Inktober Intro & Art #01

 I've decided to 'try' to participate in Inktober in 2020. Partially this is for some practice art, in preparation for the Blood Rain Kickstarter next year.

I'm going to draw a bunch of things to include in the PDF and the town Map.

The Town Map is made up of three distinct types of buildings, Inner city Main buildings, Outer city hovels or interesting places, and Downstairs Dungeons. If you're reading this in October 2020 and want to participate, pop me a message of something you'd think matches the theme, I'll add it to the list, and I'll roll a die to see which one I draw from the list. 

Inktober 01: The Shroom Tower.

 

   Nestled on the backstreets of the city proper, Mr Bilk was an avid fan of mushrooms and attempted to use the city sewers as a place to grow some varieties, as he slept, some of his creations were warped, and a brick eating shroom managed to grow itself overnight into this .. building. 

    Interestingly, the Shroom only grew in the night, and by morning had returned to brick, not before of course changing the entire structure of the house.

Mr Bilk was consumed, it seems, into the house on that night, and while now a solid brick house, that is explored sometimes by the daring children, they often exit, white as ghosts, vowing never to return.

    No one lives there now.. yet the lights come on at night, and shadows are seen lurking within.   

Appologies: After posting this, a series of events, unexpected, came up, moving house issues, settlement issues, we were homeless for the month of Oct, so drawing Buildings was furthest from my mind. 

I'm going to endevour to attempt to do this over the coming months, in a build up to my next Kickstarter Project.

Runaway Success, Kickstarter Blues

Careful what you promise, you might get more than you can handle.

Kickstarter First World Blues

First World Problems.. being too successful.. Kickstarter has its fair share, and I honestly thought my little project would be too self contained for such.. but.. here we are, and I'm at 600%+ of funding, facing 300+ hours of work for $5.50 an hour.

My Earlier, colourised, world map.. well, an unfinished part.. 

What went right:

I gathered a decent community of people before I started, I let everyone know months, then weeks in advance, I expected to get 50% of the way there from my own marketing, and maybe 25% from the kick on effect of that, then I'd have to promote it to cross the finish line.

I hoped to learn 3 things.. How to set up marketing for a kickstarter.. How to Run a kickstarter, and finally how to push through the funding, chasing the market to cross the finish line..

two out of three ain't bad.. but this new lesson, well that's gonna teach me.

What went wrong:

I was woefully unprepared to succeed.

I moved my goals around in the first 48 hours, which lost me a little respect.

I added a new tier without properly calculating the plausible (and now actual) end result, and I didn't do my math on the results of that new tier, adding 80% more work, for very little increase in payment.

What Happened?

Kickstarter, kickstarter happened, exactly as its meant to.

Kickstarter has an internal algorithm, If you hit certain thresholds within certain time frames, their system promotes your project. People spot it, and if they like it, they'll back it.

Because I had funded in the first 24 hours, I got an initial bump, I saw a bunch of new and increased pledges in that period as the news went out to 'saved' backers, so KS internal advertising was promoting my project.

I was hitting 10 pledges a day or so.. some, maybe 3 from external sources,  and the rest from internal search engines. Meaning, if someone came to kickstarter to browse the projects, mine was bumping into 10th place average, people were finding it often and pledging often..

External vs Internal.
Kickstarter works by having people come and pledge, if they don't come, existing pledgers might pledge, but since they have already and recently, they might have spent their monthly/quarterly amount, so kickstarter is likely to prioritize external pledges as being more of an advertising boost for them, as a result, by my staggered posts to several locations about my project, meant I was bringing in a steady stream of backers.. so kickstarter was rewarding me by keeping my project high up in the charts.

Higher than Average follow on pledges.
When someone backs a project, similar products are posted in the spot below your success screen. The problem here might be, after backing a $100 board game, I'm done for the month, so I'm unlikely to back another $100 board game.. BUT.. at $4 a map, I was in the sweet spot of.. just 1 more thing, and inexpensive.. so as often as not, I think, people were spotting my project and deciding that little bit extra was worth it.

How do I know all this? Well that's why I did a kickstarter.. to discover how their metrics work. They use a different link mechanic to record each and every backer, where they came from. If a backer spotted my project from the screen of another project.. I can see which project lead to them choosing mine.

