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drakeanddice · 7 months

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After eight sessions of Burning Wheel, we decided that it wasn’t clicking for our table. It had a bunch of neat tech baked in, but wielding the system was not a joy for us. It felt like we could either dedicate ourselves absolutely to the infinite Swiss watch design or else abstract down toward the core resolution forever without ever doing more than scratch the surface and in general neither of those felt…y’know, good. So we decided to drop it.

Which kind of sucks. I feel a little defeated by the book. Like, I spent a not inconsiderable amount of time plumbing through the obtuse and confusing self-referential and esoteric prose, trying to get to the heart of why so many of my favorite designers cite it as a seminal work in the TTRPG field, but all I got was the feeling that the inheritors of its ideas did a lot to clean them up, sharpen them, and make them infinitely more fun to engage with.

I’m left with a feeling I’m getting pretty used to. I missed that moment when this thing was “cool.” I missed the Forge, I missed G+, and I missed Burning Wheel.

But also, I’m given to understand the Forge, like Burning Wheel, had problems, so I’m not taking it too hard.

We decided to play Mausritter this Friday. In a complete 180 from the rule-heavy interlocking gears and levers of Burning Wheel, the 300 pages of character creation, we decided to roll 3d6 3 times, and then 1d6 twice and take our little adventurer mice into the great big world to face danger and find treasure.

I’ve been having a recent problem where I play games for the wrong reasons. I’m looking for inspiration, for pilferable game design thoughts, for experiences outside of my comfort zone. I’m running games as work, as research. I’m slavishly adherent to the rules as written because I feel as though I owe that to the designer, because they clearly knew what they were doing and were doing it for a purpose. It’s a mental weight.

So I am attacking Mausritter from an entirely different angle. It’s an OSR game, very light and fast and abstracted. The rules are loose and few. It’s very minimal mental overhead. So I don’t have a lot to worry about getting “wrong” in the way that I’ve been secretly fearing I’ve been doing for Burning Wheel these past eight weeks. I’m playing this one for fun.

I’ve told my table that I need them to keep me honest. This is not work. My Friday night table is often abused as a play test group, often treated as an extension of my job as a game designer. I design games so I must play them. But this one’s just for fun. Don’t let me think to hard about it. Because I’m not in a mental state to do that right now.

We’re going to be mice. It’s going to be fun.

Anyway. I’ve done a thing I haven’t done in forever and prepped for a game. I’ve got a cool hexmap (adorable), have created some factions out in the world (portentous), named some NPCs (wholesome), and home brewed up some interesting spells and items to sprinkle around (fun as hell). I have not sat and just played DM by myself in a while. Still not something I want to do every time, but a welcome break from conducting atop a surfboard in front of a disaster wave.

I’m excited about this game. Can’t wait to report back.

#burning wheel #ttrpg #ttrpg stuff #indie ttrpg #mausritter

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mapsontheweb · 1 year

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A snow persistence path traced hexmap of the conterminous United States from 2001 to 2020.

by @researchremora

#maps #twittersourced #researchremora #snow #us

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goblincow · 1 year

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A6 Journal Collection for Dungeon23

A free printable collection of 54 coloured A6 dot-grid journals for Dungeon23, an alternative design for your Dungeon Year journalling needs.

Includes multiple printable versions in cyan, b&w, and cyan with coloured covers.

432 pages encompassing 54 8-page A6 booklets, each with a different colour cover in a subdued CMY gradient that cycles into darker shades for the final months.

Each booklet is printed one-sided on one A4 page - just cut once & fold to A6 size to make each 8-page booklet: that's 54 pieces of paper, representing 52 weeks and 2 appendices. Instructions here (by Ashley Topacio):

Each booklet features a non-repro cyan dot-grid (even on the cover) with a tidy white border on all sides and a logo on each cover that I pulled from the Dungeon 23 Asset Pack by @lonearchivist and recoloured for each individual booklet, plus two appendices (a calendar booklet & an index table booklet).

If you want to keep up a writing or design exercise I think you should remove as many barriers as possible: you're only confronted with a tiny A6 page, every week you get to look back and mark your progress, you can always stop at the end of each week, no pressure to continue if you're not still having fun, and a fresh start every time you open a new week's booklet.

Easily scan and remove backgrounds to create ready-to-upload printable zines that you can publish each week!

There's nothing but dots on each page so you can scribble or scrawl or add a room description or encounter table or hexmap or anything you feel inspired to create.

Maybe you don't want to do one 52-week mega-dungeon? Why not 52 week-long dungeons instead?

Bind completed booklets into months or seasons (I'm going to try and bind them into a full year, with a sewn cover for the collection and instruction downloads coming in a future update).

Head here to download now and go ahead and check out the Dungeon23 Jam for more!

@thelostbaystudio @pandiongames @lonearchivist

I for one am proud to have published my first work of the new year within the first 4 hours of the coming 8760. At this rate I must at least be scraping the bottom of some metaphysical leaderboard somewhere!

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chronotsr · 3 days

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No. 5 - D2, Shrine of the Kuo-Toa (August 1978)

Author(s): Gary Gygax Artist(s): David C. Sutherland III (Cover), David A. Trampier Level range: Average of 10, preferrably party size 7+ players Theme: Underground exploration Major re-releases: D1-2 Descent into the Depths of the Earth, GDQ1-7 Queen of the Spiders

I'm almost speechless. This is the most 1e module cover to ever have 1e'd. It is perfection. The way the combat is perfectly perpendicular to the step pyramid. The bondage gear fishman who has a complete fishhead so you 100% understand he's a fishman. Lobster mommy saluting the troops. It's just….it's what dreams are made of.

So I'm already in love with this module, deeply and irrationally in love with it, before breaking the cover. If you're BORING you might prefer the later Jim Roslof cover art that's got lame things like technical proficiency. Ugh. The shit I have to put up with.

Anyway, there's a lot to talk about with D2! It's a lot of firsts for an official TSR product, and critically it's a lot of GOOD firsts.

It's the debut of the Kuo-Toa, one of the most fun groups of people in D&D! It's the first module that doesn't presume the enemy will be inherently aggressive! It's got a lot of negotiation and learning! The only good type of gnomes debuts with the Svirfneblin! This model of "alien settlement where you are not instantly attacked but you gotta learn the social rules and play along" is just the best. This will be done again in U2 and I adore U2. Yeah it's how it feels to go to a different country, especially one that doesn't speak your language, and just have everything be a little "off" compared to what you're used to, but. To me, it will always be The Autistic Experience. How well and quickly can you learn these bizarro social rules you can't intuit and what's the fewest number of whacks to the head it takes to get there? How long can you swallow your complaints when you see stuff that's obviously cruel, but the people around you don't perceive it as cruel anymore because it's The Way Things Are and they will actively defend the cruelty of it?

Ok, ok, back to your regularly scheduled program.

Gary starts off this week's festivities by telling you to be toxic to your players:

Sometimes it feels like there's three Garys in a trenchcoat and they take turns writing the modules.

So D2 starts in the cave at the immediate end of D1 and, let me derail already by saying that I really, really hate old-style hex maps. I cannot follow them -- I don't mean I don't understand how you're supposed to follow them, I mean it's nearly impossible for me to follow the diagonal to the destination. Your coordinate here is R20. Here is your map. Follow the 20 axis diagonally upward and rightward until you intersect with the R row. Can you do it?

Personally, I can't. My eye cannot follow that straight line, it will get lost in the mix of blank identical hexes and occasional interest objects. I sat here trying to follow it for 5 minutes and I couldn't do it. I need a straightedge to do it. The correct answer is that if you follow the light blue area from the bottom right towards the top left, it's the hex up and left of the fourth fully black hex you run into -- the leftmost of the two touching black hexes. I tested this against a few guinea pigs and no-one else could mange it either. Later we will admit defeat and that this axial coordinate system for hexmaps is, uh, really fucking bad, and replace it with offset coordinates (or even better, double coordinates) which more closely resemble normal cartesian coordinates, and by extension are not Eye Strain Central. They have the downside of different eyestrain (tiny font) and that you literally cannot fit as many hexes on the page, but the point of a graphic is to communicate information and the axial coordinate hexmap is bad at that unless you're playing on a huge table with like, two DM screens.

Yes this rant should've gone in D1, mea culpa. In my defense, D1-2 is, basically one module in two parts, they're not really separable.

Here's the coordinate lined out for you, since I imagine many of you have the same issue:

So, now that I have a headache trying to read, we can get to the actual text of the adventure again. Now keep in mind that max movement rate is 1 hex per 1 inch of movement for the slowest member of the party (so like, your guy wearing platemail has 60ft of movement, 10ft to the inch: 6 hexes per day). This means you could hypothetically arrive at the final location as quickly as 22/6=4 days of gameplay, 3 if no one including hirelings wore plate. That is, if you beelined to D2 by sheer luck, never got lost, never got distracted, never got slowed down, never had to take a rest day. Which is good because the food in The Depths seems questionable.

The first segment of the adventure is mostly reprinted from D1 -- random tables and maps and the like. We do get the addition of everyone's favorite early DND trope: a slavery table! And also happilly we get some goopy guys to move your eyes away from that shit:

Which, is a lot more my speed. More goopy guys. It's a roper, actually, although I frankly didn't recognize it. It looks more like the monster from Dexter's Lab? Apparently Ropers have changed a lot in the last 50 years.

So it's all random tables teasing that we're going to end up arriving at a shrine soon. There is a special entry in the back for the new Kuo-Toa and Svirfneblin, and oddly the Svirfneblin don't get a header? We don't learn much. We know that they're natural elemental summoners, that they're "natural fighters", and that they live at some unstated cave somewhere. They like their stun gas darts, they "communicate with racial empathy" (which I guess means body language?) outside their own domains, deep gnomish at home, and underworld cant when they're trading, plus earth elemental-ese. So they learn a lot as kids. They love them some traps, too, basically they're the gnomish Rambos and I love them for it.

Meanwhile, our titular Kuo-Toa get a pretty standard write-up. Driven underground, human sacrifice, raiders, like their war parties. Their priests like their mancatchers, which are based on lobster claws, they spawn in pools, they can spontaneously generate lightning by holding hands (???), are too slippery to grab, can see both infrared AND ultraviolent, can see you moving through basically any magical means, immune to poison, paralysis, charming, sleep, and are resistant to magic missile and lightning. This is, very very weird. They are wildly powerful compared to their later versions, and the only upshot is that they're readily blinded by light spells. Apparently they go insane with such regularity that they have a dedicated social role to controlling or killing the crazed? Yeah these people are a piece of work.

We get a little setpiece moment here where, essentially, there's a rogue kuo-toa who will offer you a trip across the river for 10g. He only speaks kuo-toa and he'll sicc his giant fish on you if you don't say yes fast enough. In fact, a lot of ink is spilled on this little moment, which in all likelihood will be a brief conversation and some passing of money.

Before you get into the shrine proper, some svirfneblin offer to help you in the shrine if you go halfsies on treasure (with almost that exact wordchoice).

Finally, we end up in the shrine proper, which is keyed so let us enter Keyed Mode ™️

The whole area is lit by glow-in-the-dark lichens, which is a spooky way to reveal the lobster lady idol up on the pyramid

While the party can choose to politely integrate into the crowd and play along, there's lots of little things to harass them into nonconformity. Leeches, horrifying offerings, offerings of increasing amount, having to correctly pronounce nonsense names (Blibdoolpoolp????????), holding a live lobster, it's a good bit.

You can, in fact, visit the goddess, who will give you a boon (if you give an offering) or a geas (if you don't), which also grants you kuo-toa speech and also a mark of loyalty, which is neat. You can also encounter her if you fuck around in the prince's treasure room, so the odds of meeting her are actually pretty good! Note that this is pre-"Kuo-Toa believe their gods into existence" so in this case they are worshipping a (hypothetically) permanent, naturally-occurring deity. Being that this is 1e and she is a she, she is Extremely Naked. She is later called The Mother of Lusts, which is one hell of a title.

If you fail to get the priest-prince when you meet him, he actually has a pretty rock-solid escape plan and will come back with an army. So, probably whack him if possible. I really like when antagonists have the sense to piss off and come back armed, rather than pridefully stand and die. You get the sense that Va-Guulgh is priest-prince because he plans contingencies like this, whereas other Kuo-Toa simply vibe. That being said, the Kuo-Toa are apparently not equipped for a search, so it's pretty easy to ditch them.

Sigh.

We do not have a dramatic declaration of THE END anymore, which is a terrible shame. We instead get a more reasonable "This is the end of the section."

The magic of D2 is more in the play and less in the overview. Like, look at this map:

This is a pretty naturalistic map. This is just how you'd arrange a major structure, rather than the kind of nonsense layouts you see in a lot of early dungeons. I don't put much stock in "Gygaxian Naturalism", I think Gary presented pretty intensely game-y spaces and they only seemed naturalistic by 1970s published product standards, but nonetheless he was paving the way compared to some of the silliness you got in pre-G1 modules. This map is good, I think, in that it becomes super extremely obvious to the players from the moment you enter that they extremely do not want to provoke a full alarm -- this is a shrine where you want to kill as few Kuo-Toa as you can, and as many of those as you can behind closed-doors -- it's time to straight up bail if the alarm goes off because you are not beating the hundreds of guys here if you you provoke them up front.

We end with some rust monster art, my favorite monster that I never use because I think I'd get shanked if I did. See you next time in D3!

#1e #chronotsr #dnd #dungeons and dragons #tsr #ttrpg #adnd

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soulmuppet · 7 months

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Gangs of Titan City

by Nick Spence

[Print & PDF]

Gangs of Titan City puts you in control of a gang of desperate outcasts fighting for survival. You’ll start out as a small fish in a very big and murky pond and steadily wrestle control of more of the city away from not only your gangland rivals, but also the institutions that want to crush you.

Make big plays and seize what you want, then deal with the fallout of your actions. You’ll find yourself pressed in on all sides whether it’s other gangs, corrupt authorities or deadly mutants. How will you handle the pressure? What price will you pay, what sacrifices will you make to stay ahead?

Gangs of Titan City uses simple and flexible 2d6 design to be intuitive and fast moving. The dice provide tools to players and The Narrator to craft compelling stories about gangs who claw their way to towering heights and sometimes fall to terrifying depths. The game comes with a toolbox of gang archetypes, gang member playbooks, rules for arcane and unknowable tech, sector hexmap generation tools and a rogue’s gallery to cautiously deal and ferociously battle with.

Drawing inspiration from a wide range of sources, Gangs of Titan City is a game for anyone who loves grimdark cyberpunk, dystopian futures, or criminal stories of rise and fall. If you’re a fan of Necromunda, Fallout, Judge Dredd & 2000AD, Borderlands, Altered Carbon, Blade Runner, Mad Max or Mos Eisley stories, then this is a game for you.

#ttrpg #ttrpg community #tabletop #indie ttrpg #ttrpgs #rpg #osr #cyberpunk #grimdark #necromunda #mad max

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teecupangel · 8 months

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Here's the map that Desmond sees in chapter 2 of Möbius

(made with Hexmap creator)

#ac fic: moebius

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self-loving-vampire · 6 months

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I found a cool peninsula map in an old magazine I have in my TTRPG library (Dungeon issue #84 if you want to know) and then overlaid a grid on top using Wonderdraft for use as a fantasy sandbox hexmap.

I had to make the original image less opaque since I could not find a way to just move the grid to the layer on top of the imported image but still. Eager to populate this with stuff.

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illogarithmil · 2 months

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Rotes as Revision: Byzantine Kingship Rituals

So I am very TTRPG-brained and have a bad habit of letting it distract me from uni-work - as in "ah, the essay's due in tomorrow, I have time to make a 60x60 hexmap and populate it with encounters!" However, I'm also very 'tism-brained and so if I don't think about my beloved special interest I will simply Cease Being Productive Entirely.

A way I have recently been testing of getting around this is making TTRPG content based on whatever I'm studying at the time! One significant example, a mage game set in Northern Ireland about a plot by gnostic paramilitaries to create a new Celtic realm by utilizing the awakened spirit of a long-dead Pharoah, is a WIP at the moment, but whilst I put down my dissertation on Loyalist groups in the Troubles to focus on some essays about the Late Antique middle east for a bit, I thought I'd knock out something quick for that.

I therefore present: a Mage rote inspired by the artistic and cultural displays of dominion made use of by Eastern Roman and Sasanian emperors in their interactions with each other, though definitely applicable to circumstances outside of that! This is all heavily inspired by Matthew P. Canepa's The Two Eyes of the Earth: Art and Ritual Kingship between Rome and Sasanian Iran, an excellent book you should read if you're remotely interested in the pre-Islamic Middle East, early Iranian or early Byzantine history from either a political or cultural perspective. There are two more I have ideas for (Ritual Humiliation [Entropy 5, with optional Prime 4/Time 4] and Prestige-Garnering Warfare [Prime 3 with optional Mind 2]), but also this post has been sitting in my drafts for three weeks with only the first written so I may never get to them. Alas, the fickle butterfly of inspiration settles but briefly!

Paradigms:

Iconographic Authority (Mind 5 [crude form] or Prime 4/Mind 2+ and 10+ points of Quintessence [standard form])

The representation of the ruler, given as a gift, seems to take on the aspect and dignity of the ruler themself, carrying the sense of their presence far beyond them. Though this might conjure images of paranoia-wracked cults of personality to some, its effects can also be highly desirable - for example, the sense that a neighbouring ruler is literally present in one's court projects an image of one's power and of mutual respect without the expense or stress of continuous visits.

Common Practices: Art of Desire, Craftwork, Dominion*, Faith*, Reality Hacking Common Instruments: As part of the crafting process: Artwork*, Management and HR*; As the object itself: Artwork*, Books and Periodicals, Cups and Vessels*, Gems and Stones, Money and Wealth, Sacred Iconography, Symbols*, Weapons; As part of the gifting ceremony: Blessings and curses*, Dances and movement, Drugs and poisons, Eye contact, Fashion*, Food and drink*, Group rites*, Money and wealth*, Music*, Offerings and sacrifices, Prayers and invocations*, Sacred iconography, Social domination*, True names (titles)*, Voice and vocalizations* * appropriate for the inspiring period of Byzantine-Sasanian interactions

The mage themselves or, more likely, some of their servants craft an item representing them - usually but not necessarily a literal depiction (if it is more abstract then the difficulty should increase by +1 to +3 depending on how directly and specifically the symbols used refer to the Mage). It is then handed over in a special ceremony to another individual, as part of which they are likely showered with other gifts and luxuries. This ceremony will usually be protracted, allowing for ritual casting, though of course extremely long castings risk wearing the target's patience thin.

For the crude form, four+ successes are required, with additional successes being used to extend duration (which means that in reality, 8 are probably the minimum to make the rote useful - see the Duration chart in the M20 core book). For the duration, the target's subconscious mind is altered so that they constantly feel as though the giver of the gift is physically present with them and behave appropriately - for example, avoiding acting against them in any way that would be obvious to somebody stood in the room alongside them.

In the standard form, the item is instead a Wonder - see the rules for crafting wonders - with Arete 2 (or more if more Quintessence is invested during crafting), imbued with a Mind 2 effect which it uses on every creature that observes it, beginning with the creature gifted it. This effect projects the mental impression of the presence of the giver quite directly - it is, for targets, as if the item were literally the giver. It will first roll arete after a minute of observation, then ten minutes, then once per hour a target is in its presence, beginning by accumulating nine successes against the target (at which point its effect on them is indefinite and automatic, taking effect whenever they are in its presence until the Wonder is destroyed) and then targeting other creatures, giving one creature the impression for one scene per three successes. It does not suffer the penalty for juggling multiple effects, being very specifically designed to do so.

The effect (and the effect of the Wonder in the standard case) is only vulgar in regions without a tradition of representative artwork, or at least without one of ruler-representation as a means of projecting authority. Both forms are somewhat difficult to detect as being alien impositions rather than natural reactions, requiring at least Mind 2 or (in the standard case) a Prime-based examination of the object itself.

#mage the ascension #world of darkness #ttrpg #mtas #mage rotes

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thecurioustale · 2 months

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Curious Tale Mapmaking

On Sunday I finally made the fist visual representation of the City of Sele, the city-state under the Sheer in Relance and the nucleus and origin point of Vardas Gala. I have been writing war stories from survivors of the Hero's invasion, which has necessitated the use of locational details.

After having haphazardly and very slowly collected details on the lay of Sele over just more than a decade, it was finally getting to the point where I was worried about forgetting things I had already creating, superimposing separate locations geographically, and otherwise creating continuity errors in general.

What I have done here is obviously about as primitive as a map can get; it's purely for my own personal reference but I thought it might also be interesting to some of you. Most of these locations are not mentioned in the Prelude, but readers of that work will recognize some of them.

This is an unfinished map, both in the sense that the empty areas are largely yet to be filled in rather than being actually empty and in the sense that (some) existing locations are subject to change. It is also subject to relative error: The Butter Bowl District (home to Crawler's Mouth i.e. the entrance to the Perse Hollows) is explicitly listed in my notes as encompassing the intersection of the city's north–south and west–east meridians, but on this map it is skewed north. And the size of the text on the map also forces some error; for instance, the Academy actually sits mainly on Student Ridge. There are also errors of angularity: Not everything is as neatly laid out west-to-east and north-to-south as this map implies. This will all be corrected in published canonical works.

In terms of its actual, in-world urban development, Sele is more developed in the north and the west than in the south and the east. The north–south axis in particular is strongly correlated with population density, though of course the central districts are the most populous of all. This is because the city generally began in the north, along the Cliffs of Raglan. The Fortress of Galadrim took many years to build but it was a construction site from the very beginning and its placement was indeed the entire reason the city was built at this location along the Shos Plateau. The Academy was built early on too, creating a southwest–northwest axis between the two that saw the earliest and most intense development. For many years following that, development focused in the northwestern direction, filling out the available space east of the World-Facing Palisades, until finally that space was used up and the city began to build southward, culminating in Southtown and only very recently just beginning to fill out the eastern and southeastern marches. (In fact, the southeast quadrant of the map actually is very sparsely developed and not just empty because I haven't conceived and named many of its locations yet.)

The many "ridges" you see referenced, along with the "palisades" westering the city, are the result of Landstorm topography. The entire Sourran Landstorm in the east of the world (which is also where Ieik was located) is an extreme high-elevation (generally about 11,000 feet above sea level, give or take several thousand feet) series of plateaus. You can think of it as a tiled gaming board, like a chessboard or a D&D hexmap (except the tiles are all of irregular shape and varying size), where each tile is a relatively flat expanse of land called a finger. All of the fingers are at essentially random elevations relative to one another, creating oftentimes impassable escarpments or even sheer cliffs. Galan relanceworks (i.e. earthworks) have transformed some of these boundaries into developable hills. The "ridges" on the map may therefore refer to: 1) impassable escarpments between fingers; 2) sloping hillsides either built by relanceworks or, rarely, naturally-occurring; or 3) high-elevation fingers relative to the rest of the city. Some ridges are a combination or two or more of these features.

I spent quite a lot of effort combing through my notes, manuscript text, and unplaced scenes to capture hopefully all of the various named areas within Sele. If I missed any, the number is very small and these locations might be able to be squeezed into the map later.

I also had the chance to create and name new locations, and finally give names to previously established but unnamed locations. This map reflects most of that work, although there is considerably more development in the northwest and central-southwest areas than this map implies. Also, immediately west of Galadrim is a large works area: yards and warehouses and staging grounds and so forth, mainly in service of the Fortress. The city plan calls for this area to eventually be mostly converted to residential use.

I am already making inferences about various characters based on where they live in the city, so in that regard alone this map is already a help.

Speaking of things you might have expected that I would have done a long time ago, on Saturday I wrote the preliminary text treatments on another two of the Twelve Powers of Junction in my canonical document on that subject, following the serendipitous discovery that I had actually conceived and named the Fifth Power all the way back in a Curious Tale Saturdays article in 2018! I had completely forgotten about this and only rediscovered it due to my research for writing those war stories. The Twelve Powers are the foundations of reality and are the primary source of "magic" in the world, and so are important to the story in numerous ways. Writing up a treatment of the Fifth Power wasn't hard since I'd already mostly done it in 2018, and then I went ahead and wrote the Eleventh Power treatment to give a home to one of the Nine Clouds I have named in Chapter 1 of ATH and link some related concepts together under one umbrella. (Each Power, in excess, generates an associated waste Cloud; don't ask why the numbers don't match.) This brings the total number of named Powers to seven and the number of Powers with treatments to six—meaning I'm halfway there!

One of the reasons I haven't done things like fully flesh out worldbuilding control documents like the Sele Map or the Twelve Powers overview is that generally I am wary of the premature concrete-pouring that can happen with top-down designs. I don't want to use up all the space in Sele in case I want to place something else later that I presently haven't created. Same thing with the Twelve Powers: They have a number so I can't just go tacking on more; there are twelve of them and that's it. I want to leave some open space.

This is a balancing act, because the concrete that I do pour almost immediately becomes a productive foundation for further worldbuilding. This is an induced demand problem: The more worldbuilding I set in stone, the more free space I need to set future worldbuilding. In open-ended domains where I have deliberately kept the topological boundaries vague, this is no problem: I can add more and more to my heart's desire. But sometimes the topology must eventually be locked in, as in the case of Sele here where I am describing military actions that occurred in the city. Once it's set, changing this stuff later is a nightmare, so I will almost always work around and within it. Therefore it does become useful, I find, to do this stuff in spurts, which is why I am comfortable with more or less locking down so much of the lay of Sele in just one weekend after having let it glacially agglomerate over more than ten years.

I also got a lot of actual ATH manuscript writing done this weekend, and created two new named characters!

#The Curious Tale #After The Hero #Worldbuilding #Fantasy maps #Topological maps #City of Sele #Powers of Junction #Sourran Landstorm

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