Gaslight & Steam

The portfolio and blog of David Bennett

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Mapping Monday: Man-made Features

Truth is always stranger than fiction and never more so than when looking at maps of places that have been touched by human hands. Filling swamps for warehouses and dredging of rivers for the passage of boats, as just one example, results in highly regular looking waterways and coastlines. Which is why a recent Twitter thread by James L. Sutter about New Orleans is so entertaining. The canal he points out particularly caught my attention because it’s such an absurd feature, but it’s part of a set of features that constitute the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway and it joins up with the Industrial Canal and the Mississippi River – Gulf Outlet Canal, where all three waterways allow traffic between Lake Ponchartrain and different parts of the Gulf.

New Orleans canal – James L Sutter tweet

That’s neat and all, but not so relevant to a fantasy setting that posits a High Medieval level of technology, even with the addition of magic and perhaps some manner of gargantuan beasts to assist with engineering tasks like dredging. But features like this, all criticism about “realism” aside, make for some fascinating visual accents and the most efficient way of moving people and goods is in a straight line. So if justifying canals in a straight line covering many tens of miles seems problematic and your setting doesn’t have the remains of some sort of advanced empire or forerunner civilization, consider an application of what exists in the setting. A nation with advanced engineering know-how can overcome a great deal of obstacles to built impressive roads, particularly in areas that are relatively flat, such as the roads built by the Romans in southern England. A large population dedicated to a single task, either united by a cause or enslaved to a smaller group of overseers, might overcome their deficit of expertise by simple brute force. Think, for example of the underground highways of the dwarves or the similar passages carved by Drow thralls in a traditional fantasy setting.

No matter what you do, creativity is the key and don’t limit your maps through lack of imagination. Conversely, I’ve seen so many maps of allegedly fantastic places that look like they were laid out by robots, ignoring terrain features and the simple wherewithal of the inhabitants to construct these ruler-straight roads and waterways. It’s the reason I hate the map of the Beklan Empire from Shardik by Richard Adams where roads and rivers often run in straight lines including one road that inexplicably arc from north to east in order to cross a river three times for no readily-apparent reason. In fairness, it’s been some time since I read the book, so I can’t recall if any of the setting features or origins are logically explained.

Beklan Empire from Shardik

Gamma World Watching List

A previous post, in the spirit of Dungeons and Dragons Appendix N, focused exclusively on books. However, on further reflection, I felt I would contribute a separate list on visual media that might also provide inspiration for a Gamma World game.

There are many movies I grew up with and some I watched much later. One particularly sadistic gamemaster was fond of A Boy and His Dog and the aesthetic from his games as a result of that movie found its way into my own games. It was only much later, after I’d acquired a taste for the fiction of Harlan Ellison that I watched the movie.

So while this list includes direct influences and influences that filtered through to me from others, not listed are dystopian future films like Alphaville or Divergent, nor are films like Twelve Monkeys or La Jetée, nor Doctor Strangelove or Whoops Apocalypse. There are a number of films of varying quality that may appeal, though the quality varies wildly (Yor, the Hunter from the Future, anyone?)

A Gamma World Watching List

Mapping Monday: Underground Redoubts

Way back when, I drew more than a couple of maps of underground fortifications. They were undoubtedly heavily influenced by the original D1 Descent into the Depths of the Earth adventure and the others in that series. In many cases, I conceived of guardposts like this being fortifications built by dwarves or humans, keeping in mind that this was long before the in-depth writings and background on the Underdark and on things like the architecture of Drow cities.

The first two maps are a completely underground set of fortifications with the upper levels excavated beyond the main tunnel blocked by the fortifications. The third map is a fortification at the mouth of a tunnel to the outside that could lead to a settlement that could either be completely underground or above ground and only reachable by a tunnel (such as within the caldera of an extinct volcano or atop a rocky tor).
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Mapping Monday: Redrawing Old Maps

Appleseed: The Promethean Challenge cover

Back in the day, I did a map for an adventure I had written and meticulously drew out the map by hand. At the time, I was reading the Appleseed manga and I was enchanted by the shading done with screentones that are cut to fit and applied to the drawing. So I went and duly acquired the sheets I needed from the University Bookstore. These days, with the advent of computers, a similar effect can be applied when creating or editing on the computer and there’s a variety of freely available screentone brushes available for that purpose. If I were to rework that map, I would definitely do those sorts of things digitally.

