Mapping

I got totally derailed by the holidays, and when I got back on track, it was with mapping.

I found the Cartographers' Guild, which is a very friendly forum for cartography enthusiasts to post their maps. Unfortunately you can't see any file attachments as a guest user, but if you make a free account the site is a gold mine for maps of all kinds.

On the Guild site there is a great tutorial on how to make maps with GIMP (a free Photoshop alternative) without needing a digital tablet or knowing how to draw. I've been spending some time on that. Here's my progress so far.

You might recognize the map. I swiped the outline and rough mountain layout from Dragonlance's continent Ansalon. I traced the map and mountains and flipped it upside down. So far I've only added the 2 deserts and the tundra up north.

I have a hand sketched map of where most of the terrain and nations and are going to be, but no scanner, sorry. The human empire will be in the north-eastern area of the map, bounded by the large inlet and the islands. The large desert is home to the dragonborn (4th Edition's core draconic race). The smaller desert will be the former elven forest. South of that, across the small sea will be the tiefling lands - heavy forest and mountains. Steppe filled with goblinoids is to the west of the human empire, and there are many smaller nations in the islands to the east. I haven't planned out any of them yet, but I think the area is ripe for piracy.

I realize that some of the geographic features might not be logical (deserts are usually on the east side of mountains, etc) but this world will have, uh, different weather patterns (that's the ticket) and magic, so I feel like I have an excuse.

I saw another documentary on Templars. It didn't really have anything new, but I jotted down a couple of notes. I also got my hands on Wizard's Presents: Races and Classes, which had some cool tidbits of background info. I'm thinking of stealing the names of the tiefling and dragonborn empires - Bael Turath and Arkhosia. Arkhosia had the western half of the continent, and Bael Turath the eastern, divided by the mountains. That'll help dictate the kinds of ruins are in each area.

I am definitely going to use the 4e gods too, but most of them are new and I have very little info on them. It's kind of hard to plan for them right now.

I should really go back through my notes and start writing up formal ideas.

All over the place

Been a while since my last update, and I've been working on a lot of random stuff.

Abulafia is on a new webhost (the name is growing on me, once I memorized it), and the speed has improved nicely. Unfortunately, the move kind of derailed me and I haven't worked on my project there since.

I wrote up a high level history for the area, but I found it kind of trite and boring. Eladrin get kicked out by tieflings who take over the humans in the area. They eventually fall, and a good human empire springs up in its place. I'm going to go back over that and make things a little more gray. I also had the 4e origins (as much as we know) of the eladrin/elves and tieflings worked in to the history, but that probably isn't necessary. I want to make the tieflings less evil and the humans more ambiguous. I want the tiefling empire ("dominion" sounded good) to be the founding force of "modern" civilization in the area.

I'm also trying to figure out the scale and map I want to work in. I don't want to make it too large to deal with, or too small to be quickly outgrown. I'm also seeing the need to fill in other surrounding countries, but I can alleviate some of that feeling by working on the nobilities lands within the Empire. I need to start looking at example maps. Fortunately, I've been collecting digital maps for quite some time, so I'll either just steal one or use it as inspiration.

The last two days I've been playing with Inkscape, a free vector-based drawing program, similar to Adobe Illustrator. It's a really neat program and is very powerful, but there's a learning curve. I'm also not much of an artist and I don't have a pen tablet, and that makes working in it a little harder. Anyway, Inkscape has a couple of nice features that work great for map creation. You can draw a shape or a line, then "fractalize" it, which means it becomes randomly jittered, which is perfect for terrain. The clone/duplicate object feature is pretty good too. If I make a terrain symbol, I can clone it and put them all over the place. If you clone something and change the original, all the clones change as well, so you can update everything simultaneously. You can also find features like that in some of the "real" mapping programs, but I also want to learn Inkscape for fun.

Hopefully with this nice down time for Christmas, I can get some more work done on the game.

Abulafia

I've been contributing to Abulafia for the last few days, ever since I realized that the generators on that site were perfect for creating interesting and unique loot. I've had the idea of a complex treasure generator kicking around in my head for a long, long time. Imagine my surprise when I found that Abulafia already did what I wanted, and that someone had already done 90% of the work.

