Saving Throw OSRIC fundraiser zine News and Updates - #3 on DriveThruRPG Best Sellers!

Saving Throw - Introduction
and Table of Contents

Some news and updates on Saving Throw since its launch on Sunday:

1. Thank you for your generous support of this project!---Saving Throw has been as high as #3 on the DriveThruRPG.com best sellers list this week, outpacing both Eclipse Phase 2nd Edition and Legend of the Five Rings! 
   

   

   Tuesday 17 September 2019 -
   Saving Throw is the #3 Best Seller!

   
   That wouldn't have been possible without your support!
   
   
2. Please continue to spread the word---Saving Throw isn't even a week old yet, so many old-school gamers won't be aware of it:  mention it in your gaming groups, your local game stores, and in your social media channels! 
   
   Your primary link should be back to the DriveThru project page at https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/288750/Saving-Throw-fundraiser-fanzine-for-James-D-Kramer
3. Positive reviews are starting to come in:
   
   Bryce "tenfootpole.org" Lynch's review is at https://tenfootpole.org/ironspike/?p=6236 and states:
   • "Jim Kramer is the guy behind Usherwood Publishing. Several of his adventures appear on my Best & Regerts list, including Arachnaphobia and most his Bone Hilt campaign series."
   • "You should go pick this up because you’re not an asshole. And, also, because the adventures are quite good. Also, there’s a lot of OTHER content in it, beyond the adventures."
   
   The DriveThru page now notes two five-star ratings thus far, and user Guggy Z also commented as a verified purchaser:  "What a great zine! Just skimming I think the hours of solid play to page count ratio looks immense, and I appreciate the chance to support a good cause. This stuff is going right to my table ASAP!"
   
   
4. The print edition is getting closer to reality, per updates from Guy Fullerton:
   • 18 September:  On the bright side, the premium color hardcover masters got approved (this doesn't mean they'll look right), so I ordered a proof. Last time I ordered something, it took about a week to arrive. Fingers crossed.
     
     I may end up putting a variety of print options together, since drivethru makes that easy enough to do. A perfect bound book might suck format-wise, but it's cheaper to produce. I still plan on making a pair of staple-bound books available, one each with the first & last halves of the content, respectively, with the title page and OGL page in both; that's probably the cheapest option for lay-flat.
     
   • 15 September:  I submitted a cover & (non-final) interior to drivethru for a hardcover version. It takes a couple days for their validation process to determine whether there are any glitches. I will order a proof of the hardcover as soon as they give me the green light. I've never done a hardcover cover pdf before, so I don't know whether to expect multiple iterations. I tried to out-smart the lightning press template, which I may come to regret.
     
    
5. Further content updates are in the works, including new artwork; update again from Guy Fullerton:
   • 18 September:  On the artwork addition front, we got several new filler illustrations by Wind the other day, and I saw an in-progress monster illustration by austinjimm that looks pretty amazing!
   • 15 September:  If you see any typos that we didn't catch, please let rredmond or me know. I want to fix glitches before we make a print version available, and will update the pdf too with fixes and additional artwork to come.

If you're interested in following the updates and breaking news for the project, you can do so via two threads on the Knights & Knaves Alehouse:

• "Saving Throw fundraiser fanzine for James D. Kramer" in the New Products forum 
• "Need contributors to a worthy fundraiser project" in the Special Projects Info forum

Thank you again for supporting this project, and please continue to share Saving Throw to amplify its visibility---the more gamers who are aware of Saving Throw, the more support it will bring to Jim and his family! 

Allan.

UPDATE 2 - Charting The Flanaess: a Settlements Distance and Mileage Chart

In May 2018 I began work on building a Settlements Distance and Mileage Chart for the Flanaess, but the project has lain fairly fallow until last month.

Since before the start of the year, our team of Greyhawk fan contributors have been working on material for the Greyhawk Seminar (details in last month's update), and I've been doing my part in that effort too.

As part of some of that work, I've realigned my mileage distances chart data to include only those settlements that appear on Anna B. Meyer's Flanaess map excerpt for the handouts.  In doing so, I removed a few cities from my original swag list, and added a few more, which meant that last Sunday I performed the rest of the Darlene map measurements to drive my distance calculations formulas.  

Here's where things stand at present:

grodog at work -
fitting the Flanaess into spreadsheet cells

With the change from some of the original settlements that are now out-of-scope for the map area in the new handouts, and adding in the new ones, I've now completed distances for 17 of the 130 locations, which is 13.1% of the overall effort.  A little progress goes a long way---although not so far in this case, since all of these settlements are in the Central Flanaess and are pretty close to one another! ;)

Allan.

UPDATE 1 - Charting The Flanaess: a Settlements Distance and Mileage Chart

In May last year I began work on building a Settlements Distance and Mileage Chart for the Flanaess, but the project has lain fairly fallow until recently.

