to be here - or anywhere? What's so big and scary about yet another pithy, piddly little bullet-list of RPG overgeneralization in a world chock full of 'em? Probably nothing, I know. But ...

Here's one reason I'm uncomfortable with it: nobody I've ever told it to seems to get that it isn't about good gameworld design, or at least it isn't meant to be. It's entirely meant as an eye squinted curiously at those things that make a game the most commercially viable, which is - as far as I'm concerned at least - an axis unrelated to a design's value at the gaming table. I'm not an anti-commercial cynic - I don't think commercial viability harms quality, but I also don't think it indicates it. They're different things, easily conflated in advertisements and proselytizing - but beginning back in the day with Loyd Blankenship and continuing to last week with that email from the book guy, this has been characterized/responded to as some kind of game-design or setting-design guide/principle thingy. It isn't one.

So, I beg, seriously: take heed of that closing paragraph in the thingy itself. A game can be crummy with 'em and excellent without 'em. This isn't - at all - about quality (the degree to which it overlaps with quality concerns is the question it's meant to stimulate thought on - not any kind of conclusion it's meant to encourage).

And yeah, it's an overreaction; I know. But I fret because I love, and gaming's one of the loves of my life (not on the Sandra level, obviously, but she's much cuter than gaming). So there's that. Anyway, hope you like this distilled version because, I gotta say - I think I do, now that it's in front of me. I'm glad it's here, and (despite my kvetching) I'm glad you're here to read it. Hi! Drop me a line sometime; we'll chat about design!

Medieval Demographics Made Scarce

One of the side-effects of shutting the Blue Room and original Cumberland sites down is seeing how much email their demise has generated, and seeing which of those old URLs are bringing the most people here.

On that latter point, the #3 biggest road in is Risus: The Anything RPG, but the Risus folk are pretty well set; the game is doing just fine and Risusiverse is an excellent nerve-center for the fandom. Risus still has a bright future, and in terms of new readers (and IOR members) it's been accelerating.

The second-biggest hit is the Big List of RPG Plots but that got immediately restored right here on Rolltop Indigo and remains available in PDF. No problem for fans of that.

But the #1 page, by this metric, and by a large margin, is the one for Medieval Demographics Made Easy, one of my oldest articles, which still gets a lot of action in some circles, and (judging by all the email) was popular with a lot of gamers who never just printed it out, because boy howdy they are letting me know, both indirectly (through all those hits) and directly (with emails ranging from the sad and puzzled to the angry and entitled) that they were kind of expecting that article to be there and now it's not.

And for them, there's no consolation just yet. But, there will be. And I'm going to do a little experiment with it, since it feels like a unique opportunity.

Nothing complicated. I'm making a nice PDF version (arguably, that's long overdue), and it'll be annotated and everything, and I'll really do it up proper. It'll probably weigh in at 4-6 pages soaking wet, but it'll be made with care (I've already started). And it'll be free, of course.

The experiment is that I'm just going to send it to wander the Internet on its own. It won't be published at DriveThru / RPGNow. It won't be hosted on any site I control, either. It'll just be found wherever people feel it should continue to exist. If you'd like to be part of giving it a continued life online, please let me know so I can include you [UPDATE: the experiment is now underway, so if you'd like to take part, hit the Googles and find a copy! From now on, the file's continued existence is down to the fickle whims of the wild Internet.]

I'm not releasing it into the public domain or anything like that. It's just, after the initial work of creating it and providing it, I'm letting it fall backward into the crowd, to see if it can't surf. It'll be a self-contained little article-capsule, complete with all the legal info and such anyone might need to understand what to do and not-do with it.

So that's on the way soon. I might finish it tonight; I might finish it sometime in the next few days, but I'll get that out there. And by this time next year, Googling around may just find it, here and there, or not. Time will tell.

Yes, I'll Do A New High-Res Chamlek Map, Too.

On the earlier point - the general reaction to the death of the sites - I'd be remiss if I didn't link to the beautiful sentiments posted by P.D. Magnus on the matter. And thanks to everyone who's emailed and PM'ed and so on. Believe me, I don't like seeing it happen either. But I'll keep blogging here, and for as long as it can be, my inbox will be open.

