Help Flood Victims by Watching them Die and Robbing the Corpse

If you like dark irony* then check out the Harvey Relief Bundle on RPG.NOW by clicking the image below;

Because Deep Carbon Observatory, the scrappily-produced but well-reviewed adventure module from Scrap Princess and Patrick Stuart, which starts with a terrifying flood, is part of this charity bundle, dedicated to helping victims of a terrifying flood.

There are also lots and lots and lots of other things in there, I think Hydra Co-Op has like almost all their stuff in it.

Or, ripped from Zaks reddit; "Dark of Hot Springs Island--gorgeously laid out open hexcrawl with competing factions, brilliant information design and gobs of creativity.

Slumbering Ursine Dunes, Mystery Isles of the Eld and a bunch more trippy stuff from Hydra--I've played in some of these and they're a blast

I Am Zombie Field Manual--this book is gorgeous, the art is embarassingly good. The bundle is worth it for this alone, by Vampire creator Mark Rein-Hagen.

One of the best, weirdest OSR zines (Vacant Ritual Assembly)...

....and wayyyyy more stuff."

*Also if you like, you know, charity and helping people or whatever. But that sounds less fun.

A Report on the Titan Diamonds

The Titans lying beneath Wir-Heal are quasi-living multidimensional hyper-intelligences from an unimaginably distant future.

Their 'minds' are actually curled up inside specifically-created low-entropy folded dimensions; almost impossible to destroy.

They do, however, require material hyper-technology to interface with 'real space' and operate the Titans systems and bodies, to 'wake up'. Without that technology they are simply isolated minds living at light speed in realities constructed entirely from their own thoughts (and the influence of whatever theoretical beings might be able to penetrate or effect such a space).

So the 'machinery' in a Titans 'brain' is actually a form of highly sophisticated receiver combined with complex and semi-intelligent cybernetic processes that allow control of the Titans physical forms.

Sending the Titans 'to sleep' meant disabling, or altering the function of this machinery. That could only be done by inflicting massive stress on its elaborate ego-defence systems. The nature of this stress needed to be both physical and ontological, attacking the Titans embodied structure and its 'will to resist', its capacity and desire to fulfil what it thinks its programming intends. This extended and chaotic process is referred to as the Titanomachy.

But this machinery has elements of nanotech, with their own, low-level semi-autonomous repair systems. Even in an extremely low-energy environment, these systems will try to re-build and fulfil their design.

The effects of this regeneration will mean three things;

Firstly; an increased, but chaotic and uncontrollable, interaction between the folded spaces where the Titans 'mind' is stored, and this reality, leading to partial and fragmentary 'fold-overs' of the two dimensions.

Secondly; increased activity of the Titans self-repair, self-defence or primary-function systems. Many of these functions themselves involve partial time/space folding and micro-reality collapses, either for the purpose of energy generation, importing active agents from secure dimensional mothballing, or as tactical elements pursuing the Titans functions and aims.

Thirdly; massive and irregular chronal backwash related from the Titans forcible insertion into this time and reality. Since they are hugely and irreversibly 'out of time' and, possibly, also out of space, the fracture damage of their original incursion remains and, like scar tissue being twisted and teased by the shifting of shrapnel under the skin, any increased Titan activity will produce multidimensional spiderweb distortions in the immediate environment.

  

Preventing This

The last-stage, low-tech backup elements of the Titans ego machines make a great deal of use of a pure carbon lattice and of gold. To the human eye, these would seem to be fractally complex diamonds containing elaborate helices’ of pure gold.

Because of the heavy elements involved in their creation, even the nanotech of the Titans repair systems cannot rebuild them quickly, especially in a low-energy, high-entropy environment. It takes several centuries, or even millennia, for a meaningful stage of Ego-Machine to be developed.

It would be enormously helpful and useful if, at this point, some random humanoid barged into the titans reality-adjacent control interface space and vandalised it in the crudest possible way; literally ripping the backup ego machines out of the control cluster before carting them off and exchanging them for goods and services.

In human terms; somebody beat the shit out of these giant robots, now they are in a coma, but they are trying to wake up.

If you can get in their brain and rip out their thoughts you can stop this happening.

Their thoughts are also money.

