Tera Verde Y Fruende Ney Yardin Sensial

Fru eroés!

It is with an abundance of pleasure, some measure of sweat, a few tears, some nerves, and a small serving of vegetable elves that I present the last-but-one of the Lands of the Rainbowlands.

The Green Land.

For a while I'd wondered which would want to be finished first. In the end, it was this one.

I thought it would be swifter (is it not always so?) — but I wanted to also test a final layout on this one, which meant putting a lot of lists into tables, refining the table styles (add +0.7mm vertical padding to each cell to make it more readable, then check to prevent text overflows!), checking every piece of text with a spell-checker (doubtless typos have still made it through), refining the shopping section,

(I think it looks quite nice now, but we'll see how the table titles survive copy-editing. Note I created a separate table style for the "self-explanatory tables" that don't need separate column headers. Lovely how that saves a bit of space, leaving room for that vertical padding to make it less super-dense. This means I get to have 10pt text in the tables instead of the 9pt in the UVG tables)

(I'd been considering avoiding tables because of how I struggled with them, laying things out in Affinity Publisher -- and then all of them broke when I switched to Publisher 2 -- but they seem to be just so useful in TRPGs)

...

revising how I do factions

(they're playing some of the role of locations in the UVG, but I've also given them a little NPC section. Maybe I'll have to give the NPCs levels + attributes too ... worries for future me)

...

then folding the things that hung out as a sort of appendix or add-on in the UVG, into local spreads. So, since the big portal in the middle of the Emerald City is kind of a big deal for the Green Land, I explain portals within this chapter.

(look at that cute custom diagram at bottom right)

...

finally, one thing I really struggled with was how to appropriately visualize the distorted space of the portal city, while conveying its plain weirdness. I tried a few different things, but eventually hit on the combination of a spiral railroad and segments diminishing with distance (but, in-fiction, of a similar area). This became the Portal One - Mothercity spread:

(frankly, this was a spread I probably found the most enjoyable to work on -- it took days to draw, but let's just say the muse was upon me and I wanted to visualize it the way it deserved).

Drawing Portal One

I've found that when I enjoy myself creating a piece of art, writing a location, or faction, that's a very good sign that it will be enjoyable to read and use (after some polishing and editing).

I'd had the idea for the weird spatial distortion of the portals in the Vastlands for a while, but I had no compelling visualization. I had this:

And it kind of didn't capture the essence at all.

Once it came to finishing the Green Land chapter, this diagram left me out of sorts ... I pushed it to the side, but it kept nagging at me.

Eventually, I hit on this idea, of a railway spiraling from the entrance of the portal's "event horizon" to the great portal itself. I used chat gpt to generate a little script that draw the spiral and circles for me and used that as a template for my sketching. This was the first step.

Then I drew the owl.

Added all the big stations on the rail and the times between them.

Then I started working on adding all the terrain. All of it.

All of it hand-drawn and hand-lettered.

The muse took over, the map wanted to be illustrated. So it is. And I have to say ... I like it a lot. There's enough here to wing a fair bit of overland play.

There's going to be another little surprise coming from this map, but that's further down the line.

Patience and Timing

At this point, I have to express my gratitude for your patience and understanding once again.

As with so many things, I felt like this chapter should have been done faster--it was all there in my head, after all! But reality is what it is. Some parts were harder to do than expected. Some more fiddly. Always, I had less time than in the Pre-Child Era (PCE). But, crucially, some parts just demanded I give them the time they demanded.

Like that nifty map.

I hope you enjoy this little spiral into a deep weird land. A bit of unreal world for today, eh?

Coming Next

Over the next week I'm going to review the feedback on the Vastlands Guidebook bootleg and ship that off for copy editing. It's getting close to time for the final layout on that work.

[error interrupt tskns error]

After that ... I'm going to tackle getting Our Golden Age finished. There are 3 big chapters left that I want to get to you in the shortest time possible:

• the Yellow Land

• the Hollow House

• the Omega Jubilee

Let's see how I make those. As usual, I'm going to do my darndest to do them soon, but ... I'm going to try to prioritize making them fun, pretty, and useful over making them fast.

Let's wrap with an inspiring spreading gingko tree.

Wishing you blossoming and fruition,

—Luka Not-In-Green-Land