In a similar spirit, I took it on myself to try out some techniques using GIMP and redrew the maps from my Gamma World campaign, combining the two campaign maps. There’s some great information on creating digital maps and most techniques that apply to Photoshop work equally well for GIMP. In most cases, Photoshop brushes transfer well, which can be a lifesaver. In the case of my map, I was prepared to build my own and I’m still not entirely sure I like the aesthetics of what I used, though these mountain brushes are fantastic and come in three different flavors (outline, shaded, and patterned).

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Gamma World Reading List and the Power of Appendix N

Gamma World 1st Edition box cover

For many old-school gamers who cut their teeth on Dungeons and Dragons, the Appendix N reading list from the AD&D Dungeonmaster’s Guide has become the archetype for gaming-related reading lists. As such, it referenced many obvious sources and inspirations for the rules such as Jack Vance’s Dying Earth series that were the basis for the game’s magic system. A similar reading list, credited to Barbara Davis, appeared in Tom Moldvay’s version of Basic D&D (with a discussion of the differences).

Over time, the Appendix N list has expanded, either with the addition of titles for books where only the author was referenced, the list of books belonging to a series, and books where the influence is so readily apparent that its inclusion seems like an omission. On the other hand, to me, “updated” lists are less of a representation of the influences on D&D and, more specifically, the influences on Gary Gygax when D&D was being created, and are more of a reflection of the tastes of the updater. Though the list may seem somewhat dated, the fact that it’s still a topic of discussion can’t be ignored. In an ENWorld Q&A thread, Gygax said, “The fact is that I wouldn’t change the list much other than to add a couple of novels such as Lanier’s second Hiero yarn, Piers Anthony’s Split Infinity series, and the Disc World books. I would never add other media forms to a reading list. If someone is interested in comic books and or graphic novels, they’re on their own.” (2007)

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Mapping Monday: Villains and Vigilantes

In another set of campaign maps, these were created for a series of adventures I ran in a shared universe where we traded off gamemastering duties and, at least at one point where the group had grown too large to sustain, split into multiple groups. This set of adventures was originally created to be run with the Villains and Vigilantes rules from FGU before we later migrated to Superworld.

Detective Comics #526 commemorating Batman’s 500th appearance

The flavor was intended to be street-level with settings heavily influenced by the Batman story, “All My Enemies Against Me”, in Detective Comics #526. In addition to the idea of different villains working together in groups, there was also the idea of the city being divided into areas controlled by different gangs with different plots in motion that the heroes needed to foil but, since the villains were working together, those plots interlocked and led from one to another. The maps themselves consisted of a large city map with various local maps that, in retrospect have elevations that I suspect were influenced by the Marvel Super Heroes game battle maps and by the map of Midville included in Car Wars, both of those being purpose-built maps with layouts suited to the types of gameplay those games favored. Curiously, at least the area I mapped seems to be zoned almost entirely for one- and two-story structures.

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Mapping Monday: Psi World and Dystopias

Psi World cover

Despite the sparsity of the rules and the limitations of the setting, the Psi World game was a great jumping-off point for a dystopian future built around psionic powers. The campaign I began developing was based on the game materials with a cyberpunk dystopian near-future setting, but centered around those with psionic abilities who, rather than merely being outcasts like hackers and rebels in such a setting, were instead forced to live on the fringes or to hide out due to their very nature.

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Mapping Monday: My Gamma World Campaign – Detail Maps

As mentioned in my previous post about a long-running Gamma World campaign, the maps increasingly became more detailed and linear to meet the needs of the game. This set of maps was pretty much the second phase of the campaign after the players had confronted the threat posed by the Unclean and turned their attention to the lands inhabited by the Death Groups, a combination of the nomadic aspects of the Red Death cryptic alliance (thus the name, but with the extermism subsumed by the group known as the Seekers of the Red Sword) and the willingness to live in radioactive areas like the Radioactivists (and thus having access to higher technology, like the Unclean, but with less infrastructure to take advantage of it, due to their nomadic society).
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Park Maps in the Style of Tolkien

The beauty of a good map is that it can be lifted from anywhere and used as an adventure setting for a game with minimal modification. I leanred this lesson early with a gamemaster who used a detailed topographical map of a section of bayou for an adventure that involved the party being pursued in boats by the angry natives who lived there. As waterborne adventures went, it was a blast, event though it did result in a total party kill (TPK). But the map really worked because the features were interesting and varied, but without recognizable landmarks that would have jarred the illusion.

If you’re a fan of J.R.R. Tolkien’s style of mapmaking, you should definitely consider the national park maps of Dan Bell. Not only are his stylized maps fun representations of real-world parks, their style readily lends their use to a game or simply as beautiful art for your walls.

Lake District National Park by Dan Bell

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