The Gems Themselves

The Nanotech inside a Titans Ego-Machine stays active, but with nothing to connect to, its self-repair drives are meaningless. The result of this is that individuals who commonly wear Titan-Diamonds close to their skin often find that a delicate and hyper-complex web-work or tracery of gold infiltrates their epidermis like a gold tattoo.

The gold is pure and non-reactive and this web-work is simply the equivalent of an auto-repair system infiltrating an alien environment, so the effects are harmless, 99.9999999% of the time.

In very rare instances some individuals wearing Titan Diamonds for long periods, and perhaps having some pre-existing capacity, may experience marginal and drifting interface with the Titans extra-dimensional intelligence, although a single diamond, and a single individual, could never provide enough processing power enough for a Titan to incarnate more than the smallest fraction of its self-awareness, even if it wished to.

HSI - The Guide & an Interview with Jacob Hurst

The thing you can mention to people, and thing which I in fact did mention to people at Gen Con while I was shilling it, the 'unique feature' about Hot Springs Island is that it has its own guide book.

That is; it has a guide book, written in the 'voice' of the campaign, as if it were an object that the PC's themselves found or came into contact with, and one you can hand directly to the players in the same way.

I was going to talk more about this but Jacobs answers to my questions were more interesting than anything I was going to write anyway so here you go....




THE DENSITY & FULLNESS OF THE GUIDE

Patrick - "There is a LOT more info in the Guide than the Dark - deliberate or maybe design oversight? If they are not familiar with the setting then I can imagine the DM saying "Hold on, pass me that guide...""

Jacob Hurst - "Kind of a design oversight I guess. The Dark was going to have a set page count of 192 for always because it was apparently a good page count for paper math with 8.5x11 pages. I don't know if this is actually true, but I'd seen a number of 192 page sketch books that were that size so I believed it.

Then I ran out of room.

If it's info I consider to be important it's in the dark.

Part of it too was to give the players the monster manual, and see what happens.

At gen con Zak broke open my awareness of myself when he was selling my books to people saying approximately "no one does this (the field guide)! Ever have a player who says oh that's an ochre jelly and it's weak against blah blah at the table, well this may or be true."

And I realized then, that that was me. I was that person who consumed the monster manual and knew all the weaknesses and then when playing I was "ruining" the game with my "out of game knowledge". And I would always get so mad, because who gives a fuck if everyone knows Trolls are weak against fire?

And after Zak said that stuff it made me think more, and I think that the problem is that the rpg business system is inherently broken.

Lets look at a multi-player video game. Everyone who plays buys a copy of the game. If there are 10 people playing a map, then 10 copies of the game have been sold.

With table top rpgs, if 6 people are playing, only 1 person is allowed to buy the game, because if the players buy and read the module or setting or whatever then they know all the secrets and "spoil" it (for themselves and potentially everyone else).

The field guide attempts to give everyone the fun info, but NOT the spoilers.

I still don't think that knowing Trolls are weak against fire can ruin a game, but I can now understand how that knowledge can enable players to pass through content at a rate much faster than a DM expects. So when they only prepped to the troll encounter and that was supposed to be the "final battle of the night" and you breezed through it in 5 minutes, it takes the wind out of their sails. And it's not really anyone's fault but the adventure creators who didn't give the DM tools to roll with variable "content consumption" speeds.

Now I may have

..........................

Now I may have totally failed at that, but that was the intended goal.

Regarding the DM asking to see the book, they might. They absolutely might. But they may also just smile and say "sure, go ahead and do that."

The parts of the field guide that aren't true aren't exactly defined, and the DM gets to decide.

For example, I didn't want any undead on the islands. In the FG under the shadows it says "These creatures are not undead and cannot be turned by pleas to the devine." for me, that's true. But when Donnie runs, he treats them as undead, and well... That's OK. Far as I'm concerned that's intended. "



PLAYERS USING THE GUIDE BOOK

Patrick - "Also, tell me more about the reactions of new players to the Guide Book, what did they do?"

Jacob Hurst - "Now, about the Field Guide. We played and tested the island a lot with people we know. We had done it a little with people we don't know, but we hadn't really had the "full field guide experience" 'till Gen Con, and it worked amazingly well. I'm even going to go so far as to say unexpectedly well.

