I understand that it's surprising that I'm able to make publisher work at all with maps of this size. A typical publisher file runs somewhere in the area of 150 to 1000 KB. After a few tests last night, I'm confident that I could probably create files up to 75,000 KB, though I shouldn't have to. I'm playing around with the benefits of this computer that I'm working on now. My friend (he built the computer) demonstrated that it indeed has a ram of 32 GB, so all my publisher files run faster now than they did. Those who give a $3 monthly donation on my patreon should find a pdf of a map on my site that I posted back in May 2022, rendered in 150dpi. The pdf is somewhat better than the version blogger allowed. Unfortunately, it was still to big to render in 300dpi. We can't have everything.
I had to re-teach myself how to make maps the way I stopped doing in February last year. Then, I got interested in working on the Streetvendor's Guide so I put those things down. 11 months is a long time to leave off on a project ... and there were a few glitches as I forgot how to do certain steps. I stepped back about four months on the S.G. also, working on editing and the index for a time, as I was really stuck and blocked with the clothing section (now solved). In the same way, coming back to serious researching and designing original content also involved the same re-learning curve that I experienced last night with the maps. The reader can guess from the title that this is the subject of this post. I promise, I'm going to come back around to character building soon.
No matter what sort of game preparation or worldbuilding we want to do, there are four stages of learning that we must overcome: (a) what do I want to achieve; (b) how do I achieve it; (c) how can I systematise what I want so that I can standardise the achievement; (d) how do I maintain trust and enthusiasm for the system?
For most, (a) is assumed to be the way the company does it, or even better, the way that a given creator did it once upon a time. Rather than breaking new ground in the creation of a dungeon, for example, it seems easiest to follow TSR's method dating back to KOTB or White Plume Mountain. This, at the same time, gives an answer to (b), as it's fairly plain that by drawing the dungeon this way, providing details of the rooms in this way, and ending the adventure how the template does it, more or less solves (b).
The real leap is (c). This asks us not just to create one dungeon or one adventure, but to build a framework that tells us how to create and design multiple adventures that all fit the same general motif ... especially so that when we want to create a new adventure, we already know from the frame what adventure needs to be made next, and in what manner, that fills out our grand design.
The value of this is sometimes difficult to convey to the lay creator. For a time, one that varies in length depending on the creator, the "freedom" of being able to do whatever seems good at the time beckons — and any infringement on that freedom is viewed with disdain or even hostility. I remember being in that headspace, until late in my 20s. "I'll just work on whatever seems good right now," was my thinking ... and I hear the echo of that from all sorts of writers, craftspersons, musicians and couples sorting out their marriages all the time. "A plan? A plan is what we make when we want to make God laugh."
The result, however, is a lot of wasted work that never sees the light of day, and the bitter exposure of too many failures. I count all that in my past as a valuable learning experience. No books or meaningful content came out of those years, but I did practice writing a lot. And I did haul around a lot of that writing until I was forced to throw it out in self-defense. Making a plan for the work we do isn't a straight-jacket; if that's how it feels, then we've either made the wrong plan, or we're still working through ambivalences about doing work. A plan is an assurance that we're using our time well. That everything we do has value. That our vision has greater scope that "what feels good right now." The pyramids cannot be built frivolously. Or when the workers feel like it. Truly monumental things need a monumental vision.
Therefore, progressing from (b), what we want, to (c), how do we get it, is a tremendous alteration in our thinking as creators. It transforms what we want from, "We want what Arneson wanted," to, "We want to be better than Arneson." That realisation has the effect of demoting our "hero" to our "mentor" ... though obviously my mentor isn't Arneson. This transformation is positive; I'm quite sure that Arneson also wanted to be better than Arneson.
Being better means we can't just copy any more. The template we've worked from isn't enough. What's needed is a new template. That's the crux of (c). We're not just making scenes and places and characters now; it isn't just a bunch of parts that are shelved like books, ready to be pulled out individually and used. We're moving from parts to a machine, one that incorporates the books as instrumentation, so that before we have to think about what part we need, the "machine" puts that part automatically in front of us. Once the machine is built, we'll know how to turn it on, we'll know how to feed in data, and we'll get a result for that data ... but all the middle part ceases to exist for us, even if we're the ones that built the middle part.
I'll try this as a simple metaphor. Let's say, we learn how to make a toaster and we go through the rigamarole to build the thing from scratch. We design the components and assemble them painstakingly, fitting them this way and that, until we end with a working toaster. And like any toaster, it works by putting bread in the top, pushing a button down and waiting for the bread to pop up.
After all that work, we can forget all about the machine itself. We get up in the morning, put our toast in while thinking about the day ahead, get our toast out and butter it, eat and move on. There's no need at all to think about the toaster itself any more. Oh, sure, if the toaster breaks, we can fix it. But thinking through all the middle part is discarded. The toaster works. It saves us time. We can go and do other things.
My methodology for making maps is like the toaster. I have a series of steps that I go through that can be done mostly without my needing to decide anything. I do this, I do that, I follow each step, and presto, map. No time is wasted wondering if this is working, or if it's put together right, or if the toast is going to taste good. All that's been sorted. The only cost is some of my time, which I can give when I don't feel especially creative and I just want to churn out some product. It's more valuable than my spending time playing a video game, while providing about the same level of immersion.