Abulafia's generators typically create natural text descriptions. Jewelry is a good example. Here are some examples:

• A platinum costume mask, with the image of a scarab beetle.
• A matching pair of Magically Treated Platinum toe rings, each with the coat of arms of a city, nation, or other location and set with 3 Jargoons. It appears to be of Wood Elven make.
• A electrum breastplate, with the symbol of Servants of the Dark Lord (a pentagram).
• A bronze comb inlaid with giant crab chitin.
• A copper knife handle with the image of a diving falcon and set with a Feldspar. Much of the piece's value comes from the fact that it is obviously quite old.
• A mammoth ivory sickle, etched with a twisting, vine-like pattern and set with a Malachite. It is of ancient workmanship.

Imagine a player cracking open a chest of pirate treasure and finding that list instead of "5000 sp, 1000 gp, and 2 diamonds." Treasure like this generates adventure hooks without even trying. The site had already secured a permanent place in my GM's Notebook, but once I get my own stuff in there, it'll be a must-have.

The generator tables are all housed in regular MediaWiki pages, making them really easy to edit. You have to Edit a page to get a look at the generator tables for a page. Since you need an account to edit, here's an example. A generator looks something like this: (I had to replace angle brackets with curly braces so it would display correctly.)

{sgdisplay iterations="5"}A [main]
{/sgdisplay}

{sgtable}
;main
5,[JewelryMaterial] [Item][Predicate]
1,matching pair of [JewelryMaterial] [Item]s, each [Predicate]

;Predicate
4, set with a [Utility.GemType]. [Craftsmanship]
3, set with [Dice.2d6] [Utility.GemType]s. [Craftsmanship]
4, [Design]. [Craftsmanship]
2, [Design] and set with a [Utility.GemType]. [Craftsmanship]
2, [Design] and set with [Dice.2d6] [Utility.GemType]s. [Craftsmanship]
4, with [Utility.Symbols]. [Craftsmanship]
2, with [Utility.Symbols] and set with a [Utility.GemType]. [Craftsmanship]
2, with [Utility.Symbols] and set with [Dice.1d12] [Utility.GemType]s. [Craftsmanship]
2, with the inscription "[Inscriptions.main]" written in [Inscriptions.Language]. [Craftsmanship]
2, with the inscription "[Inscriptions.main]" written in [Inscriptions.Language] and set with [Dice.2d6] [Utility.GemType]s. [Craftsmanship]

...
{/sgtable}

This might seem complex, but if you've ever worked with computer language grammar or parsers, it's very intuitive and powerful. Basically, any time you see an item in single brackets, like [main], it gets replaced by a result from the table with that name. You can freely mix text and table names within a table. The numbers indicate the relative frequency that an item will be chosen.

So from the initial call of A [main] it could become :

1. A [JewelryMaterial] [Item][Predicate]
2. A gold [Item][Predicate]
3. A gold bracelet [Predicate]
4. A gold bracelet set with a [Utility.GemType]. [Craftsmanship]
5. A gold bracelet set with a [Utility.SemiPrecious]. [Craftsmanship]
6. A gold bracelet set with a Spinel. [Craftsmanship]
7. A gold bracelet set with a Spinel. It is of exquisite workmanship.

[Utility.GemType] is just a list of other tables that contain gems, so it was replaced with a call to one of the other tables. It also happens to be on another page, which is very convenient for making multiple generators that all reference the same sets of tables.

The SGDISPLAY tags are how you call the generator to display items. SGTABLE indicates the beginning of the generator tables and the items in single brackets are references to table names. The actual tables start with a semicolon followed by the table name. Each line after the table name starts with a number that indicates the relative frequency of the item, so on the [main] table you're 5 times more likely to get a result of [JewelryMaterial] [Item][Predicate] than you are to get matching pair of [JewelryMaterial] [Item]s, each [Predicate]. The comma indicates the beginning of the text or table names.