Greyhawk Seminar at GaryCon 2019

A crew of six of us will host a Greyhawk seminar at GaryCon XI in March 2019, focused on the state of the state of Greyhawk fandom.  The seminar is titled "Celebraing Greyhawk: A Fandom Renaissance" and the event description is:

Greyhawk fans have been creating and sharing content online for 25+ years, across many platforms. Join Bryan Blumklotz, Mike Bridges, Allan Grohe, Carlos Lising, Anna Meyer, and Kristoph Nolen as we celebrate and showcase Greyhawk resources created by the fans who champion one of D&D's oldest settings. Reference handouts will be provided, and perhaps prizes if we get our act together!

• Bryan “Saracenus” Blumklotz – Bryan is the lead administrator for the CanonFire! A Greyhawk Resource! Facebook group and is creator of the World of Greyhawk Heraldry site.
• Mike "mortellan" Bridges – Mike publishes the Greyhawk blog Greyhawkery and co-hosts the weekly Legends & Lore show on the Greyhawk channel.
• Allan "grodog" Grohe – Allan publishes his grodog's Greyhawk fan site and is co-founder of Black Blade Publishing (OSRIC, Rob Kuntz’s The Original Bottle City, etc.) and The Twisting Stair mega-dungeon design zine.
• Carlos "caslEntertainment" Lising – Carlos writes and publishes OSRIC adventures set in Oerth and in Avremier via casl Entertainment and Patreon.
• Anna "GH Maps" Meyer – Anna publishes her Flanaess maps and founded the Flanaess Geographical Society Facebook group.  She also co-hosts the Legends & Lore Greyhawk show with Mike Bridges.
• Kristoph "Icarus" Nolen – Krisoph is leading the redesign of Greyhawk Online and showcases his artwork at http://wkristophnolen.daportfolio.com/.

Additional informationabout the seminar  (including a recording of the session and any distributed handouts) will appear on Greyhawk Online at https://www.greyhawkonline.com/seminar.

Charting the Flanaess Update

One of the seminar handouts I'm planing is a working prototype for the mileage chart,  limited in scope to the Central Flanaess in and around the City of Greyhawk, so I’ve been working on that recently by measuring out the distances from city to city on the Darlene map, in millimeters:

grodog at work -
measuring the Flanaess in millimeters

Once the measurements are complete, I enter the raw data into Excel in the first/upper set of cities listings.  The green, red, and yellow highlighted rows are my fact-checking:  I want to insure that the figures true-up across each row and column, and then in total as well:
 

grodog at work -
fitting the Flanaess into spreadsheet cells

The second/lower set of cities listings is where I convert the measured distances in mm into scale miles (I’ll eventually do kilometers as well), based on this data and formula logic:

1. One Folio Darlene hex = 55 mm across = 10 scale leagues/30 scale miles
2. Convert the raw distance between each city into a ratio relative to the hex sizes on the Darlene Folio maps:  (X mm/55mm). 
3. Multiple the ratio by 30 miles to derive the final distance figure

Like in the first/ upper set of cities, I also fact-check the figures to insure that they match properly. 
 
I think I’ve also found a good methodology for how to manually count out of the Darlene map mileage distances:  I’ll simply print a copy of the “Index to the Cities & Features of the Flanaess” page from the Glassography and measure out the distances for each listed city, one city to a sheet.
 

 
Interesting aside #1:  of the 130 settlements that appear in the Glassography index, about 50 appear in the general region of the Central Flanaess.  That’s 38% of the cities squeezed into an area only that occupies only 25% of the Darlene mapspace. 
 
Interesting aside #2:  looking at each page of the original maps to calculate the settlement density will also be an interesting exercise to go through, I think. 
 

Minor Complications

One of the major issues I’ll want to call out in the data is a possible discrepancy in measurement when the distances span both of the Darlene maps:  maps can shift around, the hexes could be misaligned, etc., so measuring across both maps will be more challenging and more prone to error than when measuring within either map alone. 
 
In my prototype data set, only Luekish, Radigast City, and Riftcraft appear on the right-hand map, so I calculated all of the left-hand map’s distances first, then measured the right-hand ones back to the left, and wrapped up with the right-hand-only mileage. 
 

Next Steps

Once I have a better understanding of the scope included in the map handouts that we’ll distribute at the seminar (and we will post all of the handouts to Greyhawk Online, and at minimum an audio recording of the seminar as well), I will update the list of cities to feature any other major ones that aren’t already included in the chart, which will finalize the initial prototype data set. 
 
Sometime after GaryCon, the rest of the long-haul work will begin, likely to occur in three phases: 

1. Count out all of the distances in the left-hand map.
2. Count out all of the distances in the right-hand map.
3. Count out all of the distances that span both maps.

I’ll continue to post updates here as I make further progress!
 
Allan.