Initial post on the new blog

I had a blog called Grindstonë Games in which I mostly cleaned up and posted stuff that had been sitting in an RPG folder on my laptop for some time. Stuff that was on my old Macintosh Classic and copied over again and again. Some of it was good, some was terrible, the blog helped me organize my thoughts on different RPG matters but it was nothing serious. 

When I created it I didn't see any other Grindstone's out there, then two years later I found a bunch of them. I don't know if my first search was badly executed or if they all sprung up in the mean time but the fact was they were out there and I didn't like sharing the name because that could mean potential confusion, which sucks so I went with Ruprecht's RPG Blog. Searching for Ruprecht mostly comes up with that weird Krampus or Knecht Ruprecht which is far enough removed I don't see a problem.

Since Blogger allows you to change the name of your Header but not the URL I felt the best course was to junk the old blog and start a new one and transfer the content. I'll clean up some of the stuff and repost it as pdfs, and delete some of the stuff, but basically its the same guy doing the same thing as before, except a little differently. 

Back on that other blog I tried to post something every weekday. I don't think I'll even try to do that. I had posts ready to go weeks ahead to time at some point but trying to keep up with deadlines creates stress, even on an amateur RPG blog, so I won't even set that goal.

I'm a big fan of Sergio Aragonés artwork and especially Groo the Wanderer. I've used Groo as my avatar for years when I post online and now I've put him on the masthead. I make no claims to the art and will replace it once I've gotten to drawing my own stuff. Photoshop has managed to really cripple my drawing skills over the years but I think it can all be reclaimed if I put the effort out. I'll post art here if I finish any.

So that's the story of the new blog. Stick around, I hope you like it.

For the Love of Maps

I need a break from cleaning up village maps and thought I'd do something slightly different.

I've always loved maps. When I went hiking as a kid I'd stare at the topomaps, when I went to Disneyland or another theme park I'd obsess over the map. I saw beauty in dungeon maps when I started playing Holmes back in the day and one of my first 'real' jobs was at a mapping company and I actually brought up D&D and the various maps during the interview.

When I was young I could draw pretty well, as the decades rolled on drawing morphed into photoshop and my hand-eye skills changed (I'm hoping to rebuild that skill with practice). So for most of the stuff on this site it's recycled Public Domain stuff from long, long, long ago.

Exterior maps are where I'm going with this, more specifically regional maps. I loved Darlenes map of Greyhawk so much I framed it and put it on my wall. It was a great large scale map with a sense of balance and beauty. I didn't like the slavish devotion to the hex standard though and it covered way to much area in insufficient detail but that was the DIY attitude of early TSR. Then I ran into Harn by Columbia games and their maps were amazing. Realistic but without going into the topo-lines that give me too much of a modern/sci-fi vibe. I framed Harn and put it up as well (and Ivania and others). But the kind of maps I found years later searching about on the internet were Hachure maps and Poetic Maps.

Hachure map

Hachure maps, are one of the earliest styles of topographical maps, before they settled on lines to show the vertical topography every x feet, instead they used lines that somewhat mimicked the verticals in a less accurate more stylized way. Although from post-renaissance in nature these maps feel they could have been drawn during the medieval period. They show most things without having to resort to symbols.

Poetic Maps (the term used by Columbia Games, I don't know the accurate name) date back even further. These are maps that draw out what you would see. They don't really need a legend as a hill looks like a hill, and a river like a river. The best known example would be the Middle Earth map. These can be hideous but I find most to be somewhat beautiful. Most maps created in the medieval period and the renaissance are Poetic maps. Most were done using metal etchings that could then be used to print books and occasionally they'd be colorized afterwards. The internet is full of badly colorized versions but the underlying maps are beautiful.

So doing my own maps I've been trying to settle on a style Ptolemy. Topographic maps were out as they were too modern. Harn style were difficult to get right, I'm too sloppy for that. I found a ton of Hachure maps and Poetic Maps and vacillate back and forth over which I prefer. It's likely I'll go with one style for one campaign world and the other for another, giving a very different feel to each. But which to spend time on now?

New Year, but not a year old yet

I re-read my Initial post from Feb last year and realized I said I'd publish maps and I really haven't done that. I've covered a lot of territory, some of it pretty dull stuff, some of it along the lines of thinking aloud. I think now it's time to start publishing a few maps.

I think I'll start with village maps. Back in the day I used Homlet (T1) and Orlane (N1) again and again whenever I needed a village. Then Harn came along and provided a dozen or so villages which was nice. Still, you can never have enough villages so I've decided I'll clean up a few real village maps I found, include a trio of NPC for each.

