A journey through a land of fantasy…

My next post is going to be about Chorenn and its political geography (and the one after that, its history, and then I hope to get into the actual game), but before I do that, I wanted to mention some pieces of software that I have found indispensable during this campaign, both for campaign building as well as for actually playing the game.

One thing that this campaign would not be runnable without is a map of the continent.  The world is very coherent, and everyone needs to know where they are, where they’re going, and how long it’s taking to get there.  Climate and resources also have a very strong impact on the flavor of a region.  Almost the first thing I did when I started this campaign was to create the map.

I decided to do this using Campaign Cartographer, created by ProFantasy Software.  CC2 has been available since the late 90s, I believe, and I happened to purchase it about 4 months before CC3 was released.  (I received a free upgrade key, though I haven’t actually used it.)  I found it to be easy to use, especially if you have any experience with “real” mapping software; it uses the same terminology and design.  This includes the way it layers (which is not the way that an art program such as Adobe Photoshop layers), so it is easy to put features on a separate layers and hide/show layers depending on what you want to display.  You can also annotate maps, as well as link them together — for example, link your map of City A to this item on your overmap, so that when you click on City A, the city map comes up.

I designed my campaign map in less than a week, and created versions of it for each of the characters based on where they had already travelled.  One of the PCs carries a general map with him, so I adapted my map into a “freehand drawing” type art style and printed it out for him.

You can also purchase add-ons for CC, such as Dungeon Designer, which, well, is for dungeon designing (duh!).  ProFantasy sells art packs, too, for more objects to place, or you can design your own or download other people’s packs.

I really don’t know if this program is better than other mapping software, but I am very happy with it and have used it occasionally when creating dungeons or cities (when it turned out that a simple sketch on a piece of paper wasn’t going to be enough).

During the now 2-year time span of this campaign, two of the players moved out of town to separate states, but have continued to play in the campaign.  The only reason we are able to do this is because the entire group of us are geeks and we all own laptops — thus we can use software to assist.  The first thing we started using right away was Skype.   This is a voice-over-IP program, which means, it’s like a telephone, but transmits over the Internet.  It allows conference calling, so we can have our speaker phone going on our side, and Nathan and Kyle are able to connect up individually.  Skype is adequate for our purposes, but you can find other programs that will do the same thing.  I believe Yahoo Messenger can, and of course, programs designed for hooking up with your multiplayer-online-game friends, such as Ventrilo, will work just as well.

We spent a number of sessions working without a real map that Nathan and Kyle could see.  We had, of course, our usual hex map with painted miniatures, and we used a webcam to broadcast the map, but Kyle, working on a Mac laptop, could not tap into the video feed.  We ended up having exchanges like ”Ok, it’s your turn.  There’s one monster 15 feet ahead of you, and one 20 feet at 3 o’clock.  What do you want to do?”  “I move 25 feet to the left, avoiding any threatended squares and skirmish the guy in front of me.”  “Ok, there wasn’t really a way to do that, but I moved you where I think you would have gone.”  “Ok, that’s fine.”

Obviously, this didn’t work particularly well.  When Bret left the game, Asia joined up, and one day, he came to game with a new program that he wrote – a mapping program hosted on his personal server, with clients that he distributed to all of us.  This allowed me to drop basic layouts and allowed the players to see where the monsters are and move their characters individually.  This revolutionized the game; now Nathan and Kyle felt like they were actually a part of it again.

Sadly, it isn’t available for distribution, but there are programs out there that will do the same thing (and probably has a lot better art than ours).  Of course, the one benefit of our program is that Asia wrote it, so it’s free for us to use, and he’s been customizing it to the way that we game.

I just noticed, within the past few days, that I actually have a bit of a readership!  I wanted to thank you for reading my campaign blog, and for your comments!  I think this all started with Tommi mentioning me in his blog, Cogito, Ergo Ludo, which is itself an excellent gaming blog, and now I’ve noticed my blog linked on other blogs, too.  It’s very flattering! (I think, also, that knowing someone is reading might spur me to write more often, which is always good.)

I’ve been going through my blog stats and following links, and I came across The Game Master Foundation, which also has great GM tips and discussions.  On their page, they have a link to a PDF about how to set up a game master’s notebook, and I thought I’d take a moment to tell you about mine.

I’m somewhat computer-savvy and I run my game off my laptop, so my notebook is on the computer.  However, I also work and play on a number of different computers, so keeping the notes solely on my laptop is not optimal.  What I did was set up a wiki on my personal web space.

I chose Wikka Wiki as my platform because it was the only one I could find that lets you allow only certain people to see pages; I wanted to make sure that my players could not access GM-only pages.  (Wiki philosophy is that information and knowledge should be available to all who participate, so software such as the popular MediaWiki do not allow user access restrictions.  Maybe this has changed since I first looked in 2006.)  It’s also a plus that it’s so fun to say, “Wikka Wakka Wiki,” as the engine was called when I installed it.

I had intended the wiki to also serve as a collaborative home page for my campaign, but it turned out that my players had no interest in visiting the page or making their own pages on the wiki.  No problem, though. I’ve found the following advantages to this approach to my notebook.

• I type a lot faster than I write, so I can generate content much faster. 
• I can access my notes any time I’m on the web (which is pretty much all the time for me).
• Editing and referencing material is very easy.
• My friend and campaign advisor, Bob, can read it all at any time, too (though he can’t edit any of it).
• One day, when my campaign is done, I can open it all up to anyone who wants to look at it.

My only problem with it is that I still write my actual adventures in Microsoft Word, so those aren’t in the notebook.  That’s just force of habit, and I need to cut it out.  And, of course, there’s the occasional loss of network/Internet access, but they haven’t affected me much yet (and I can work offline and upload later if I have to).

If you’re interested in poking about a bit, here is my wiki, though you can’t get into any of the GM pages.  I really like it, and I hope it can help some of you readers out there.