The hardest part of making the tables is choosing exactly how to phrase each chunk so that you get a readable result. It's possible to get results like "A Adamantine cloak pin" and "A matching pair of pair of spectacles", and there's not an easy way to fix it. Still, if you can overlook little glitches like that, Abulafia can be an incredible resource

Right now you might notice that you can't sign up for an account or edit Abulafia (the generators are still working). The database of the site has been locked so that the owner can move it to another web host, hopefully a faster one. I'm not sure how long it will take, but Dave (the owner) warns that it could take several days.

GM's Notebook, pt 3

I've been fiddling with Google Spreadsheets, but it looks like it's not sufficient for my needs. It's slow, the toolbars take up too much space, and it doesn't look like I can do some of the useful randomization features I can in Excel. Excel is faster and I can customize it more too, so I think I'll go with that for now.

I also took a step back and changed sources. I'm using Kate Monk's Onomastikon for most of my names now. It has some unfortunate formatting problems with some names, like Arabic, but it's good for the most part. Plus, since a lot of the names are divided by source, I can leave out sets of names I'm not interested in, like Biblical names. I realized I don't care about name meanings, so I removed those.

I started gathering Romanian and Arabic names, for the Tiefling and Elven areas, respectively. I had to fall back on 20000-names.com for readable Arabic names. I also made a simple combination generator for them: FirstName RelationshipConnector FirstName Connector PlaceName. This produces full names like Sa'Id ibn Faiz al Aqabâ or Hana bint Farah el Fugayrâ. Not historically accurate, but perfect for my needs. (I envision my elves like the Valenar of Eberron. Skilled warriors and horsemen who venerate their ancestors.)

Right now, I have 5 random names generated for each of the following: Empire (German based) male, female, surname, city name, the same for Tiefling (Romanian based) and full names and city names for Elven (Arabic based).

When looking for Arabic city names I found the Geonames site. It's a great resource for this kind of thing. There's only a few city names for each country, but I grabbed them from multiple sources. It's also got multi-language glossaries and a ton of other similar things. I grabbed the months of the year in German.

I've added some Spanish and Maori names too, but I haven't decided who they will apply to. I also grabbed some random text generated by a Barsoomian name generator. I'm thinking those will make good intelligent monster names. I need some goblin/orc names, but I haven't found a source that's right yet. I tossed in some links in the sheet to other random generators on Abulafia, just so they're available when I need them.

GM's Notebook, pt 2

I spent some time filling in bits of my GM Notebook. I started with people's names.

20000-names.com had a lot of German first names and meanings, almost 1000, I think. That's actually too many. I need to go through that list and pull out some of the similar variations and dull names. I should probably randomize the list occasionally too, so I don't see all the "A" names first. The site was kind of lame and trashy, but the content was good.

For last names, a good article on German Names from About.com had a few dozen good ones. There was also a nice little find that had German root words for place names.

I also found some good first and last names from the Story Games Names Project. Here's a link to the index of all the names.

Lastly, I rediscovered Abulafia, which is the worst name for a site ever. Fortunately the URL is http://www.random-generator.com. Abulafia is a wiki with some special code to make random generators really easily. If you want a generator that they don't have, you can try to make one. Or you can add options to an existing one. I've bookmarked several of their generators in case I need them in-game, but I'm not going to bother pulling out individual entries ahead of time.

After I was done with names for a bit, I hit up some of the Wikipedia articles I found earlier and used them to compile a list of common vocabulary that I can drop in. Stuff like Herr, Frauline, schnell, meister, etc... I also went poking around for German terms for weapons and armor. I didn't do so well on armor, but for weapons I found zweihander ("two-hander", greatsword), katzbalger ("Cat brawler", short sword), kreigsmesser ("war knife", falchion) and some more like that. MyArmoury.com was also good resource for info on weapons. I may hit it up later when I'm working on other areas.

I got a few town names as well, and found a site that cross-referenced modern German city names with a 16th century Czech list of cities in the HRE. I just pulled out the modern names, that's good enough. I'd like to mix up some of those names with the usual English descriptive names, so I should probably trim that list down as well.