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Update: I finalized the PDF and sent it out into the world (with thanks to the volunteers!) so with a little luck, Google will start finding it easily very soon. Keep an eye peeled!

If the page design doesn't look like this image, it's the wrong PDF. There are some bootlegs out there of earlier, less-polished versions. Grr.

Fantasy Cartography: Just Add Something Blotchy

It's been a while since I've done a graphicky post, so here's a new one for the chilly weather. Over on the doomed platform of magnificence known as Google Plus, reader Michael Lee tagged me to ask:

I remember reading about you taking a lot of pictures that you store away to use as textures and reference for the work you do on your art. If you have an article kinda going through your process on using those photos in a piece, I'd love to have a link to it. If not, is it something you wouldn't mind sharing?

I do make extensive use of snapshots in my graphics, and the technique is so simple it's almost embarrassing, but that makes it super-easy to share, and something even a Photoshop novice can fiddle with as long as they're comfortable with the basic Layers palette.

To demonstrate the effect from the ground up, we'll need some ground. We'll take a chunk from one of my finished maps.

From the Scott's Landing Article
(Uresia: Lore and Curiosities)

I've left the Layers palette visible to show the dance-steps, and in particular I've highlighted the Layer Group called "Texture Bundles," seven grouped layers of varying transparency and blending modes. To see what those layers are actually doing, we'll now turn them off.

All The Graphics in This Post Are Embiggen-Able, But Do So Somewhere With Unmetered Bandwidth; They're Big Images

It's still the same map, but ... smoothier. Soapier. A bit more plainly digital, with those nice-even gradients and Cloud filters and so on.

Having stripped the image of its textures, I'll need a new one. Flipping through the snaps on my phone, my eyes are drawn to this delicious cheat-day indulgence from several weeks ago, so I send it to my laptop and whip it into a tile by copy-pasting the good bits over and over on itself (use the Offset filter and avoid the edges):

Seriously look at how thin that crust is.
It's draping over the lip of a PAPER plate.

Why the pizza snap? It's blotchy, without too many large zones of overtly-different contrast (there are no pepperoni slices, for example). I don't always use food ... I use snapshots of rocks, leaves, vegetable skins, supermarket bins of almonds, dirty painters' drop-cloths, broken concrete ... pretty much anything blotchy or grainy or streaky (remember that Oscar the Grouch song about trash? Like that).

I did some great textures once from a frying pan I'd ruined with a grease fire. Sad day for the skillet, but that was a fine mapping texture. Anyway we just flood that pizza-tile into a new layer:

And that's not helpful, but it's amusing. It becomes helpful when we choose a blending mode for the pizza layer. Three of my favorite blending modes for map-textures are Soft Light, Screen, and Overlay. Here are all three, each at 100% opacity.

Soft Light Mode

Screen Mode

Overlay Mode

Compare. Contrast. Consider. The overly-digital gradients of the base are now crudely and productively interrupted by the contrasts of cheese, sauce, and dried herbal flakes. This one layer, made from a phone snapshot, adds some legitimate character to the map.

It also changes the colors quite a bit, giving it an autumnal vibe we may or may not want. But if we want it to look different, we can just de-saturate or hue-shift the pizza layer. Or we can invert it to a negative-image of itself. Or we can reduce its transparency, or cross-cut two different versions of the same texture (one rotated 90 degrees, for example) or (as I did in the original map) include it as just one transparent texture among many. Or any of a million permutations or combinations of these or other effects.

Some Quick Variations. There's So Much More You Can Do.

This is why Photoshop is one of my favorite videogames. Just one simple "trick" becomes the basis for a thousand looks, and the best way to get there is just play with it. Play and learn.

Hope that gets your juices flowing and/or gets you supporting a local pizzeria. Thanks to Michael Lee for the prompt, and remember: my inbox is always open.

Town Maps: Tops, Bottoms, and Hot-Spots

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Correspondent Joshua Wolfe writes:

"Your maps always look so pretty. Is your process for map-making towns bottom up or top down? Do you start with your list of hot spots and assemble how the town should look around that? Or, do you start with an idea of how the town and topography should look and then see where your location ideas fit into it?"

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Thank you! Those terms sound kinky! The short answer is "neither," but there are always shades of each, so the short answer is actually "both." Unless it's "neither." Or both. I mean answers. Let's restart.

I've never drawn a town-map without prior context; it's always within an existing setting (Uresia or some other world I'm mapping that day). Consequently, there's always something established before I begin, even if it's just the location of the nearest coastlines and the nearest relevant mountains and what kingdom/realm we're in. So even if I wanted to begin without considering those things, it's never an option.

My Master Hex-Map, Unpublished For a Reason: It's Super Dull

After that we dive deep into "it depends." I don't just write about Uresia; I GM the hell out of it, so it's rare for me to map a town we (the players and I) haven't already gamed in or at least heard in-game stories of.

Sometimes, that amounts to what might be called "hot spots." From recent games in Jubilance, for example, we know the city's Guild of Lapidaries has a heavily-constructed (stone) guildhall on the east end of town, that it has two above-ground stories, and a walled yard tucked against the town's own wall. So, if I get around to mapping Jubilance in "town scale" (like Trostig and Scott's Landing), I'd need to (A) beat my head on the desk because I really need to stop mapping cities in town-scale and (B) make sure there's an appropriately-shaped building in approximately the right area. Town-scale doesn't include low walls on the scale of a single burgage plot, so that detail wouldn't need to be present: just a largish stone building and some greenery in the yard. Maybe a teensy fountain if I want to indicate how swank it is to be emerald-cutters in Dreed (it's very swank).

But everything else we know about Jubilance is the kind of stuff that wouldn't show up at that scale: we know an inn where the PCs stashed their stuff (they never got to sleep there), a bordello where one of the knights did some stuff (again, sleepless), a tavern where tavern-things happened, streets down which a happy parade of Trolls bebopped, and a seaport where seaport-things went on.

There were memorable moments attached to all of them, but on those town-scale maps they'd all just be ... streets, a seaport, and teensy little town-buildings occupying ordinary plots of land. Those memorable locales would look exactly like their never-visited equivalents.

And that's true of most town locations, really. I generally map towns in two styles: the town-style, and the city-style (which shows only major streets and oversized permanent structures like walls and citadels).

Now, just between you and I: I'll absolutely linger on those little boxes, giving them special attention, because they have identity in my mind's eye. But I also take care to linger, almost at random, on a certain portion of all the little boxes, because otherwise the town looks bland. I can't abide a Row of Identical Rectangles unless I'm deliberately trying to communicate that this is a particularly ordinary, even tedious, row of buildings. I want every town map to be filled with stuff I do understand and stuff I don't, and I learn a lot about each town when building them.

Some of the Simplest Boxes Have the Most History and Vice-Versa

Uresia isn't a "medieval" world in any serious sense, but it does have a certain Gone Drunkenly to the Renfaire aesthetic, so most buildings are scaled and arranged in a hand-wavey Oldeish Europe sort of way, where I stay conscious of how each town arranges lots and frontages and closes so as to make the town survivable to tiny meep-meep cars in the imaginary Uresian future, but terribly inconvenient to a lumbering full-size American sedan.

So, there are rules I draw by (broad rules based on cultures, specific exceptions based on cultural collisions and local circumstances), and inevitably a few basics in my head, going in: Jubilance has walls (not always a given in Dreed); Jubilance has that nice east-end guildhall for the Lapidaries; Jubilance is a seaport on the northwest coast of the island. It's a couple of days' hike to the mountains, and it has generic town-type-things. It's Dreed, and it's got emeralds, so it's at least partly, grossly, rich (which means broader frontages, more frequent fountains, more frequent greenery).

Having gamed there (and having already mapped all the Uresian coastlines) I have a general shape which emerges from necessity.

So that's square one. A mushy blend of hot-spot and topography. Instead of top-down or bottom-up it's just sort of saggy middle. Imitating its creator, no doubt.

From there, the process is iterative. I don't just start with a blank sheet of paper and draw 'til it's done (I've seen people who do; they impress me). I start with a blank piece of paper and scribble a deeply crappy first draft.

This follows my approach to writing. I'm a huge fan of "splat the first draft, [insert gross sound effect] and then sculpt it into something that's less like hot garbage." Sculpt it via second and third and fourth and as many drafts as it takes.

As those drafts roll out (freehand, usually on whatever cheap notebook paper comes to hand, or clean sheets stolen from the printer tray) I learn more about the town (including hot spots and topography, along with history and resources and fires and wars and hills leveled and ditches dug and walls argued-over because pennies got pinched), and I interrogate the design, engaging in fruitful acts of doubt, questioning why-is-this-there and why-is-that-shaped-that-way and shouldn't-there-be-a-more-direct-route-from-this-gate-to-this-marketplace and so on.

Sometimes I Use SketchUp to Visualize the Elevations

I don't consider any of this to be the cartography. Not yet. During the splats I'm just designing the town, and it's a bit like the distinction I make between RPG design and RPG writing (click here for that): I want to have a lot of the design finished, solidified, interrogated and multiply-drafted, before I start worrying about how to present it (presenting it: that's the cartography).

Once I'm satisfied that I know my way around, I go digital: using scans of the least-splatty drafts, I begin constructing the territory (water, elevations) in Adobe Illustrator or some other vector-art software (I built the original Shadow River plan in DTP software because Illlustrator still terrified me in those days, but the principle's the same).

And then I really go to town ... In city-scale, I focus on the identities of entire neighborhoods and principal landmarks. In town-scale, I go less sane: lovingly obsessing over each close, alleyway, street and square; every space allotted for caravans or livestock; every bit of clean water that becomes nasty water and flows somewhere else. Literally every single tree (within town) and then swaths of forest beyond it, if there are any. That part's a long story.

Once it's done, I can drag those nice clean vectors into Photoshop to thrash them around, warm them up, and give them their final textures and colors. This often means a return to natural media: the way I get watercolor textures, for example, is I splat some cheap supermarket-toy-section watercolors on equally cheap paper and scan it. I also use textures made from photographs I take of everything from rocks to leaves to other rocks to food to stones to rocks.

And that's the process. Such as it is. Tops, bottoms, hot-spots? Yes? Sort of.

From Cold Vectors to Warm Textures

GMing: Some of My Pre-Campaign Habits

While every campaign is unique, I have a handful of habits I return to in the pre-game stages. These are my favorites.

Foundation Materials

I always distribute some kind of campaign document, a hyper-distilled micro-worldbook, emphasizing the parts of the setting the PCs should/would be most aware of, or might be dealing with in the near future. Depending on the needs and moods, it'll run from 2-12 pages.

My runs lean toward the invisible end of the spectrum, so I like to GM the kind of adventures that invite and reward investment in the setting, and this kind of focused document boils things down for casual readers, while providing in-depth setting junkies with a starting point.

It doesn't even matter if the world is well-described by free resources. If I'm running FASATrek, for example, focusing on fallout from the Organian Peace Treaty, I can point them toward multiple Trek resources online ... but to the casual reader, those thousands of pages can be more intimidating than inspiring.

The most casual players can read my stripped-down summary, and they're ready to go. More ambitious roleplayers might want a character with strong ties to the event – someone who's suffered or prospered from the Treaty, for example. They can start with my mini-version, and wiki onward from there.

Structure vs. Scheduling

The enemy of grown-up gaming is Mundane Life. Many campaigns die due to circumstances beyond the game: someone had to move across town (or across state, nation or planet); someone had a romantic breakup (or an exciting new romance); a couple had a baby; someone's night-shifts got day-shifted, etc. Most campaigns can survive one such blow (we'll missing having an Ace Starpilot, but the ship's AI can fly well enough) but as they pile up, things start to look grim (we like to think that AI ship is still out there, doing all the jobs the crew used to).

Few campaigns are mundanity-proof, but I do my best to anticipate potential issues, and bake those into the campaign structure during early planning. If key players are likely to drop in and out frequently, for example, I'll lean toward an episodic campaign, where each adventure is self-contained. This makes it easy to explain why Drake Truncheon, Two-Fisted Man of Danger, joined us on our 1933 caper in Algeria but didn't make it for our [very next session] 1934 trek from Chengdu to Mandalay.

Since not every campaign really works as episodic (sometimes you just gotta have a big ol' single-focus epic), for other games we've reached for stranger solutions, like "the PCs will often be on remote treks for many sessions in a row; we'd love to have you drop in now and then, but would you mind if your character is someone the wizard summons from his pants? He has pants full of demons but some of them are pretty nice. Really any character could live in his pants. It's a world in there."

There's no one-size-fits-all solution (add your own "demon sweatpants" joke here), but it's always worth scanning the horizon for the most likely hazards, and adjusting early.

The Creation Session

For many one-shots, I'll just say "bring a character suited to X and Y, and off we go." For a one-shot, it's all good.

For campaigns, though, I host a session devoted to character creation. We don't usually gather at the gaming table for these ... any social setting will do: a favorite restaurant or bar, someone's living room, or the FLGS.

I prefer a pencils-down approach to these. It isn't about statting the characters out (players are welcome to do that at home), it's about creating them, individually and as a campaign ensemble: seeing which niches (if any) anyone wants to carve or share, establishing some relationship dynamics, knitting connections between backstories and long-term goals. In practice, the players "run" this session themselves in a cross-table barrage of brainstorming and Q&A, and I just dip in at need to offer advice. Even when the ensemble is built around friction (a party of cutthroat pirates, or Paranoia troubleshooters, someone's pulling a Jayne Cobb, etc) it's nice to give it just a bit of form, so we can hit the ground running.

The Mood Watch

I do this one maybe half the time: we gather to watch a few movies selected to set a certain campaigny mood. Most of my campaigns take place in some version of real-world history (with thick layers of genre-syrup on top), so it's usually fun to pick two or three films touching on the same genre / time-period in some way.

Whether I schedule the Mood Watch before or after the chargen session depends on the run. Sometimes, I want the films to inspire chargen choices and gameworld perspective. Sometimes, I prefer to have the players attached to their character concepts before such exposure.

The Campaign Glossary

Every campaign I've run for the past 20 years or so has its own Campaign Glossary. I find them invaluable.

The Glossary is just a document listing all the stuff: NPCs and locations, objects and events, and more. Depending on how many mysteries/secrets I'm juggling, I sometimes have two versions of the Glossary: one for the eyes of the players, one private. A simple Glossary entry might be something like:

Blackwind Cove: Isolated cove north along the coast from Jubilance, where the PCs battled for the Banderilla in Session B3.

A fleshier (but still brief) entry:

Carmichael, Lonnie: An Agent of the King, legal overseer of the emerald mine at the village of Illies. Affable and more even-tempered than his colleague, Tully. Described himself as "Blind Deacon born-and-raised." PCs met him in Session B1, B2. Due to connections to Scholar Teague and the death of Clenson Dara, Lonnie was apparently questioned (even tortured) in Vanity sometime between the PCs last seeing him, and Session 15 (when they heard of this questioning from Salem Lambeth).

That campaign was your basic world-spanning mystery, so tracking all the moving pieces on the global chess-board was handy for everyone. I maintained the document on Google Drive, gave everyone access, and updated it after each session. Snazzy for me when weaving threads; snazzy for the players when NPCs returned after a long absence, etc.

These days, it's also a snazzy memento. Between the campaign "micro-worldbooks" and the Glossaries and the session notes ... any of us who played can revisit each campaign, in a way, for years to come.

And if I ever publish a book about Uresian Loreseekers? Well, you'll know where a lot of it started.

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In response to yesterday's Interactive Sunday, correspondent Jack Dawson asked for a piece on campaign groundwork. Thanks for the prompt, Jack! While I can't write an article for every request, I always appreciate a good writing prompt, and I'll write posts for as many as I can. Is there something you'd like a ramble on? Drop me a line.

From the Same Campaign. I Do Love a Loreseeker.