For the maps I'll use the footprints of 3-Bay Hall House, Open Hall House, Saxon Hovel, and an Open Hall house with Eves.

I expect I'll eventually publish the villages when I have 20 or so. At that point I'll add the interior maps to the things to create detailed GMs maps that I figure will be super-useful for GMs. It'll be somewhat like the City State of the Invincible Overlord. I'm not sure how I'll deal with upper stories. Upper stories aren't used that much but they'd be nice to have. Perhaps I'll draw up a few and number them, then I can indicate somehow which ones apply.

Also the question comes up about deities and temples. It's an impossible problem so I'll just make them generic. Cult of Law is a monotheistic diety which as the name indicates is Lawful and so I assume good at the sort of political maneuvering that eventually leads to them gaining power and displacing competition. Also the Old Faith which is more of a pantheon of the Celtic variety, that is one with a horde of deities handled by a single priesthood be they Druids or Priests. I refer to them as Priestesses throughout but all of this will be generic enough to be adapted as necessary.

About Ruprecht Part 2

I grew up drawing and writing a lot. The drawing led me to a graphic designer degree in University. The sad economy of the early 90s led me to taking jobs outside my field and I used the writing talents to become a technical writer.

My training as a graphic designer has led me to love good design. Good design, in my eyes means  the design should be understated and simple. It should not draw attention to itself but should serve the text. Common fonts should be used because there is nothing worse than a PDF bloated with extra fonts except a PDF without rare fonts that have to be downloaded by the user for things to display correct. I hate watermarked art on every page, art should serve as a mental bookmarks and shouldn't use up all the ink in your printer. Also art should have something to do with the accompanying text and should never cross over the text. When I see bad design in game books it makes me a little sad.

I would have provided graphic design work for free when I graduated and needed a job. Anything for the portfolio. I'm pretty sure there are designers out there now that would do the same. Yet bad design is everywhere. At some point I'll make a post with examples, but not here.

My day job as a technical writer is to take complicated information and format it and rearrange it to make it easy to follow.  That is another issue that role playing games seem to be somewhat poor at. Not just within a book but in deciding how to divide information into multiple books. Many games are beautiful but not organized well, others are organized very well but are horribly ugly. Again, some folks should hire a designer, and others should judge design on readability, not on cool, as cool fades with use and actually becomes annoying if it gets between you and what you need to find in the book.

Hopefully my training as a Graphic Designer and a Technical Writer will enable my fantasy heart breaker to clean and easy to use.

About Ruprecht Part 1

If anyone finds this blog sooner or later they may wonder who the hell is putting up all this amazing content. In that light...

I started role playing back in the early 80s when I was in middle school. My friend, we'll call him Simon, put together a simple dungeon and I was hooked. Before long we shared dungeon master duties but it wasn't long before I was doing most of the DMing. I was hooked.

We started off like idiots with a horrible monty haul campaign, we treated Deities & Demigods like a high powered Monster Manual. It was dumb fun. Then a friend of my brothers, we'll call him the Colonel, saw us playing and told us the game was better at low level (he wasn't a Colonel at the time by the way).

The Colonel joined our little merry band and we started over with 1st level characters fighting to progress. Then I discovered the glories of Harn, and RuneQuest, and eventually in University I started using HarnMaster for awhile as our game continued and I looked for a bit more gritty realism (a level of realism I no longer care for).

Along the way we shifted from dungeons to political adventures (the detailed Harnic Kingdoms seemed to excel at that). I re-skinned everything I could think of to create new and interesting adventures, I used novels, movies, comic books, whatever. I don't know if the players ever realized the origins of some of the re-skinning but I doubt it. It was all great fun.

I remember while at University a friend had a bunch of 2nd Edition games. I read through them and they didn't sit well. The big improvement was ascending AC but beyond that it seemed, well, bland. We'd moved on to RuneQuest and Harnmaster by then which probably colored my opinions more than a little.

Sometime after graduation the gang all went their separate ways and we stopped role playing while we scrambled for work in the sketchy economy of the early 90s.

I was unaware of 3E until I wandered into a Hobby Shop out of curiosity and saw Pathfinder which was freaking beautiful and caused a number of internet searches as I caught up to the history of the game and learned about the OSR and the SRD and to DrivethruRPG and all that, which led me to researching what happened to RuneQuest while I was gone and my discovery of Legend and OpenQuest and a full return into the hobby again.