I started looking for tavern names, but I ended up back at Abulafia and I think their generator will be sufficient. Next up, I might start looking at food and drink.

GM Notebook, pt 1 - Addendum

After reading some more about the "Secret" method of plot building, I'm changing the "Random Secrets and Plot Hooks" tab to be just "Secrets and Plot Hooks". Basically, build the campaign and apply a secret to major plot points. Then foreshadow these secrets. I was misunderstanding the random part. Choose a random secret to foreshadow, not roll for a random secret to give something.

Dungeoncraft

I read through the Dungeoncraft articles yesterday and today, and did a little more planning. It kind of derailed my GM Notebook, but it's good info to get down.

Dungeoncraft has several "rules" to guide campaign creation. These are the important ones:

1. Never force yourself to create more than you must.
2. Whenever you fill in a major piece of the campaign world, always devise at least one secret related to that piece.
4. Always challenge both the players and their characters

I walked through the creation process for the early articles. I didn't spend a lot of time coming up with lots of details, so it's a bit sparse. The rest of this post is pretty brainstormy. I haven't cleaned it up much. Some of this info conflicts with previous brainstorming, and I'll need to reconcile it later.

Setting: Earth-analogue, focusing on the Holy Roman Empire for a Germanic feel.

Home base: Hammerstein, a hamlet of about 250 people, focused around a well-known regional brewery. Residents grow barley and hops locally and sell beer to buy other food. Hammerstein is governed by a burghermeister who is appointed by the local count. Secret: The recipe for Hammerstein Premium Ale has been stolen and is being held for ransom in the form of regular gold payments.

Government: The Empire is a monarchy, but the ruling family has not been consistent, and in times of strife a new ruling family has been elected by the other nobility. The "Empire" is really a collection of culturally similar principalities and free cities with close economic and cultural ties. Secret: The first Emperor wasn't the man who unified the principalities. The unifier was killed by his lieutenant before the Empire was fully formed. The lieutenant blamed enemy assassins and became the first Emperor.

Other areas: Wild and strange Arab-influenced elves to the south. Dark Slavic tieflings to the East. Goblin hordes to the West.

Religion: One of the major LG or LN gods, TBD, is the primary religion. Some other gods have prominence in smaller areas, particularly those in remote and isolated areas. The God of Trade is widespread, but not widely worshiped outside of his knighthood and the merchant class. Yondalla or Ehlonna is particularly worshiped in Hammerstein. Secret: A LE god is growing increasingly popular among the young nobility of the Empire.

(Idea: Map Roman gods onto D&D gods. Attributes, domains of D&D gods, names of Roman. Seems to fit existing 3e pantheon pretty well.)

Names will be Germanic (Hans Miter) or English compound (Blackwood).

Home Base: Local authority will be a Man-at-arms, appointed by the Mayor. The Man-at-Arms organizes the local militia for defense of the town. He also acts as a constable, but the mayor is the local legal authority (judge). Man-at-Arms could be a PC mentor. Secret: the Man-at-Arms is a good man, but his daughter is a criminal (and ran away from home).

Critical Townsfolk: Brewer, Mayor, Man-At-Arms (Warden? Captain?), local Priest, Trading post (run by foreign (slav) Knight of the Trade God)

Fantasy Element: A small tribe of a dozen or so peaceful kobolds live nearby. They scavenge and do menial jobs around town. Their lair is a junk-yard. They are not well-liked by the rest of the town, but tolerated because of small numbers and because they haven't done anything wrong. Secret: One of the kobolds found an object of real value. He hid it in the woods and sneaks off to look at it regularly.

Rumor Mill: The local inn/tavern, the Hammerstein Inn. It's the only place in town, but it's always got the best Hammerstein beer, and all the steins are stamped with the Hammerstein logo. The Inn is also the largest building in town and doubles as a meeting hall. Secret: The innkeeper is in love with the daughter of a prominent townsperson.

Stuff in town: Brewery, Inn/Tavern/meeting hall, Temple, Trading Post and market square, in-town housing for approx 75 people (the rest are farmers), mayor's home.