A Break down of what happened and When:

(Apologies, Kickstarter doesn't give out data until later so I had to rig up this, which is in reverse)

The First 16 hours.. to 120% funding.

The Purple is the "make 100" limited pledge, light purple are people pledging at $4, dark purple are people pledging above $4, and red are people adjusting their $4 pledge later, I wanted to see the typical level of people understanding what they are doing up front, vs coming back and pledging more later.. (doesn't yet take into account the shift from dark purple to red, just the increase)

So far so good. People tend to be pledging at the amount they intend to pledge at, the red 'adjustment' at the beginning stays true for most of this part of the graph, that person was the first pledge, who adjusted up, not realizing he could from the very beginning.

M) The first pledge for 'just a map' it increases at maybe 2 pledges a day for the first 3 days.

A) You can (sorta) see here the jagged increases as people realise they can pledge above the base $4, some friends and family who've come in with their first backing at $10 bring up the darker purple line, A0, A1 and A2 are people pledging $10 or $12, they've got an idea of what they want on the map, and know how much they need.. so hopefully my descriptions were on par, people understand what the 'rules' were and followed along.

Between A2 and B), there are a number of people just joining with increased their pledges, note the dark purple bump up a few times.. they can see 'oooh, look, I can jump from $4 to $6 to help fund the goal.

The Psychology of wanting something to succeed is all well and good, but if you don't give people the tools to do so, how can they. People here have pledged the minimum, but to get it higher, they either need to go out of their comfort zone and sell it to their friends.. OR they can just give a little more.. yet.. what will they get for this little more, you need to reward people, just a little reward, to increase their pledge.

13 days of funding, 630%, 20 hours to go... 

Now, the next stage in the process.. the goal has been achieved.. but I had 12 days left.. How to keep it going?

Kickstarter has this stretch goal system, adding more and improving your product to raise more capita, Its not directly created by kickstarter, it was done by some board game projects and has just become 'the done thing'. I didn't expect to have to do this, so my initial stretch goals were just 'pie in the sky' thoughts, but now.. at almost $400, I had to consider, I was actually going to hit $500.. I needed to have more realistic goals... AND means to achieve them.

So I added in the $3 Easter Egg pledge.. (I named it 'a little thing' but later I couldn't change the name, another lesson learned) but.. note the rocky road after.. no.1 was the first cancelled pledge, there were some adjustment pledges in there, people giving up their $4 pledge for a $2 map, but straight away, it gets snapped up (99 of 100 taken.. 1 left... fear of missing out.. people jumped on it)

People who had backed before, were not 100% keen on the change, some voiced it, some acted on it. My experience is, for every 1 person that does something, 25 people are thinking it. I hope I addressed the concern in my next update message, that I had no intention of diluting the project, I just didn't want anyone to miss out.

C) from here starts The New Yellow Wedge, the new $3 Easter Egg pledge, which as you can see goes as strong as the map pledge.

D) Some people like to help out, this was a map pledge +, just helping the project to get to the $750 tier.

E, F and G) Once it was understood that there were no real bounds.. some people just started pledging crazy amounts, some, to break the rules of the map (which was allowed.. i.e. you pay for it, I'll break it) and some want whole kingdoms of stuff going on..

For 200+ backers, I've had only 5 cancelled pledges.. I understand this is very very good, but maybe in the last 24 hours, some might quickly jump out. (I understand some advertising companies, pledge to access your details, then back out in the last 24 hours)

So there I am..

The graph doesn't show, someone bought the map, and pushed the total to $1830 at the time of writing..  have 20 hours left of the project, so if you've just seen this pop up in your feed and want to grab a final slice of the pie, feel free.

I don't know where this will go from here. There is enough interest, so I'll likely post a drivethuRPG map PDF for $4 or something fair to the backers (can't have it cheaper than the KS price), Many of the backers have asked I do another.. which I'll consider. but won't have it as cheap as this (I'd like to gauge what kind of interest people would have if it was twice the price...)

KICKSTARTED!

So, I was umming and ahhing about what to do as my first Kickstarter..

