IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

PRELUDE 2A: THE AWAKENING – RANTHIR

PBeM – March 5th thru 9th, 2007
The 15th Day of Amseyl  in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

(more…)

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Prelude 2: The Awakening – Ranthir

I started gaming in the summer of 1989. It was right around this time that I also discovered the local BBS scene in Rochester, MN — most notably the North Castle BBS. At the raging speeds made possible by a 1200 baud modem I was able to plug into the ADND FidoNet echo.

For those of you unfamiliar with FidoNet, it was similar to Usenet: A set of completely text-based messageboards. However, unlike Usenet, the individual BBSes that made up the FidoNet were not in perpetual contact with each other. Instead, during each day, the FidoNet systems would call each other during the ZoneMailHour (ZMH) and exchange messages. Local systems would push messages up to regional hubs and those hubs would circulate the message around the world and then push them back down to local systems.

Which meant that sometimes it would take you several days to see a message posted by someone else and sometimes you would see it immediately (if the person posting it was on the same BBS you were).

One of the features of the ADND FidoNet echo were the campaigns that were played through it. This was my earliest exposure to the concept of Play-By-Mail (PBM) games.

My first experience with roleplaying games was when I created my own. My second major experience was the true old school play of campaign-hopping characters, whipping out dungeons on graph paper, and playing during every possible stolen moment of the school day. But my third major experience was watching and playing in the PBEM (Play-By-Echo-Mail) games of the ADND echo.

Because of the asyncrhonous nature of communication, the ADND games all followed a similar structure: The DM would post a lengthy summary of events and then the players would respond. If they were facing a physical challenge or combat, player responses were usually tactical in nature — summarizing a strategy for the next several rounds of play instead of specifying particular actions. If it was a conversational situation, players would just start responding to each other’s messages.

But the asynchronous communication, of course, meant that not all of these responses necessarily meshed. (For example, you might have two characters both respond to a straight line with the same joke.) So, at some point, the DM would draw a line in the sand and end that particular phase of play. They would then gather up all the responses and summarize the official version of events. These summaries were referred to as “Moves”.

From my understanding, this system is similar to the original Play-By-Mail games which were played by physically posting letters — but with the added advantage that the players could actually talk to each other without the DM acting as an intermediary.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying: PBeM games had a major impact on my formative years as a gamer.

But, on the other hand, I profess that I have never seen a PBeM campaign end successfully. Even keeping a tabletop campaign together is difficult, and while it would seem as if the non-intensive nature of a PBeM would help keep it running… in practice the lack of any physical demand for attention means that players tend to just wander away and interest tends to atrophy.

Which is unfortunate, because — in my experience — PBeM play has some unique strengths. It lends itself particularly well, for example, to a more contemplative style of play. In ongoing tabletop campaigns, I’ve found PBeM to be a good way of dealing with certain types of side-action. It can also be used to fill in the occasional lengthy gap between playing sessions.

All of these features made PBeM play ideal for launching the Ptolus campaign: The characters were separated, the contemplative style gave the players time to ease themselves into their roles, and we had a gap of time before the campaign could start because of incompatible schedules.

(And if anyone reading this happens to have an archive of old FidoNet ADND games — particularly those run by Bruce Norman — I would dearly love to get a copy. I used to have a substantial archive myself, but it was wiped out by a bad floppy disk. Now I only have a handful of random moves that were tucked here and there.)

I’ve got things set-up now so that I can do regular updates without breaking my mind or the website. Now all I need is the time to do it.

What have I been up to? Well, in addition to the new house that I mentioned awhile back (and which triggered the sporadic nature of recent updates), I’ve had several major projects on my platter.

THE SEAGULL

I did a proxy translation of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull and have been directing it at South High School (my alma mater). The show opens next week with a preview on the 26th. It’s high school theater, but it’s very good high school theater.

THE FLICKERING WALL

I am also appearing in The Flickering Wall, an original play written specifically for the Illusion Theater. It’s a really fascinating installation piece in which the audience moves through the backstage spaces of what was once a Masonic temple and is now one of the premiere theaters of the Twin Cities.

Between these two projects, I’ve been doing back-to-back rehearsals for most of the past two months. It’s been exciting, but also exhausting.

PTOLUS – IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

One of the perks of finishing the moving and renovation process is that we’ve been able to meet for more regular game sessions in the ongoing campaign I’ve been DMing. Before the disruption to the website, I’d been posting the early campaign journals. I’ll be getting more of those campaign journals up soon, along with various snippets of commentary and analysis.

DREAM MACHINE PRODUCTIONS

I have several 3rd Edition products in development.

Many people have been asking me about the current status of Legends & Labyrinths. Development is progressing, but the long and the short of it is that it will be done when it’s done. The truth is I’m probably being too much of a perfectionist with it.

Response to Spells of Light and Darkness and City Supplement 3: Anyoc have been strong. For now I’m taking that as an indication that the 3rd Edition market is still extant. It’ll be interesting to see how that progresses over the next several months, particularly with so many publishers pulling down their 3rd Edition material.

THE ALEXANDRIAN

I’ve actually been backlogging a lot of material for the website during this technological furlough. If you come back tomorrow, you’ll get to see some of it…

(I’m such a tease.)

When I finished putting everything together, this was the map I had created. I’m fairly proud of it. (Which would explain why I’ve written a four part series on its creation.) It’s not the best map of a fantasy city ever published, but for a city supplement that can be purchased for as little as $7.99, I think it’s fairly impressive.

