Learning is a Lifetime Endeavor

As promised in a previous post I have switched gears into illustrating sections of sewers for use in an adventure I am working on for White Haired Man. In this particular case I am developing a section of sewer that exists under the City of Warten where action, and encounters may occur. I prefer to draw my maps with Adobe Illustrator for many reasons, but the main one is how crisp the artwork remains despite scaling to smaller or larger sizes.

I have run into a small dilemma using Adobe Illustrator for this purpose. The software has undergone significant changes since I've last used it for developing map work. So as I jump into developing a concept for a location, I find that I have options that could improve my line artwork in a way that makes the lines look more organically drawn. I embrace learning new techniques such as this. Imagine a line drawn in Illustrator. It is straight, clean and unblemished, in fact it is a "perfect" line.



What I have discovered is that I can adjust the stroke such that it can be thicker or thinner on either side. 

By adjusting the width of the stroke, a feature that only became available in CS 5, I can make my lines appear more hand drawn. Not only that, but I can save these small sections of 'wavyness' as profiles for use on other lines in the future. I am always looking for ways to improve my workflow process and learning how to incorporate this technique has been at the heart of my work today.

To fully understand my interest I must share that I started using Adobe Illustrator when it was in its third version, or CS 3. Through my college years I adapted to CS 4 and CS 5, CS 5.5, and even CS 6. Now I design with a subscription called Adobe Creative Cloud and the current version is Adobe Illustrator CC 2020. Even though I have a long history of use with the software I am continually learning more features, some of which are pretty obscure like the one I am describing above. I wish I had discovered it earlier, but I think we learn what we need, when we need it for the most part.

I suspect that many technical fields that rely upon software go through this same struggle to keep up and master their tools. Taking it further, anything in life is worth doing well if you are to do it at all. Embrace the changes and the time you invest into honing your craft. It is time well spent.

Deadend Processes

I am deep into the project of design work for a map that showcases the fictional City of Warten for a current White Haired Man Design project. Recently, I suffered a setback where I chose to design with Adobe Illustrator and then port the work into my iPad device for work with Adobe Draw. I chose to do this because soon I have a surgery and I don't think I will be able to sit at my typical design station using my desktop computer. After a day or two of work, I ported the work back into Adobe Illustrator, only to find that my design was stripped of its layers, forcing all artwork into a single layer. This is not a major issue when working with vectors that are simple and have clean line work. However, my work had tiny areas that depicted side streets and frankly I could not get the software to break apart the sections without losing details. This was a frustrating dead end.

My next thought was to go back to the original file and start over and keep my work in Adobe Illustrator. Anyone who understands the difference between vector and raster image qualities, knows that designs in Illustrator can be scaled from the size of a grain of rice all the way up to sides of buildings and anywhere in between without loss of image quality. In other words the image won't blur or become 'pixelated.' However, the trade off is that you can't really paint with brushes as you would in Photoshop.

This led me to another attempt at process change. I ported my work over into Photoshop, thinking, I could utilize a homemade brush to create the feel of a city block randomly, without having to draw in every last building. Then when I was very satisfied with the look of the map I ported it back over into Adobe Illustrator, hoping that the large size of the file would allow me to extract and render it into vector format successfully...Failure! What a colossal use of time for no appreciable results. I am still left with a city that has only vague lines for walls.

I discussed this with Dave and he provided me with sagely advice, "Why don't you set it aside and work on something else so you can get some success under your belt?" So, I plan on doing just that today. I am going to switch gears and create a floor plan of a section of sewer for use in our adventure.

The takeaway's I offer for other business owners who find themselves at a dead end is to not give up. Keep trying until you find a way forward that is right. Don't shortcut you or your customers with something that is not right. After all, if owning a business were easy everyone would do it. So my advice is to just keep trying, and be patient with yourself. Allow time for failures and dead ends. You will learn from them and your offering will become that much better, or at the very least not as poor as it might have been.

On a personal note I found myself having a great time playing a new addition to my board game collection: Star Wars Rebellion. After two full, four player games over the last three days I can share that the 3-4 hour per game timeframe was not our experience. Rather, our games were lasting 7 and 8 hours apiece, which had to broken across Friday-Saturday, and then Saturday-Sunday.

I loved the experience of playing on both sides in different games as well. The first time I played the Rebels against the Empire. Holy crap it was so bleak, almost everything we did ended in further loss of territory and units. Yet, it had these 'cinematic' moments that were such fun and ultimately we managed to coax out a victory for the Rebels by biding for time. Then I played the Empire and felt the overwhelming power of materials and systems under my jackboot. Having played the Rebels the first time around, I angled my Empire to deprive the Rebels of advantages I had taken hold of before. In the end it was a crushing victory for the Empire! Both sides felt the struggle, and it was real and intense feeling. Aside from the long play time I give this game a huge thumbs up, even though the rules could use better organization. Having to decipher how to do things between two booklets and online search forays was not enjoyable. Fortunately my group was patient.

One final note. The plastic comes in light gray for Rebel units, and dark gray for the Empire. I added a Citidel Paints product, 'Nuln Oil' as a wash, to make them look better. After all who can resist painting 153 miniatures in a weekend...and now it's time to go back to work!

Birthing the City of Warten

This past week has included continued work on painting miniatures from Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu. The Shoggoths are now finished. I have also continued my work on preparing for an upcoming surgery to remove cancer from my body. I don't have a date yet for this surgery, but based upon the tests and feedback from professionals, it is looking like sometime in the next 1 to 3 weeks. Finally, I've also begun crafting a city to be central in a new adventure being created by White Haired Man.

