New on Desk #36 — Useless Graphic Design

The summer drags on, slowly turning to Autumn. Meanwhile, I’m procrastinating in the weeds — the weeds of incidental artistic expression, that is.

Check out my rpg campaign advertisement

We’ve had a couple of sessions in the Coup campaign now with just 3+1 participants. Not unworkable in itself, and as far as I’m to judge it’s just incidental rather than permanent, but it’s still a bit lower than I’d prefer; my ideal would be for 4+1 to be the low point in the tides. One more regular player would be just about perfect. It wouldn’t result in having too many players most of the time, even in video conference play. I guess it’d be fair to say that when your low tide is at 3+1 in an indefinitely running open campaign like this, it’s time to do something active to look for new players.

One of the players happened to poke at me with some cool medieval art they’d found, claiming that it’d work for a campaign advert. Said and done! They pushed various pieces of art through online trained-AI procedural art apps, and I grabbed one I liked the look of to build the actual ad around. While I don’t have any actual medium to push the advertisement in, I do like how it came out: the carnevalistic colors and split field structure reminiscent of heraldry make for a medieval feel, and the dense text blocks make it seem like a ’90s geek ad of the sort you’d see in comics books and whatnot. If I was looking for a game, I’d give Coup here a chance — the ad makes us look much cooler than we are, like it was Ars Magica or something!

Doing something frivolous like this was pretty fun, I do enjoy graphic design even if I don’t draw myself. If it’s “design” I like it, I suppose. By all rights I should just… do more art projects instead of moping around ineffectively. I like looking at that ad and how real it looks. Maybe I’ll make more in the winter, assuming we’re not drowning in players by then.

The obvious issue of not having a rpg media to publish my ad in does rear its ugly head, obviously. And even if there was a media with the appropriate kind of readership, who would actually pay to run their rpg campaign ad — that’d be such a strange thing to do. Social media is the thing, I guess, but I can’t quite bring myself to put in the personal commitment just to spam the networks with my campaign ad. Maybe I’ll get one of the less eremitic players to do it.

And here’s another stupid graphic design project

An example of the ’90s cards. The art quality varied tremendously.

After the campaign ad I returned to messing around with something I’ve been thinking about this summer — trading cards. Specifically, my baleful eye turned towards TSR’s AD&D trading cards from the early ’90s, from before the CCG craze swept the project away in favor of various collectible game projects.

There’s a variety of reasons for why I find these interesting. For instance, consider these:

  • These old-fashioned pre-CCG trading cards are a curious phenomenon for our time, it’s not blindingly obvious what they’re for. There is an implicit “card trading game” they’re involved in, and they can be nice as pretty artifacts insofar as they are that, and there are various vague ideas for how they might be barely relevant to playing D&D.
  • The Coup de Main in Greyhawk campaign I’m running can obviously eat up enormous amounts of material cruft, and these cards are full of snappy illustrations and short descriptions of NPCs. Maybe I can repurpose them for something nice.
  • In today’s technological environment it’s not that difficult to take a commanding position over a trading card set yourself and be your own card designer and publisher. Therefore, instead of being on the mercies of the publisher’s aesthetics, you can be your own boss and just “publish” whatever cards you feel like. This arrangement might be useful for something.
  • These AD&D trading cards are amazingly stupid in so many ways, they’re entertaining to read through just for that. How about blatant misogyny so overt it’s darkly comical? Or sadistic TSR era ideas for dungeon traps? Or an outright sub-set of the card series on doors? (I mean that literally, there’s a “Mini-series: Portals” in there.) The poor fellow who had to write these clearly lost will sometimes after the first couple of hundred cards and nobody at TSR noticed or cared, because that’s the kind of company they were. The art’s scraped from everything between reprinting book covers (the nicest pieces by far) and random fan art.

So anyway, my actual point is that I’ve been planning my own set of D&D trading cards. Unfortunately, what with copyright laws and all, it won’t be for general publication, but then again, what does publishing mean anyway in this day and age — it’s not like I’m going to be printing these. It’s more of a handout prop thing for the Coup campaign, a way to frame NPC illustrations and such. We’ll see where the project goes.

Both front and back, in case it’s not clear.