(d) is the least esoteric about the above. (c) is hard to envision because (d), having enthusiasm for the method, seems for most of us to be impossible. As an example, I'll use my friend and I.T. guy. Here's a brilliant, capable fellow, has endless knowledge of computer systems ... and like most of his type, has the expected server bank in his basement that would probably let him manage a satellite, if he could get one in space. He stores my authentic wiki on it, as well as content for a wide number of other users. This is one reason why I don't need to worry about someone trying to hack my wiki. They'd have to hack him — and I wouldn't recommend it.
But he can't stop fiddling with things. He and I have talked about it, and it's not a unique habit among his type. For the most part, he's not improving anything ... he's just finding different ways to do the thing he's already doing. Most of the time, this fails completely, and he has to make repairs to bring it back to where it was. I'm certain he likes this process. The effect is, however, that for all his ability, he follows his industry; he doesn't lead it.
Of course, there's no reason he should. I only bring this up as a metaphor because there are far more dungeon masters in the world who are intentionally breaking their game worlds than making them. They can perceive (c) for a time, building the "game toaster" as it were, but in the end they can't just let it be a toaster. Though it works fine, they're always taking the toaster apart and fixing something that doesn't need to be fixed ... and though they spend an enormous amount of time doing this, in the end it never does more than make toast. Meanwhile, the food processor doesn't exist at all.
Returning to my map-creating system this week, I felt zero inclination to "rebuild it and make it better." I tried publisher on Office 365, it didn't work, I obtained my old publisher program on the new system and the thing I wanted to do was make a map in the same old way. The results speak for themselves. What's not understood, however, is the results don't happen if I'm not able to quiet the inner voice saying, they could be better. Maybe they could. But I don't want to get bogged down in (c). I want to trust my system, and maintain my enthusiasm. Then things get done.
I do this by reminding myself for a time that however complicated or difficult this seems at present, I'm practicing. I'm giving my trust to the system and letting myself adapt to it. Take the Streetvendor's Guide and the manner in which clothing is discussed. One serious problem came in describing a specific item of clothing — say, a tunic. A medieval-Renaissance tunic is what we'd call a shirt. It has many different shapes and forms, and can be made in every cloth under the rainbow. My guide provides descriptions for thirty cloth varieties. If I give space in the guide to every possible make of tunic, I won't have space for all of the clothes that are available. Plus, this is a problem that's going to come up when I have wooden items can can be made of twenty kinds of wood, or metal items that can be made with twenty kinds of metal.
I had to step back and think about how to manage this. Tunics appear in every part of the world, but they're not made of the same cloth in every part of the world. Most clothing made in north temperate climates, speaking for the time period and not post-Industrial times, are made of wool. North temperate describes Britain, Scandinavia, the Baltic Lands and Russia. Even colder climates require furs, and that's a whole section separate from cloth.
Most clothing made in south temperate climates — France, Germany, northern Italy, the Slavic lands, Russia in the summer — is made of linen. That made in subtropical lands — Ottoman, Persian, South Asian — is made of cotton. And where silk is common, certain kinds of clothing are made from that. I realised that the solution was to define what the tunic was in different parts of the world ... and then give the name for that thing as it's given in different parts of the world. Thus, if we want to price a cotton tunic, it doesn't have a European name because at the time, it wasn't made in Europe. A cotton tunic is a gomlek or a kurta; a linen tunic is a cotte, as it was called in those parts of the world where it was worn — and it's longer than a tunic, reaching to the knees. A silk tunic is a hanfu. The finished list looks very odd to the Western eye, but it's accurate. All I need do is provide rules (which was always intended) to teach the reader how to price a cotton hanfu, or a woolen cotte, or a linen tunic, if that's what they want.
But I'm not used to this thinking. It's taken time to bang my brain into thinking in this format, using items whose names are utterly unfamiliar to me. Pursuing them, describing them, I can recall each item being worn in various films. The Chinese emperor at the end of Mulan is wearing a "changshan," though I wouldn't have known that's what it was called without this work.
To get used to this, to think in this frame, I have to practice at it. And reassure myself that with patience and familiarity, it'll come naturally. I have faith that it will, because I've been here before with difficult things and it always does. But if we don't stick with it; if we don't wrestle through it for as many weeks or months that it takes, we don't get any practice at practicing things ... and we never learn how to beat the learning curve. For anything.
I adapt more quickly than most because I've forced myself to adapt many times. The first few times is a real bitch. This is what I was doing in the late 80s, as I started to pursue problems like trade and deeper worldbuilding into my game system. Took 15 years to codify my trade system. Yet I've accomplished 85 pages on the Streetvendor's Guide in just 7 months (discounting my time off to think).
I remind myself that it took something like 30+ people to put together Tasha's Cauldron, with text equal to about half the size of my proposed Guide. I'm doing all the writing for this by myself, with one artist for support. There's just the two of us. It took the company something like two years to produce Tasha's dreck. If it takes me until next January to finish the Guide, I'll have accomplished a miracle.
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