I've started and restarted crafting the City of Warten three times now. Each new iteration gets me closer to the vision of White Haired Man's author, Dave. Our last discussion was spirited as I had developed a very detail rich test version of part of the city using Inkarnate. Inkarnate is a fantasy map-making tool that may be found at inkarnate.com. After using this software for about a week, I found it to be difficult to manage to use for city creation. It could be done, but, I reckon many of the assets used to do so, would need to be self-created. There are also no existing tools for creating lines or shapes that I could easily use to begin crafting so called city blocks. Now, I'd rather not flame this tool, as I found it likely that it would excel at regional area maps of a game world. Just not good at city creation at this time. Feel free to contact me with examples of cities made with Inkarnate to show me the error of my ways!

So, this past week I returned to Adobe Illustrator to begin blocking out sections of the city. Old original growth, second city growth, waterfront, the spire, and what lies beyond the walls of the the second city growth. What I have so far is just that, a rough concept map which I will share.

Blue is the water, brown is waterfront and at roughly sea level as the water. Red represents the old growth areas of The Spire, an island where the founders built the government seat and the older section of town that was built behind a sturdy stone wall. Note that both of these areas are to be 60' above the level of the water, thus creating a sharp cliff facing the water, and waterfront areas.

The second growth of the city came later and is also adorned with a more modern stone wall with regular towers set into it. This area is roughly the same height as the older section of town. Everything outside in green either does not fit due to current levels of population, or is simply unwanted.

With this stage approved, it is time to develop more details of this map. I use Illustrator for this so that I can hone into an area later and "blow" it up larger for creating more details. Perhaps a very small section within the city, etc.

For those of you who have skill at this type of endeavor, maybe you would be willing to share something of your process. I am always looking to learn more about creating fictional maps, as well as about the process others employ!

Myriad Methods Distilled

Dave and I decided to fire up White Haired Man from its 5 year hiatus a little over a month ago. During this time we have carefully considered our past products, formats, and the methods we used to create them. This was an important process for us as one of the primary reasons we drifted off to sleep was producing our adventure into many formats. So, imagine writing 50 to 88 page adventures, chock full of art, and careful consideration of trade dress all produced together into a beautiful digital product in the format of a PDF. Now, the PDF requires extensive work to have it more useful via links.

 Then another format would be to take all the raw files and reproduce it into a format usable in Fantasy Grounds, an online multiplayer roleplaying platform. This platform also required tweaking with XML programming, similar to HTML, yet different. All the artwork would have to be properly sized for this new format, often edited heavily for use. The maps and floor plans in particular were a nightmare to convert. Fantasy Grounds also needed digital artwork tokens that would be used to represent our horrors, creatures, NPCs, etc. Whew, sounds exhausting.

But wait there's more! All of that work discussed above only covered the OGL version of rules. We thought at the time that having our work available for other rule systems would be ideal. Maybe it was for customers...but, for us it meant editing the original content to conform to a wholly new set of in game rules. We sought out a license to become a Savage Worlds third party publisher. After meeting in person at GenCon in 2008, White Haired Man was granted permission to publish for Savage Worlds.With this license in hand we reproduced our adventures into a format suitable for Savage Worlds rules. Then, all of the previously mentioned work needed to be performed again. Create and modify PDF. Create Fantasy Grounds format, then edit carefully in XML.

When we set out to create adventures we needed a place for them to call home. So we created a backwater swamp area known as Kith'takharos. Each adventure we produced in a series of five adventures added more background, npcs, lore, etc to the setting. Such in fact that after we had published all five adventures we were able to create a sixth product for just the setting itself. These adventures were written to be played either as a self contained adventure, or they could be hung together and run as a series of adventures with enough setting to be a full fledged campaign.

We considered all of this extra work to produce alternate formats and frankly, we almost threw in the towel. However, we have the experience of editing our adventures, why not simply edit the way we approach this area of our business. With that in mind we have decided to move forward and produce an adventure in a new setting with the working title "The Warten Confederacy." This time around we plan to build up the setting organically as we did before. So, the first adventure will reveal enough of "The Warten Confederacy," as needed to run the adventure. As before we are creating our setting in a way that it may simple be added into a GM's existing world, wherever a coastal city may be located. This should make it easy for a GM to 'shoe-horn' in our work, while preserving the overall touch and feel of their own self-created world.

Other GM's may use our adventure products to run our adventures in a series of loosely connected adventures, adopting our world as their own. Either method works, and we believe GM's will appreciate the choice.

Lastly, we do not plan to 'port' over our work into myriads of formats. We are planning to produce shorter, more concise 32 page (plus or minus) adventures exclusively for Savage Worlds in PDF format only. We will sell our products through DriveThruRPG.com. We have no plans to produce a website at this time, yet another time saver. If we decide to do anything web related it will be to point to DriveThruRPG and have our customers buy through them. I am thinking of creating and running digital marketing campaign's. This free's us of the obligation of maintaining a website with commerce abilities, along with being responsible for our customers identity and credit card data.

The only area we are not sure how best to address is marketing. How do you let others know that you have a product available? We don't know all the answers. What we do know is that this blog will hopefully attract others who may have an interest in RPG adventure products. If you are reading this, you are that person!

We are also discussing a proper Kickstarter campaign to launch our product. This will allow us to gauge interest in the form of a group of people willing to invest money into our product, and help us to execute the final push for hiring artists and polishing an already written and designed adventure.

What else can we do to increase our audience? What have you done to increase your audience, reach, sales, etc. How do you market for your small start up? Follow this blog by adding your email, you'll be notified as each article is published. Feel free to respond to any and all articles, or like a previous response, present me with what you would like to know more about. I will do what I can to respond in kind.

Soon I will be back at making the City of Warten into a map usable for an upcoming adventure we are writing/designing. But not before continuing on with a personal miniature painting project for Pandemic: Reign of Cthulu.