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.)

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…

One of the most important creative tips I ever got was to avoid genre incest.

This advice takes many forms, with perhaps the most common being: “Read outside the genre.”

The earliest memory I have of this advice goes all the way back to when I was about eight years old and downloading the writer’s guidelines for Star Trek novelizations off the Prodigy service. The editor of the line basically said (albeit in much more polite terms), “If your only influence for writing a Star Trek story is having seen 100+ episodes of the TV shows and reading 50+ novels, you are almost guaranteed to produce some unreadable, derivative crap just like the other 25,000 hacks dive-bombing our slush pile.”

I can also remember, when I was about six years old, reading Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy and promptly sitting down to write a story about the fall of a galactic empire. About three pages in I realized I didn’t actually have a story to tell that wasn’t Asimov’s story, and I can very precisely peg revelation as the moment in which I discovered the importance of having a good idea.

(It was several more years before I realized that a good idea is only about 1/10th of the work, although it does help to make the other 9/10ths far easier.)

I seem to blithering. Where was I going with all this?

Ah, yes. Research!

So if I’m designing the map of a fantasy city, it’s important not to spend all my time looking at other people’s maps of fantasy cities. Coming into the project I already brought a weird and eclectic mix of knowledge –ranging from the study of medieval cities to classes in urban planning.

And I’m also lucky to be living in this day and age, because Google Earth makes it almost trivial to snag satellite imagery detailing the layout of streets and the shape of real buildings. So, as part of my prep work, I spent a couple of hours grabbing evocative and visually interesting satellite photos from a variety of cities:

Rome

Moscow

London

Kyoto

Because Anyoc was built entirely on one large hill, it was particularly important for me to be able to look at how streets and hills historically interacted (before the modern era when streets tend to simply cleave through the local geography). What I discovered that roads will generally follow the curve of the land, but not always precisely and often with exceptions. (It may be difficult to climb straight up that steep hill, but sometimes it may be easier than the alternatives.)

This was a good lesson to learn, because before studying these real world cities I had an inclination towards making the roads follow the geography almost religiously. I’m glad I moved away from that, because the result looked very unnatural — resembling something closer to the contour map instead of a city.

When I was done, I (literally) had my road map:

Continued…

City Supplement 3: Anyoc was essentially a completed product when Dream Machine Productions went on hiatus. The only thing we were waiting for was the map. In fact, it was my intention to release it as our last product before the hiatus. But, unfortunately, the cartographer we had working on the project never completed it. Since we were shifting into a hiatus state in any case, I shelved the project.

As we started gearing up to come out of hiatus, however, I started working on the map myself. Here’s what the original sketch map that I drew way back in 2001 looked like:

Basically, there was little laid out except for the gross geography and spatial relationships of the city. However, I know that one of the things I love about a good city supplement is the map: As a handout, there are few things more satisfying than being able to slap down a really slick-looking map for the players to look at. And I’ve found that there are few things that can get my creative juices flowing like a good map: Imagine yourself standing on those streets and looking at those buildings. What does that colorful roof really look like? What lies beyond that door or hidden around that corner?

I knew that executing a city map to the standards that I would demand out of a product would be tough. I had previously designed the map for Aerie (City Supplement 2), but that was a very different type of project: Aerie had been carved out of solid rock according to a relatively rigid plan. For Anyoc, I felt it was important to capture the more natural and organic curves of a living city.

So I started researching.

SURVEYING THE FIELD

The first part of this research was a matter of “surveying the field”. I went to my shelves and pulled down a wide representative sampling of city maps from other roleplaying supplements. Notable examples include:

As you can see, there have been many different ways of handling the cartography for fantasy cities. Based on my recent experience with Ptolus, among other things, I knew how incredibly useful it could be to have every street and every building detailed on the map. As a player, I love the ability to say “I’m going to X by heading down this street right here”. And as a DM I love being able to say, “Okay, the House of Violet Gold is this building right here.”

With those goals in mind, I pushed aside the very generic style of maps like the one seen in the Freeport sample above. These types of maps are a bit more graphically detailed than my sketch on graph paper, but the detail is largely illusory — none of those blobs actually represent anything meaningfully concrete.

I also stepped away from the style of map seen in the Minas Tirith sample above: These maps resemble the kind of cartographical lot maps created by city surveyors and the like.

While I couldn’t create the type of detailed, individual buildings created by Ed Bourelle for Ptolus (unless I wanted to charge a lot more for the finished product than I was planning to), I felt that a “roof outline” style (such as those used in the Raven’s Bluff and Sharn examples above) represented the best compromise. Here’s the style I ended up with:

With a style in hand, it was time to start laying out the streets. But before I could do that, I had to finish my research.

Continued…