When Donnie ran the games, the Field Guide would be found, as a treasure item, on a corpse. And then he'd slide the book onto the table. It's some beautiful theatrics really.

The player's viscerally know that it's important, because well I mean... here it is, on the fucking table in front of them right now. And it looks pretty nice. But in the game world it was on a corpse so you know... there's danger associated with it.

Because it's physically limited only one person can really be looking at it at a time, unless two or more human beings get physically close to one another. So the person with the book tends to become the "caller" at the table, or the "right hand man" of the caller at the table. Or the book gets passed around (again, physical interaction).

So when you have a table of total strangers, who are strangers to each other (like at Gen Con), it's fucking magic. Because it breaks the ice. They now have a reason to interact with each other both in game and out of game, and it's a semi-structured interaction because of the limitations of book being shared (both in and out of game).

"Wizard what IS that thing?!?!"

The main thing they all did with the information in the book itself was to identify and weaponize stuff. Which I mean... is the whole point!

One group had been sent to find the elusive Kujibird. They saw sleeping ivy in the book, and then decided to look for that plant, so they could then use it to catch the bird if they found it.

Basically we gave them a "goal" on the island, and then they'd use the information in the Field Guide to effectively plan their adventure.

One group was dropped off at the elven ruins with the mission of recovering elven artifacts, but they knew the ruined city was fucking dangerous, so they decided to not go to it, and go elsewhere. Because they knew there were other locations out there where they could accomplish their mission, even if they didn't exactly know where they were. So they fumbled around and found the Lapis Observatory instead of dying in the ruins of Hot Springs City.

Frequently too, the person holding the book would end up reading pieces of entries out loud to the group.

It really did work better than I'd hoped it would.



THE PLANTS

Patrick - "Who did the plants? They are quire botanically sophisticated, in a way rare to see in a D&D products and the en-culturation or the specificity of their processing and use is often quite complex as well..."

Jacob Hurst - Regarding the plants: Everything with Hot Springs Island began collaboratively. Having a whole section devoted to plants was my idea though, and I did the heavy lifting for them. When the 4 of us brainstormed up plants, my guidelines were "all of the plants need to do something. Even if that something is relatively mundane (e.g., 'they're fucking delicious')."

And from there we spitballed up the majority of their core attributes.

We also did some backwards, such as the peppers. And now I'm going to go on a contextual tangent.

One of my personal core ideas for Swordfish Islands was that I wanted a person to be able to play a birdwatcher. Or a "exploration oriented scientist from the Age of Discovery". Which obviously doesn't translate well into your standard fantasy faire. But I used to play Ultima Online (a lot) (Great Lakes shard), and in UO, when you opened a person's character window, there was a small scroll off to one side where you could write your character backstory. I made so many jokes with my friends that they were all the same: "My parents were killed when I was young and so I was raised an orphan on the hard streets of Britain/Trinsic/Moonglow/major city. I did what I had to do to survive and now I want revenge. Death to orcs! blah blah blah."

I've also tried to run numerous games of D&D where the players are super adamant about coming up with "elaborate" character backstories that can then be "woven into" the game. And then... they give me two pages of backstory that's basically the same shit I saw in UO (i.e., boring and nothing to work with). But if your game is totally combat oriented (4e) then can you blame them for gravitating in that direction?

So my whole thing was: Swordfish Islands needs to be a place where you can have a hell of a good time and never have any combat, but it's still an RPG, and deadly and full of treasure and problems. And the real problem needs to be, not finding treasure and interesting things, but making it off the island with them in one piece. A problem of "abundance".

And this is the place from which the plants really came from. I was super obsessed with the idea of making a random bird generator so you could, for example, be a wizard who's life dream was to catch a glimpse of this elusive bird rumored to have been seen on the islands. But doing the generator the way I wanted was going to be stupidly hard, and ultimately pretty boring. So I went with plants.

I love plants. We always had gardens growing up (flowers at my house and vegetables at my grandparents). I was an Eagle Scout in Boy Scouts and for my Eagle Project I "wildscaped" an area in a local park (planted native plants that local animals like). And Poison Ivy is my favorite Batman villain.

