Vastlands Guidebook Update & Thankful News

Dear Heroes, New and Old,

The Equipment Chapter. Final content form and nearly final layout. This is the format that's going to the editor ... uh ... next week. I've:

• Translated the entire section from lists to tables for easier scanning.

• Completed the customization and hallmark sections.

• Added quite a few new pieces of art.

• Tightened up the layout.

• Oh, and added chapter-specific footer art.

I meant to make this post much earlier last week, but now here we are, it's early Wednesday morning. So it goes! I hope to have another location just for the TSKNS hexcrawl later this week, but here I just want to talk a bit about equipment.

It feels like a really simple chapter, equipment. Just list some stuff. It's a ttrpg, yeah? Plop down some knives and sticks and guns and bows. Add five armors. A list of stuff to buy and you're good, yeah?

Well, yes and no. In many ways the equipment is an up close and tangible way for players to experience a setting, and with a setting like the Vastlands, well.

At the same time, as far as layout goes, it's ... a lot of playing around with tables to fit a lot of things onto not too many pages. I'm happier with my tables now than I used to be, but still.

Anyway, as I reviewed the equipment chapter it struck me that here was my opportunity to both spruce up (and clean out) this section in a way I had put off for too long, while also testing the layout I'd finalized for the OGA with the Green Land on the VLG. After all, no other chapter has this many tables - if there were any problems, I'd see them here.

Folks, little did I know.

Footer Art

I'm not going to go into all the details. I'll just talk about the footers (something I already ranted about in the stratometaship discord) ...

Footer art. I thought that was a great idea of Gontijo's, using my art to create decorations for the otherwise rather plain corner page numbers.

But I wanted this to be chapter specific, so the art would let you know where you where. This would be simple, I thought.

First, I set about drawing something to capture the idea ... the givinsphynx.

But it didn't feel quite right so I tried to draw it by hand.

And then I thought no, this isn't right so I tried to make it based off the OGA font ...

But it was too much, so I tried just the text ...

I even drew a mirrored  version to see what the whole spread might look like ...

... and frankly I thought it looked stupid.

I spent like eight hours trying to figure this thing out! And the more I worked on it, the worse it felt ... not to mention that trying to run the text into the bleed looked utterly terrible. It looked especially terrible after I printed out all these tries and looked at them off-screen

Eventually I figured out that I was making a mess of the neat page by taking more than the corner - where the point was to use color and drawing to quickly suggest the chapter (equipment, if this wasn't obvious) - and not spell everything out

So ... I returned to the fray with a triangle silhouette as a base to work from and made the vidymitter ... the great autofabricator of procedurally generated vidy boxes with multiple amusing pre-installed shows, like Preinds and Sird Rok Vome The Sun and Break Hole.

Here it is with the proper page cropping (and an older layout from last week) ... so as you'll be leafing through this book and the OGA, you'll immediately know kind of whereabouts you are based on the weird creature in the bottom outer corner of the page. 

I have to say, around six p.m. I felt utterly disgusted. Roughly 8 hours of work that had got me precisely nowhere ... but then at 10 p.m., after the Eggy was asleep: solution.

Next

Well, I hope you enjoyed that deep dive into one day of figuring out a spread. That's what it's like sometimes. So, uhm, I hope you like the equipment chapter! I have to go to bed soon, so I'll make this conclusion pretty quick.

First, happy thanksgiving to all those who celebrate that autumn festival and a jolly end of November to everyone else.

This month has just whizzed by here in our household. We're all well, but the due date of the second child is approaching—faster and faster it seems. If all goes well, we're expecting her birth sometime in mid December.

This means I likely won't have a 30-page polished up chapter for you in December (>_<'')—but who knows? I will certainly, as always, try.

The sections I'm mulling finishing up next are:

• Mirrorman Adventure (the big pamphlet)—I've been labelling the map and adding pointcrawl routes and times.

• Yellow Land—the last region of the OGA.

• Red Land—revising the first region I wrote up to follow the style of the Green Land.

As always, thoughts and ideas welcome. Typos spotted? I'll take that too.

Finally, again, let me welcome you all (new and old) to the stratometaship discord: https://discord.gg/vRvxyEHstn

We are approaching 1111 members there and I really need to figure out some kind of prize once we get there! Ideas welcome!

Take care, good cats and noble heroes,
—Luka
(Seoul, Very Late, Autumn, 2024)