Rolltop Indigo: Hammondal & Trust
Over on the Dice Camp , groovy questioneer luxet asked a question both compound and substantial, so I'll treat it as a mailbag entry here ...| rolltop-indigo.blogspot.com
Over on the Dice Camp , groovy questioneer luxet asked a question both compound and substantial, so I'll treat it as a mailbag entry here ...| rolltop-indigo.blogspot.com
Just going to run down some of the latest stuff by way of keeping in touch. Big thanks to those who've been corresponding with me lately; pl...| rolltop-indigo.blogspot.com
Hammondal is pure game-design (with bursts of writing) at this stage, so it's harder to blog about in some ways since there's less to look at, and a lot more abstraction, and lists, and abstractions of lists and lists of abstractions (really; I do that).| Rolltop Indigo
Today I want to ramble about two closely-related decisions in RPG design, both relating to Hammondal.| Rolltop Indigo
I have Strong Opinions on matters of fantasy cartography. No shock, I know! One of those opinions is that you should never draw to fit the paper. The way I fight that tendency (because it can be really hard not to) is I do a lot of preliminary work on a much, much larger canvas than the target output.| Rolltop Indigo
The whole point of this blog-post is to mark that I've finally got all of Hammondal's street-names in place on the master map. There are, at final count, 195 named streets (there are even more named alleyways and closes and other storied passages, but finishing all that labeling is still a big deal to me) 😄| Rolltop Indigo
I wake up each morning excited about Hammondal. I'm working on it constantly (or as constantly as asthma permits, lately) and it gives me that noisy popcorn brain where the elements are enjoying their teeny little explosions, bouncing and colliding and combining ...| Rolltop Indigo
The early, heady, research-heavy phase of an RPG project is, to me, the beginning of a rollercoaster ride. During that phase, I cram my eyeballs full of historical research, classic RPG works, genre research, fiddly real-world stuff like evaporation and waste from cisterns, the nature of long-term road maintenance, the precise conditions for fog, the chemistry of a peat bog, the many uses of wax, and brick. The nature of a handful of world religions, folkloric traditions, spiritual belief sys...| Rolltop Indigo
The main "poster" map of Hammondal is complete. It'll still evolve as the book progresses, of course, but it's nice to see it all together ... or even pointedly dissected.| Rolltop Indigo
The Hammondal poster townmap is nearly done. What's preventing it from being declared a "complete draft" is boats. I've done multiple passes at "populating" the city's harbor and other waterlines with ships and boats, and each one has fallen short of my standards in one way or another. I'll keep poking at it between fontwork and other stuff. I hope to begin some of the building interior maps over the next week, and I'm excited for those! The obligatory spray of development snapshots follows, ...| Rolltop Indigo
It's easy to preview maps in progress, and writing in progress, but the actual design in progress is such a ghost of a thing ... But I'll try:| Rolltop Indigo
I'm going under for surgery in about 12 hours so that means 12 hours of wide-awake brain-shrieking anxiety and terror 😐| Rolltop Indigo