Also, around the time we started on all this, I was really into the idea that when the Spanish conquered the "New World" and started bringing back all this gold and silver, they basically destroyed their (and everyone elses) economy due to inflation.

So I combined these and said: Let's come up with plants that do something, and some should have the potential to totally, and utterly fuck up your game world (like Jelly Moss).

But to get back to the backwards peppers, we came up with Blindfire vine first. A plant monster that eats you and turns your body into delicious fruit, but because I'm from Texas it was like... let's do spicy peppers! Spicy peppers are so much better than fruit 'cause you can eat them, AND weaponize them (thank you capsaicin!). And my grandpa always competed in chili cookoffs... hey guys, what if on the main island there's an annual(?) chili cookoff, and so they send adventurers to the island to collect the best tasting and hottest peppers? Ok well we should have some other peppers that aren't on a monster plant, but maybe they're only found on the island with active volcanoes 'cause you know... lava/heat/peppers?

And so cachuga peppers on Hot Springs Island were born. A sandbox hook that can be weaponized by creative individuals.

Jelly Moss was a "hey guys, what about a slime mold? Those look fucking cool. Wanna draw something like this Gabe? Fuck yeah! Ok... what does it do? Well they're slimy obviously, slime is sticky... so glue? Good good, but bigger? What if the glue is so good it works as well as nails. Oh that's fantastic. Especially for a fantasy type world where nails are having to be hammered out individually by hand. Dude.. that could totally fuck up an economy 'cause it'd put all these blacksmiths out of work. And their guild would be pissed and paying people to stop that from happening, but the carpenter's guild would probably love it and be paying on the other side. Hahaha yes... ship it!"

------------------------
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Regarding "Botanically sophisticated", well, I cheated. Once we knew what all the plants were, and we knew what they did, I got a bunch of sciency books, and looked for the ways in which plants were described that seemed in line with the plants we had,. I sorted all my plants by type (bush, tree, grass, etc) and then flipped and read and was like "ooooo, vaguely pyramidal, that's a cool fucking phrase". Yoink!

This brings us to another aside. Photography is a bane to doing things this way. If you pick up a field guide now a days on plants or animals, what you typically find is a beautiful glossy picture of the plant or animal and its name. There's no written description, or if there is it's either the most basic shit. All the space devoted to writing now is devoted to what the thing does or how it lives because photography "solved" the what does it look like problem.

So if you want to do this, you have to find books about plants and animals from the time before cheap photography/color printing. If you're really lucky you can find some books from the 1950s-1970s where they publishers were still providing the detailed written physical descriptions AND nice images. But these are rare.

Also, the internet is pure fucking garbage for doing this. And it's all really interesting to me. Like... it's the most amazing time to raise a kid ever right now and yet lacking. My mother got my son a subscription to a kids nature magazine. There was a "find these animals on this page, in the big picture on that page." One of the animals was an eastern meadowlark. So I immediately pulled up a video of an eastern meadowlark singing so my kid could hear it. This is amazing. The number 1 question my kid asks when I'm on my phone is "What are you finding for me?" which is wonderful. And yet, at the same time... we're poorer in a way because I can find this meadowlark song, but I'm not really equipped to process and recommunicate it. How do I describe the song? I don't know. But I can send you a link so you can experience it yourself.

This all sort of ties into that "what the fuck does an elephant look like?" thing that Scrap(?) was sharing the other day with drawings of elephants over time by people who'd never actually seen an elephant.

And all this, imo, is really important when it comes to writing fantasy stuff because no one has seen these creatures or plants or places that don't exist. And as we become more and more reliant upon pictures and recordings and whatnot, I think that it may become harder and harder for people to describe their worlds because they've never had to do it.

[gets down off soap box] Thanks for listening to that.


As usual - SHOP IS HERE.

Hot Springs Island - How We Roll

OK, lets look at the information and the way its actually intended to work.

........................

Exploration

Hexes are only 2 miles across (I originally thought they were larger)

Time/exploration and movement are unified.

• 1 watch is four hours.
• 1 watch to cross a hex
• 1 watch to explore a hex - finding the next available point of interest.
• Each hex has three points of interest - one obvious, the other two you have to find or be guided to.

The entrances to a number of dungeons are within one of these secondary or tertiary points of interest, which PC's will find either by exploration or by being sucked into the network of NPC interactions

There is a recommended tabletop poker-chip method for recording time which looks like it would work reasonably well.