Something small, easy to deal with, easy to produce, just enough to cut my teeth but not too much if it got a bit crazy

Then I saw the Make 100 Challenge.. only make 100 of something..

Well I said.. I can do that!

So I DID!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1203688183/make-100-fantasy-locations

Its Simple Enough, I'm going to draw 100 locations on a map, so fellow GMs and Authors and Artists and anyone interested, can just have a cool little map for their own.

I draw these kinds of maps for people from time to time as commissions, I've charged as much as $200 for them, its usually 10 hours of drawing after 25+ hours of preparation and discussion with the author / games designer. So its not too far off what I've done before.

The Interesting part (for me) is getting 100 different locations into the map, I'll have to sort them out, structure them, get a feel for what goes where, interpret them from some backers it might be confusing mess..

So lets see where this goes. I'll post some thoughts on Kickstarting a project and How it all works out in the coming weeks.

Heres the Kicktraq for it

[worldbuilding] Discovering old maps part 2

Having discovered my old maps and deciding to rework them, I continue on my path to create a new.. old world

Part One

The Canvas

To really get a feel for what I was doing, I gathered all my maps and looked over them, drew out sketches of things, very very general sketches.. making sure certain issues were dealt with..

The first was simple world physics. The Original Coyn World was far smaller, the sun would pass overhead which would mean very long days, very hot days.. or the sun would need to move so fast you could watch it shift shadows. So I needed to 'set' the sun to match the more current world maps which I worked on the physics for months before I got it all right.

So the sun rises and falls on the rim of the coyn, but now a new problem.. in the centre of the world is a spire (because remember, that this world was more directly a copy of Terry Pratchett's Discworld). So with only a 30. degree rise, the spire would blot out the sun on the other side of the world, making winter in some areas deadly.. while interesting.. was going to break too many maps..

Zoom in to see details.

So I adjusted the rules of the sun, 40. degree, sped it up slightly to ensure an earth approximate temperature, checked the maths, then started measuring the spire. (see the little image below.. it had to get shrunk..60%)

As you can see from the image, the spire shadow would (from the 16 different months) only cover half of the world in winters shadow.

Now, since I was going to use the zoomed in section, I needed to ensure that any nearby mountain ranges might not interfere with the suns rays.. there was.. you can see the mountain with the green sun lines to determine its midday ranges..

Next, I plotted out the suns direction to give me some workable lines. I no longer had the cad program I used before and I calculated the time it would take to make a new program to work the maths, would exceed the time I would take to simply draw lines on a map myself. So I drew the lines myself.

One Shadow Map

I'm not going to bore you with 16 variants of map, just one. What I did was work out the distances the sun was from the local hills, and the height of the sun at 9am, midday and 3pm, and "shifted" the mountain peaks lines in an art program and filled in the shadows with a darker colour.

Shadow Lines, Shadow Months & Sun Levels

Then I blended all images together to give me a colour coded map for the 4 months of summer, winter, spring and autumn so I could determine biomes. If an area got 2-3 hours of sun, mid-autumn, but remained in the shadow of the local mountains, its going to be a colder region, and will less likely to have temperate forests, so I'd colour those zones with a light green/blue, if it got sun all 18 hours of the day, all times of the year, its going to be a desert.

Rainfall Levels

Next I started adding Water. Simple google searches explain how water evaporates off the ocean, flows across the land, then when it hits mountains it becomes rain and produces forests and rivers and the like. So I mapped out the general flow of the clouds and map a map of that.

Forests in Green, Deserts in Yellow

Next I made sure my river beds on the original maps matched the flow of water coming from the mountains. I had made some mistakes, but mostly it was ok, so I matched the rivers to the shadows to the biomes and drew in the spots where forests could grow (not would.. just could).

Then I scanned all these, and overlayed them in the art program, and this gave me the 'concept' of where the forests 'would be' before humans started chopping them down and building places.

Not that its easy, but you might be able to see that my original 1991 maps have quite different forest lines to the new more legit maps

Lots of little trees, all those green dots.. (yes I'm using copics)

So far so good.

