Meme-Free Zone

Playing with some more effects and different pictures, mostly by frostfox - think I'm beginning to get better results. I'm starting to think in terms of a collage of a lot of different coins for the cover, rather than all the same, so none of this is entirely wasted effort.

I hope.

( Read more... )

Later - added another Great Sea Serpent variant

This will mostly make sense to beta readers who saw the worldbook and rules section.

I'm making some changes which will basically make it easier to split into three books - a sourcebook, game rules, and adventures. I will need to make this split with the HTML version, it's going to be big enough to slow some browsers to a crawl as a single file; the PDF version won't be a problem that way but people may want to print it out, and having the ability to easily split it this way will be useful - make two or three copies of the rules for players and referee, since that's the bit people will use most, a worldbook or two for referee and players, and one copy of the adventures for the referee. I realised when I thought of this that some bits of the rules section worked better if moved to the worldbook, and I've now done so. There are also some other changes.

The changes are:

• There's an extra page at the end of the "international affairs" chapter which expands a little on the canal scheme mentioned there and the reasons for it, when I've finished it will incorporate another adventure outline. This isn't something you've seen before, but it happened to fit well there.
• The section on money, currency and prices has been revised slightly and moved from the rules to the end of the section describing Tiamath's economy.
• The material on Yarge society and fashions etc, their personalities and the sidebar on Dragon Slayers has been moved to the end of the sourcebook section on Yarge.
• Recommended reading and the four pages of cutout dragons and Yarge have also been moved to the end of the sourcebook.
• The rules are more or less unchanged but I've cut the "Animal, Vegetable, Mineral" part (pgs 74-5) completely - it's mostly irrelevant to this setting and there will be stats for some of the things mentioned in the adventures.
• Magic has been moved to before the section on role playing
• The section on NPCs has been heavily cut, with the part about the Yarge moved to the worldbook. I'm still revising this, but it will probably end up at a page and a half or so.

That's about it for now - I'll be posting a revised PDF for beta readers in the next few days, once I've finished polishing the changes.

Here are the cover variants for the single-book and three-book versions of the Tooth and Claw RPG

I've changed the wording slightly on the three covers

Original cover - Roleplaying in the world of Jo Waltons World Fantasy Award winning novel.

Worldbook - Exploring the world of Jo Waltons... novel.
Rules - Roleplaying in the world of...
Adventures - Adventures in the world of...

There's a different coin motif for each cover - the original one is also used for the worldbook, the other two use two of frostfox's dragon pictures colorised and processed to look like coins. Think they work reasonably well.

( pictures )

I need to adjust the spacing slightly, but I think they look pretty good.

Later The more I look at this, the more I think I want to use the third coin pattern for the game as a whole, not the one I originally used. Any opinions?

I'm putting Forgotten Futures X together as a single PDF that'll be about 150 pages long excluding table of contents. That's quite a big book for a PDF. But it breaks down into three sections fairly easily. Excluding table of contents etc.:

Pages 1-34 describe the world of Tooth and Claw
Pages 35-94 are a rewrite of the game rules for dragons
Pages 95-whatever are the adventures

I may move a couple of things from the game rules to the worldbook part, but I'm still thinking about that.

The single volume approach is the way I want to go, since I'm pretty sure that writing hundreds of links from one PDF to a particular page in another will be a total pain, but I'm beginning to think that it may be a good idea to provide a separate file containing alternative covers and tables of contents for people who want to print it as three books. Does that seem a practical way to go? The cover logo would be

Forgotten Futures X - The Tooth and Claw Role Playing Game for all three, then author / artist information, then a different wording at the bottom for each:

The World of Jo Walton's World Fantasy Award winning novel for the worldbook
Roleplaying in the World of Jo Walton's World Fantasy Award winning novel for the rules (as the existing cover I've used as my icon)
Adventures in the World of Jo Walton's World Fantasy Award winning novel for the adventures

To keep things simple the page numbering would be 1-34 for the worldbook, 35-94 for rules, 95-whatever for adventures. I really don't want to have two different page numbers on each page or something!

Possibly a different cover illo for each too, though I'm not sure about that since I need to keep an eye on total file size.

I'll definitely split the HTML version into three files; no reason not to, and the full size document might slow some browsers to a crawl.

Anyone got any thoughts on this?

When I posted about the Blessed Jamanah's research project a few days ago I forgot to include a picture of the gentledragon in question. I had the picture then, now I've finally remembered to give him a hat, so here he is.



I should maybe say that this will be about half a page wide in the book, which ought to hide any imperfections that are visible in the high magnification view.

Just noticed an ad for a new partwork called something like "Myths and Monsters" coming out (I think) tomorrow. The first issue is cheaper than the rest, and comes with a red dragon figurine. No idea of size, unfortunately, but if they're biggish I might buy a couple for use with the Tooth and Claw game. Might be useful for other gamers, of course.

More scene-setting, this time for the country-cave mystery. I'm going to say more about the location etc. and residents, this is the start of an introduction which I hope explains a little about the history of the place, its current occupants, etc.

( Copper Caverns )

Does this seem OK? Bearing in mind that this is the introduction and contains stuff that will be more or less common knowledge, what else might someone want to see here? I'm going to add more about the rest of the family, and there will be more details of the location for the referee, of course.

Also, is "shop-soiled" or "shop-worn" more appropriate for this sort of association with commerce. Would it apply to publishing anyway?

Another stab at the copyright stuff, incorporating the Creative Commons bit etc. I really don't want it any bigger than this, it's already most of a page

( Read more... )

Later: As of about 12.30 AM on the 18th I've finished the first adventure for FF X and its epilogue, and will be sending them to Jo for approval shortly. Next the country cave mystery...

For the Tooth and Claw RPG:

If I describe a What-The-Butler-Saw machine "film" as "A Bollywood epic without sound and shown in one-minute segments" what comes to mind?

Following on from the comments on yesterday's post, this is what I'm going to put in the adventure:



Tiamath’s flag; in heraldic terms it is described as

Azure, a dragon rousant or, mountain of three peaks argent in base.

Or in more conventional language:

Blue (background), a dragon rising (gold) with a mountain of three peaks at the bottom coloured silver

There have been at least five previous versions of the flag, differing mainly in the position and size of the dragon. The history of these changes is a fascinating reflection of the history of Tiamath but, alas, outside the scope of the current work; see chapter XII of A Dragonet's History of Tiamath by the Blessed Jamanah for a good overview of the subject.

Does this look OK?

For anyone who is wondering, the Blessed Jamanah is one of Jo's inventions, a "writes loads of books for the kiddies" vicar with (presumably) an undemanding country parish and a lot of time on his claws. He may eventually become the Alfred Harmsworth of Tiamath and produce a dragonet's encyclopaedia if I want to put in a few more infodumps. In fact this gives me a very good idea for one of the other adventures...