.................................

Homie be rollin'

There is EXTENSIVE use of multiple tables to provide complex situational results, so this is intended to be not just an adventure zone, but a multiply-explored place. All the tables work on a 3d6-read-across principal, one table usually leads you to another, or to a re-roll on this one.

I think you're meant to encounter something pretty much every watch and pretty much every journey, the complexity and depth of the encounter tables seems to recommend this.

Lets give it a go, assuming I roll a 10 every time - we'll have a look at what comes out and how many rolls there are;

Ok, lets say the PCs are in light jungle (there are seven types, Light, Heavy and Mountainous Jungle, Volcano, Volcan*ic*, Ruins and Villiage. Most rolls are going to be some kind of jungle.

Roll 1 - They encounter a beast of some kind, go to the beast table.

Roll 2 - (Look for the 'Light Jungle' column, becasue the Beast table itself is subdivided into area types) - they encounter a Giant Centipede.

Roll 3 - What's it up to? It's in Combat.

Roll 4 - What with? Lets say we roll an 11 this time. Its in combat with a Boar.

Depending on how dangerous we judge a giant centipede to be, we may be encountering more than one. Theres a random number generation here thing as well, which takes us to;

Roll 5 - How many Centipedes? 10 means d4

Roll 6 - The d4 rolls 2.

BUT - if we look in the back there are three different kinds of Centipede with different poison effects, so I suppose we can just choose one if we like.

.................................

Homie Be Flippin'

Every individual hex has its own most-common encounter table embedded in it with motivation and numbers table included.

The main encounter table page also has pretty much everything you will be needing to generate an encounter, so you will be flippin' either once, or not at all.

This is meant to be small
and deliberately a bit out of focus
so you can't just yank the page info.

Its also pretty obvious that for everything in the island, it has a range of stuff that it is doing and relatively little of that includes specifically-looking-for-the-PCs-to-fight-them.

But another big element of this is that, whether you are running it from the book or from a tablet, you will still need a second, self-designed document, as a monster manual because none of these things have stats.

If you are running old-school then it should be relatively simple to string together some hit points and AC's. The book itself gives you good general information about any special effects, enough to run them descriptively.

If you want to run it in 5e then the aesthetic is normie enough that you can yank most templates easily out of the Monster Manual and add or change whatever you need to. But you are probably going to need to actually do that and create a little sub-monster-manual for yourself and run the creatures out of that.

The quasi-Normie aesthetic is probably another reason that WotC will be interested in it. It's not full-on Hipster D&D edgelord dream-vision bullshit like you would get from certain recent darkly handsome yet still somehow single award winners.

.................................

Roll Deep?

Once you get used to it, the main encounter table is, I would guess, if you involve the players in rolling dice and giving you results, about 60 seconds or more work each time, and you are probably combining that with a 'point of interest' (it is, effectively, a pointcrawl).

For every table a meaningful number of the more-common results mean one encounter effectively interacting with another.

(One is 'defecating', so nice to see that included for once.)

Also there's nothing to say what to do when you roll a second encounter and that tells you to roll another encounter. Realistically you would just link them up but it would be fun to go full-Aspergers and just keep adding guys.

This is from page 5;

"This is, absolutely, a lot of rolling. Because of this, digital maps are available so you can roll everything up by touching the party's current location on a computer, phone or tablet."

> Has anyone tested these? Leave a comment below or on G+ if you have.

The more I read this and think about it the more likely I think it is that WotC will probably contact Jacob, either to license it or to consult with him on a App or something. HSI is designed to be workable without any digital or phone element, but if you have the app or the digital file then it is going to squat out a complex situation quite neatly, so it works both ways. And I think, for various reasons, WotC really wants you to have an app on your phone and this would be a good way to get you there; release the new splatbook and it either comes with a free app or you get a free update to your current WotC app to run it.

Thinking about how people use apps on their phone, an app-per-product probably makes more sense, though I think the company would probably prefer one main one. Though there is no reason you couldn't have a main WotC app that governs the rest and you download and delete your others based on what you buy & what you are using.

................................