So my new map now has a very cool desert like terrain, not exactly Sahara, but more Australia/Arabia/Egypt, so that unlocks some opportunities. Also the larger expanses of plains on the east, could be used for some battles.. European style.. and now the central valleys are all cold.. snowy cold.. so I can also make some cool little Russian/Mongolian Taiga locations.

Plot-hooks

The Main draw card for this island, is the History. 12 gigantic Ziggurats from an ancient civilization of 9ft tall crocodile people, built of gold, (based on the 'cities of gold t.v. series when I was a kid). Heroes across the world catch boats here, travel through the cities, spend their money, and some return from the ziggurats with a gold brick the size of a dog, enough to retire the entire group, if they so wish.
My notes are sketchy as to what they contain, but I have some maps and a few pages of notes, so I just need to piece it together (and re-watch the t.v. series to see if it sparks any memories). the main point comes from one line at the top of the page:

"The Ziggurats are heavily guarded, not by living creatures, as they would have died eons ago, no but by traps, ingenious deadly traps, that are designed for 9ft tall priests, who know the correct path, to be able to traverse safely, at the right time, in the right season."

My notes only included traps that players came across, (I used to make everything up as I went). Chessboard battles, Illusionary chasms, a Cart-Voodoo puzzle and some giant cat statues that shoot lazers? So now I just need some ingenious traps to flesh out the rest of the rooms..

Lastly, because I never got around to finishing it, I'm putting the dead remains of one of my old roleplay groups, in a set of Crypts that guard ancient treasures that they collected

[Worldbuilding] Discovering Old Maps Part 1.

Have you ever packed up all your stuff, moved, and then forgotten to unpack one box, stuck in storage, back room or shed or some place, then you open it years later and say "oh wow, I forgot I had all this?" Tag that emotion..

The Discovery

I left my mums place when I was 19, packed a lot of things in boxes to move, but my new place was big enough to expand into. I wrote a lot of notes into old books. At the start of a new year, around  February / March, Diaries become cheaper, so I picked up what was $20 hard cover, leather bound business diaries for maybe $2.

In these I would write my game rules, notes, adventures, everything. I even have old receipts and budgets for my lifestyle..

When I moved from that place, I had to go home for 6 months to sort out my finances, so most of my stuff, unable to fit into my small room, had to get put in boxes.

Digital Version of my world and how I made it

When I moved from there to my next place, I had the room, but I sorta maybe forgot about the older stuff, I maybe felt like my old notes were not as good as my newer notes, I was more grown up.

Also I had decided to make things digital, I could map things in the Civilisation game, sort out what was where and structure things more systematically.. so why would I ever use all my old maps again?

So they stayed in their boxes and I made all new maps.

Fast forward >> I GMd for several years, made a whole new version of my rules, shelved the old version, and with it, made all new maps >> Then I left Australia, travelled Europe to understand more of what makes roleplay interesting and returned to start the whole next version of my rules to match the growing and changing landscape that is the roleplay community >>

So 2013, I move into a new place, and take all my boxes stored in my mothers roof and put them on my shelves.. but I'm studying so hard, I have no time to actually check them

The Orginal (Upper Right) Albius, Drawn 1991

And now its 2015, a month ago I opened up a few boxes and started to sift through.. Cue tagged emotion.. WOW!

What to do with it all? a lot of it was almost useless.. maps we never got around to using, places that had no names.. is it worth it to bother to use a map because I made it 25 years ago?

Is it any different to making a new one?

Well I decided to stick to my original plans.. History is written by those who survive, so whose to say that the world map I had was 'legit' It could be a map that someone could have drawn based on theory and conjecture, rather than the actual world map.. that allowed for some 'adjustments for reality'

Then also, we had stories about characters from ages ago.. players who played in our games and I could ask them to recall their events and write them in this blog or put some together as 'histories' all manner of creative ideas can come from it.

The Lands of Albius, Drawn June 2015

So, I decided.. since my blog has been a bit sparse of late, that I would document the 're-creation' of my game world, using original maps, updated maps, notes, structures of ideas and things from 1989-1996, prior to the Civ Maps, and use them as my "original world" series.

My endevour, to 'match' enough of the maps and map notes together to make one cohesive world, without breaking any of the history, (but maybe breaking a tiny bit of continuity, but creatively) and document the process.

Link to be Added: