Under the Laser

 I'm going under for surgery in about 12 hours so that means 12 hours of wide-awake brain-shrieking anxiety and terror 😐

So I'm hoping that means I'll get some mapping done. If not, I'll go find Twitch streams of people doing graphic design; that can be soothing.

It's times like this I really wish I had a Discord full of like-minded gamers, but I only know like, four like-minded gamers on the whole planet and they're mostly day-people.

Here are some recent development snaps from Hammondal: Light of the Candle Islands:

Tonight my mind is turned to thoughts of alphabets ... partly because I'm working on an important font commission for a fellow creator in the nerdspaces, and partly because I'm thinking ahead to how I want Hammondal to look on the page. My current jumble of thoughts includes the following sparks and tangents:

• I'm going to be working with some seriously book-weighted type. I get genuinely heartbroken when I see cool fantasy worlds from ye olden times republished with faint, spidery, featherweight type and the pages look blank if you squint. This is not just an "I'm about to have eye surgery" thing; type with some meat on its bones is a warmth thing and this book will look warm.
• Back when I was the Uresia guy, I built my page design around my cartography aesthetic, so the whole thing would look like a piece. Now that my cartography aesthetic has evolved an extra ten years (yep, the ASL Edition of Uresia came out in 2012), that means I can take the same approach and end up with a very different look, one with more of the textures and color-palette of my newer maps.
• This brings me back to the alphabet, because I keep seeing, in my mind's eye, a set of initial caps with the same aesthetic as the town map. If that doesn't make sense, that's okay. My mind's eye is on it, and it's got a thing going. I can't say for certain that the book will have these initial caps, but I can say for certain that I'll give 'em a try and see how it goes.
• I'm definitely doing some building interiors. This is partly because I just happen to think building interiors are a nice thing to have in a fantasy city book. It's also, in this case, to give a more definite sense of scale, since a lot of readers are used to fantasy cities with larger, 19th-century style buildings, filled to abundance with 5'×5' squares to smite foes in ... while Hammondal's aesthetic is a bit more pre-industrial, a bit cozier (Hammondal totally has some 19th-century things too, but I'm pretty selective about where). I love creating building interiors; I just haven't given myself many excuses lately, but I intend to here.
• If I do building interiors I feel obligated to at least attempt some front-elevations and/or side-elevations. I've never really done those before, but the charm of the elevations in 1st-edition Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, or League (Pelinore from Imagine magazine), haunts me and shames me: I must attempt it. I've got a plan as to how; we'll see how it goes.
• I want lines and boxes providing clear divisions on the page. I'm really feeling some of that 80s look, as always. I never like to imitate a particular look from the past but, as with Uresia, I want to evolve forward from those looks, and ignore some of the awful side-roads of the 90s on.
• As always, I want to play with color in a way that looks good in black-and-white. No matter what, I always design with the understanding that many gamers are using black toner or inexpensive inkjets, and those printers, not the screen or anything else, are my target medium. Every other medium gets some love, too, but never the deciding vote.
• There's no art budget, so maps and incidentals need to shoulder the load. I'm cool with that. I'm good at maps and pretty good at incidentals. And doing more of them will help me get better.

And I apologize for dumping random thoughts on you ... that's not really my habit with Rolltop Indigo, but ... like I said. Surgery. Freaking out. No like-minded gamers to talk to. So, you get to be my Dear Diary. Thank you for that. I know you didn't volunteer, but, thank you anyway. Assuming the surgery goes well: more soon.

Fantasy City Under Construction!

Last post, I teased an image of my latest fantasy RPG project, tentatively titled Hammondal: Light of the Candle Islands. This is a type of book I've wanted to do for a long time: a good old-fashioned city sourcebook, the kind that explores a single town in sufficient depth and breadth to make it a worthy all-in-one setting for fantasy campaigning. Here's a mockup of Hammondal as the map stands this morning:

Be Careful Near the Construction Zones

As you may already know, I sold Uresia: Grave of Heaven to Dyskami Publishing last year, along with its supplements and related material, and they'll be publishing a new BESM edition this fall or winter (including One Last New Chapter from me), which means I needed a new fantasy world to write about and run my campaigns in, having said my tearful goodbyes to Heaven's Grave.

As you probably also know, I have a thing for cities and towns. I love imagining them, designing them, mapping them, writing about them and gaming in them, and some of my favorite RPG books have been devoted to cities as settings. I'm also really drawn to "generic fantasy" as a design arena, partly because I love an underdog and generic fantasy is often dismissed as junk, and partly because the design challenge of making something interesting enough to stand on its own but also socketable in a way that makes it useful for a variety of worlds challenges my design-brain in special ways.

So I got to pondering what the boundaries and untapped potentials of "generic fantasy" actually are when it comes to fantasy cities. What tropes are disposable, subvert-ible, intrinsic? What features are needed, and what typical "features" really aren't? Where are the richest veins for surprise, for inspiration, for characters and adventures?

The city of Hammondal is built from my answers (also wood and bricks and things), and as you can imagine, my answers are more than a little satiric, pulpy, swashbuckly and layered in mystery, horror, comedy and humanistic sympathy. It includes my take on everything I've ever loved in a fantasy city book, and my takes on things I've never seen in a fantasy city book, and just lots of shameless excuses for the kind of RPG design I live for.

It also evokes the tensions deep within its own design challenges, and brings them right to the gameable surface. It's a modestly-sized city on a remote island, in a province of a stumbling Empire where foreign trade is taking deep root. It's the collision point for multiple competing cultures, refugees from a lost realm, powerful nature spirits, a wealthy and influential Church, a hidden community of the dead, a disgraced order of mages, a hospital run by Dwarvish nuns married spiritually to a trickster god, and enclaves of fantasy bohemians ... each of which reflect facets of the "generic" fantasy's contradictions in playful ways.

And it does have its own world, just offstage where it needn't trouble anyone, but exerting constant gravity on the design. It's impossible for a city to feel alive without connections to a larger world, so that larger world, too, had to be socketable, made of elements analogous to traditional fantasy ideas while also mixing flavors in surprising ways, and while the city is the focus of the book, the Candle Islands, and the local warlords and Queen not entirely enthused about the Imperial colony on their northern shore, get a couple of pages and maps as well.

The Candle Isles.

Working Out Which Roads Suck Slightly Less

I Love Hexes More Than Anyone Needs To

I am very excited about this book, this city and this world, so I'll pester this blog about it more than once before the book is done, but I'll wrap this up for now before I get too mushy about it. If you'd like a regular drip of maps-in-progress and design musings, Hammondal has a Twitter account, and I also post images to DeviantArt now and then. If you want to see the real-world stuff I'm imagining while designing Hammondal, my DeviantArt favorites page is full of what I fantasize about (some of which is NSFW, but most of which is trees and old buildings and and dirt roads).

If you've got questions about Hammondal that might make a fun blog post, drop me a line and I'll be ever so grateful. If you've got friendly things to say about my maps, I can always use a little of that, too. Either way, thanks for reading, and I hope you feel the beginnings of my Hammondal excitement, too!

And of Course, There Are New Silly Fonts.

Guacamole Quickstep

Today's new font from the Cumberland Fontworks is called Guacamole Quickstep. It's simple and huggy and nothing-fancy. I dig it:

It's got a nice on-screen legibility, even at smaller sizes. I'll probably use it for character sheet graphics, and maybe some Risus captions sometime ... it's got a similar visual personality to the Little Cartoon Bastards. It's probably what their handwriting looks like.

It's the first font I've ever drawn entirely on my phone, which is no shocker nowadays (phones have some top-notch doodling apps so there's a lot of good work being done on those little screens) but it's a personal milestone in expanding my mobile productivity. I've used phones for LCB art before (some of the pieces in Toast of the Town), and for writing small sections of my books and modules and things (Toast again, plus other titles still in the works). The process of doodling the font was very comfortable, so it ended up with an extended-character set, all of it pretty thoroughly kerned.

I have no idea if it's the first ever font drawn entirely on a phone. I can certify that it's the first Cumberland font drawn entirely on a phone, and that the second one is already drawn and in the works.

This One Isn't Named After Guacamole. Probably.

Sandra's glyph-mapping that new one right now in the laptop across the booth from me.

That's one of the other cool things about Guacamole Quickstep: it's the third new Cumberland font this month (following Cynocel Poster and Monesque), because Sandra's now (as I like to say it) slaving away in the font mines or (as she likes to say it) having fun helping husby with fonts.

So, if you're happy to see new Cumberland fonts, you have Sandra to thank for a lot of that happiness from now on. She's shouldering the glyph-mapping portion of the production process, letting me focus on the designy-and-kerny parts, and it's a productive formula, fueled in large part by Sandra's almost giddy enthusiasm for it.

It's also National Avocado Day, and if I'd known that I was releasing a font named Guacamole Quickstep on National Avocado Day I'd have worked it into the release somehow, but I found out later. D'oh.

As always, fonts from the Cumberland Fontworks are available out in the wilds of the Internets and tend to spread from font-website-to-font-website like embers in a forest fire. Google knows the way. I'm also experimenting with posting a couple on my DeviantArt gallery but I'm not sure how I feel about that; they might vanish by the time you read this. Dunno.

Equally as-always, my inbox is open if you'd like to chat about fonts or, you know, games or food or whatever. Hope this finds you well.