Dungeons

All of this is just for 'outside' encounters. The 'Dungeon' encounters have their own sub-system, also based on nested 3d6 rolls.

You start with an opening 'Whats Happening' table, which effectively gives you a meta-story

So you always (usually) have the map on the same page as the tables and the key, that's good.

Like the outdoors encoutner tables, the dungeon tables have a range of results from different factions. Unlike the outdoor ones, you are (usually, probably) going to be rolling a whole range of results and this means most dungeons will be a network of interconnected, sometimes opposing, elements, with the range of potential motivations blurring the lines between monster/animal and NPC.

And again this is a relatively heavy rolling system, though nowhere near as heavy as the outdoor system. But becasue the results can be so complex, there might occasionally be a handful of problems with integration, probably nothing that a decent DM can't fudge.


.............................


The logic of the tables, the explorability of the island, the multiple points per hex, the multiple factions, animal groups and the whole thing really meshes in the central encounter tables. If you are not into these then you will only be buying the book to tear it apart and it isn't the best suited to that. Though if you do want to buy it to tear it apart then there is a LOT of stuff in it.

So at this point readers are thinking either; "Nope. This rolls too deep for me.", "This is how I roll" or "I might roll with you."

If its either of the second two; read on into the next post.


SHOP IS HERE.

Aspects of the 'Texas'-Style Layout in Hot Springs Island

(Advance warning; the OSR situation of people who already know each other well and like each others stuff 'reviewing' each others books is in even more effect here. Not only do I know Jacob reasonably well but I am featured in the book quite a bit.)



PATRICK, WHAT IS THE "TEXAS STYLE"?

Well it's Jacobs layout style but I'm calling it the 'Texas Style' so that it sounds cooler, like part of a movement rather than just some wierd guy, and because it makes it easier to sell it to Americans. Who wouldn't want 'Texas Style' RPG's?



WHAT MAKES UP THIS FRESHLY-IMAGINED STYLE?


Well to start with its monochrome, so maybe we should call it 'Texas Monochrome', which sounds a bit more pretentious.

Everything in the book except the bookmark is black and white. Writing is by Jacob Hurst, Evan Peterson, Donnie Garcia and I have a few fragments in there as well. There are pieces of art by Scrap and Cecil Howe and a really fun map by Jason Thompson but almost everything is by Gabriel Hernandez.

There are a few Gabriel Hernandez's online, it's this Gabriel Hernandez;

https://www.instagram.com/worthyenemies/
http://worthyenemies.bigcartel.com/

All of the maps are by Billy Longino;

https://plus.google.com/+BillyLongino
https://megadungeoncomic.wordpress.com/

The ovverriding aesthetic is provided by Jacobs layout, Gabriels art, (and there is a LOT of art, it's on almost every page), and Billy Longinos map, and that aesthetic is unified, repeated and tight.


By Book

Five staggered book sections, four easily observable in this image;

The fifth - the short quick reference section, the only part with all-black borders;

The other four;

- Hex Key.

- Maps and events.

- Factions.

- Appendixes.

Every page of the book has this near-corner white-on-black (cubes again) page numbering.



By Page and Spread

HSI is broken down very tightly by spread so, unlike some other books, it becomes reasonable to regard the page and spread as essentially a unified element.

A few initial noticable things;

- Regular semi-asymmetry.

Pages are always meta-stable over sections. So for the hex key, the encounter tables, mini-map and sensory descriptive words are always in the same place, the primary hex information is also always in the same place, and the next two hexes vary in their arrangement, slightly, along with their ordering and assumed direction of reading, but tend to keep to a narrow range of general patterning.


- Lots of use of negative space.

What this means for later pages is that large primary titles almost never sacrifice font size for page width, instead, a big chunk, maybe a top quarter of the left page, is kept white-space and the only thing there is the spread heading and the words of the spread heading descend down in a step formation if they need to, rather than being shrunk.

Again, this is meta-stable, rather than exactly the same each time. The spatial logic of the arrangment; where you look to begin with, the assumed size of the text, the relative proportions of white to black, all remain the same but the exact arrangement of each individual page/spread shifts depending on the needs of the adventure.


- Deep image integration.

Images are ink I think, either integrated into the text layout or, on opening sections, bursting across one or more pages, some of the images that have been 'blown up' are actually the more powerful, to me anyway, they are scratchyer and less fine.