Of course, I’m biased. (And shilling.)

(What is the best map of a fantasy city every published? For my money, Ed Bourelle’s map of Ptolus wins that distinction hands-down. It’s a beautiful work of art, featuring layered geography; individual buildings; crystal-clear information clarity; and an enormous amount of utility. Quantity isn’t the same thing as quality, but it’s notable that I have a version of the Ptolus map hanging on my wall which is more than six and a half feet long. And, even at that immense size, it remains an astonishingly beautiful piece. The map of Anyoc, by contrast, is designed to be viewed at just 21″ x 16″ — which is big, but not huge.)

One of the things I love about mapping is the ability it has to provide a conduit for inspiration. Some of the best ideas I’ve ever had have been the result of my brain churning something out because there was a blank piece of graph paper that needed to be filled.

Designing the map for Anyoc was no exception.

Let me back up for a second and talk about the history behind City Supplement 3: Anyoc.

Anyoc was originally created back in 2001 as the setting for an adventure module. A playtest draft was completed and playtested (which is reflected in the playtest credits to be found in the published book), but the project was cancelled before a final draft was completed — partly because the publisher was already moving away from D20 modules and partly so that I could focus on a supplement called Gods & Goddesses^TM (which was also cancelled before it was completed).

In 2002, Campaign Magazine started publishing my new column: Cities of Fantasy. Each issue of the magazine featured a complete fantasy city designed by me. I wrote two original columns, recycled and expanded the unpublished Anyoc material for the third, and started work on three more columns.

Unfortunately, after publishing a single column (featuring the city of Dweredell), Campaign Magazine went out of business. So the material was shelved again.

And shortly thereafter I got tired of my projects being cancelled by other people for reasons that had nothing to do with the work itself, so I took a hiatus from the roleplaying industry and when I came back I founded Dream Machine Productions.

All of which is to say that City Supplement 3: Anyoc was originally going to look a lot like City Supplement 1: Dweredell — a shorter, cheaper book detailing roughly a dozen locations.

But as I was working on the map, a couple of things happened: First, I kept getting struck by inspiration as I considered the various stories behind the buildings and streets I was drawing. Second, I realized that there was a serious mismatch between the detail of the map and the detail of the gazetteer. It just didn’t make a whole lot of sense to have a poster-size map serving up only a handful of detailed locations.

So, despite the fact that the entire book had already been laid out and proofread, I decided to scrap the existing gazetteer and rewrite it basically from scratch. At the time, I was appearing as Inspector Colquhoun in The Hollow by Agatha Christie. As the requisite detective in the story, I spent most of the second act onstage, but during the first act I was just sitting backstage waiting for the murder to happen.

So I would sit in the dressing room with my laptop, busily working away with fresh inspiration on an expanded gazetteer for the city. The final result more than tripled the number of locations detailed.

And that’s how the map of Anyoc was both my creation and my muse.

Merely aping real world geography will give you a functional map, but won’t create a living city. For that to happen, you have to understand the soul of the city: What does it look like? How do people move through it? What’s it like to live there? These types of questions have a very real impact on how the streets are laid out; how the buildings are built; the whole nine yards.

In the case of Anyoc, I had already written up two evocative pieces of detail. The first was the literal look of the city:

As you pass through the inner gates of the wall, you are struck by a sudden cascade of color: In a single glance you capture fully half the city as it sweeps up and away from you along the side of a gently sloping hill. Pale purples mix with soft blues and faded greens; pinkish reds stand in contrast to burnished gold. And atop the hill, where it crests at a distance of what must be half a mile, are three buildings of white stone which seem to dwarf all else within the city’s walls. Anyoc bears the marks of age, as if every curved wall bears an infinity of memories. People sweep past you – a constant flow of traffic in and out of the gate through which you havepassed.

Anyoc is built from fairy stone, which comes in seven types — taylos, which is the faded green of a wood beneath the sun; vaylos, which is the faint violet of an evening cloud; saelos, which is the pale red of a friendship rose; kadlos, which is the golden color of burnished copper; anlos, which is the blue of a noontime sky; bahslos, the black midnight stone; and essabas, the star stone, which is of purest white.

This meant that I had a very specific color palette to work with, and it was important for me to get those colors right. I spent a non-trivial amount of time finding the right colors to help evoke the look I wanted for the city.

Second, I made a point in the city supplement of detailing what the common architecture of the city looks like:

The buildings of Anyoc are seldom higher than they are long. But in many cases this is not a significant restriction – entire sections of town are dominated by buildings which run the entire length of blocks, and which easily reach a height of four or five stories. Often these taller buildings will be terraced – with each subsequent level smaller than the ones below, and the remaining space rendered as an outdoor porch or salon. In some cases these terraces will create the impression of a pyramid, but generally the terraces are aligned along one side of the building to complement the angle of the hill. In contrast to the terraces, other sections of Anyoc see buildings which have been slowly expanded – until they cross over the tops of streets, meet, and join one another. And extended eaves are common throughout the city.

I decided to forego the visual representation of buildings meeting each other across the top of the street (due to the loss of visual clarity when it came to the roads themselves). But the idea of these long, low buildings terracing their way up the side of the hill had a significant impact on how the buildings of the city were laid down on the map. Here’s a representative sample:

Here you can see the distinctive colors of the fairy stone; the long, curving architecture of the buildings; and the impact the hill has had on both the buildings and the streets.

Continued…