Jacob - "The only real art direction I ever provided for Gabe was that I wanted everything to be "unfinished" and "sketchy". All his illustrations were done in pencil and you can still see a lot of the lines that would normally be erased for a "finished" piece. He kinda hated this at first, but I think he grew to love it (or he pretended well). The big metaphysical reasoning for this was that I have found that oftentimes I like the sketches that came before a finished piece more than I like the finished piece. And I think it's because you can oftentimes see ways in which the piece could have gone, but didn't go. So you kind of see more of the artist's thought process, and you can see the potential of the thing. Since SFI is a sandbox, it's all potential and no finished product, so I thought sketchy art would work for it on many different levels. It'd be faster, cheaper, and yet it would also hopefully help people focus on or at least notice "potential". "

And again, imagery on almost every page. More on this below.



- Black-block-white-text info-titles for rapid inter-referrability.

You could even say that the book is built primarily around its inter-reliability, with the Hex Key being a more immediate source of information than the map.



The Visual Hierarchy


Kings and Queens

The 'King' of the page us usually the big, block, left-page (usually) main titles with a solid fraction of land space given up to pure negative space purely for them to float in.

The 'Queen' is the art. So a page awareness experience goes back and forth between 'hard', precise, inter-referable information and soft interpretive information.

This is a very classic HSI image/text integration.

This logic is repeated again in terms of use with the map, becoming crowned on the dungeon pages. This is now the 'hard' information, and the text of the encounter and 'whats happening' chart becoming variable active and interpretive.

These look a bit yellow as I'm taking them at night.

Jacob - "The one page dungeon contest was a big influence on my stuff. I thought it was a neat idea, but thought a single spread was better than a single page (because it's a book not a digital thing)."


So if you follow this, possibly absurd. line of analysis, the dungeon pages and perhaps the section opening pages and spreads are 'feminine' with the image dominating and leading the experience and the text responding, and the other pages are more 'masculine' with the text providing the through-line and the image both soaking up the inferred and auto-generated mental static and reflecting it; a mirror of art if you will.


Page Princes

White-on-black elements - often white text in a black cube, givng the white information its own negative-negative space, these are both 'flip to' (all the page numbers are like this, and as mentioned below, the exact positioning of the numbers shifts depending on the section of the book) and 'flip within' elements, as in you use them to find the page you need and to find the place in that page you were looking for.

On dungeon spreads the page princes are the map/key room and section numbers.


Page Peasants

Textural churls, all the nitty little titles and sub-headings that do all the hard work. Here we have a range of smaller titles, paragraph separation and bolding.

The dungeon pages go down a level below this with a cognitive pulse of bolded and light bracketed text, an attempt to merge the 'opening room description/objects' elements with the 'I investigate closer' elements, in the same linear paragraph.

I'm probably going to talk more about this in a series of posts as there is quite a lot to talk about. After taking care of the basic elements of the style I'll look more at how it works, the imagined sequence of play and at the imaginative elements. I'll have more questions for Jacob and we can also look at how the Field Guide and main book interact.

(Oh and you can buy the whole thing here.)

A Daytrip to Bastions Canal District

Was lucky enough recently to grab a free daytrip to the Canal District of Chris McDowall's Bastion.

Not the game. The real, actual place.

First a stay at the charming Station Hotel;

Then a quick stroll through a series of concrete tunnels;

Before finally arriving at the coast. 

It was certainly day-tripper weather;

The place was full of charming follies & adornments;

The world-famous canal-boats were in fine fettle;

Arranged in all their glory;

I was lucky enough to get a look inside some local homes;

They were full of modern amenities;

The most up-to-date "Mod Cons"

Academic achievements on display;

The phone box was locked, presumably for safety;

People may claim that Bastions Canal District has seen better days..

But as you can clearly observe here..

Things can only get better!

A boat of yester-year here on display.

Some tools of the boat-painters art.

An artefact retrieved from.. somewhere.

Some more of the boat-painters-art. Based on real castles?

I can absolutely confirm that everything about the Canal District is;

"Healthily active, mildly adventurous and abounding in interest."

Unfortunately, all good things come to an end, and it was time to say goodbye!