I have my prototype card here as a sample, check it out. The card subject is Rob Banks, one of the leading partners in our adventuring party in the Coup campaign. He’s a 2nd level Thief and brings his own crew of misfit henchmen to the party efforts, plus his naturally born suspicion of everything that might lie behind doorways. (We’ve been abusing orthodox D&D style “listening rolls” in the campaign for some reason.) Rob got the #1 slot because the player brought me the artwork for the card earlier in the summer.

(Rob’s supposed to be foil, but I’ve yet to figure out a really nice way to show that on a digital card, so the glisteningly golden frame will have to do. Normal cards get a much more commonplace frame.)

Now that I have a pretty good prototype, I’ll just need to start mass production. The exact workflow for that depends on the ultimate presentation medium, so I’ll probably take a bit of a break and think that through carefully before moving forward. I’m pondering on maybe making trading card collecting a bit of a sub-game in the campaign, but that’d require keeping track of individual card collections for the various players… maybe.

Monday: Coup de Main #13

Our old school D&D session started with a cliffhanger from last time, as the party had just stumbled upon an rival adventuring party exploring the same abandoned manor. The players took to the encounter in a chill way, though, and didn’t aggravate socially, so ultimately the exciting situation didn’t devolve into the bloodbath I was hoping for. Instead, the adventurers agreed to split the mansion with the new-comers, a decision that was no doubt made easier by the fact that they agreed with the competition to let them explore the parts of the place our crew had already cleaned out. Not that the newcomers had to leave empty-handed: they left with an armchair and two large framed paintings that our adventurers had left untouched earlier due to caution. The other party is pretty shy, to the extent of incompetence, but here they lucked out a bit.

Meanwhile, though, our adventurers spent the rest of the day down in the basement, dealing with challenges in their own inimitable style. And by that I mean, with extreme positioning play that attempts to undercut all difficulties without rolling the dice. There was admittedly a random encounter with some of the surviving giant rats in the basement, but aside from that the party just spent four hours digging their way through a wall ever-so-carefully, and then dispatching a troop of animate goblin skeletons through the hole in the wall by the use of spears and opportunistic Turning. The level of danger was rather minimal, which I think is the definition of competent D&D dungeoneering play: minimizing danger.

The most exciting part of the session was when one of the henchmen participating in this long and arduous skeleton-dispatching operation broke down from the stress and escaped aboveground. That in itself was exciting enough, as I haven’t yet had a chance to test-drive my sanity rules a lot, but the follow-up was even better: the party Cleric, taking their shepherding duties seriously, critted on their spiritual management check and caused the man to become Inspired! In the throes of inspiration this small-minded fellow decided to pick up a character Class himself and became a 1st level Cleric, making them the first Retainer for the party!

(“Henchmen” and “retainers” are two different grades of NPC followers that player characters can manage. Henchmen are non-classed basic stat block people; relatively cheap but of limited usefulness in various tasks. Retainers, on the other hand, are basically secondary player characters, like Robin to Batman. Taking on a retainer is almost like playing two characters at once.)

The party spent the night at the chateau Yragern again, so we’ll probably see them doing more dungeon-delving next time. Things are looking good in various ways, but that’s how it always seems before the adventurers stumble on something horrible and die, screaming or otherwise.

Session #14 is scheduled for tomorrow, Monday 7.9., starting around 15:00 UTC. Feel free to stop by if you’re interested in trying the game out or simply seeing what it’s like.

Thursday: Varangian Way

We’re apparently playing Varangian Way weekly instead of bi-weekly, it seems. Well, I’m not complaining: the game is improving every time we play, so it’s a good time to be playtesting it.

This week with the Varangians we had a bit of a choke point characteristic of this game in particular: the game has a very free structure in terms of who does what, which means that any players might have player characters or narrator duties over various things going on in the game. This time it just so happened that all the scenes we had on our plate had me as either character player or narrator. I think everybody else got at least a little bit of play during the session, but I was dabbling in everything. Of course that’s what you do in GMed games as a GM, so I’m used to it in that context, but I think I like Varangians more when there are more breaks. Makes it more casual to play when you’re not constantly “on”.

We did get a lot of scenes done, though. I was particularly fond of the story my first character in the campaign is doing: unlike the other players I didn’t create a character of my own when we started, opting to instead explore a bit before committing to anything. This character I played on Thursday is somebody who sprang from another player character’s adventures as a side character, which is exactly like Varangians is supposed to work: you do stories, and those stories beget new stories, and the game as a whole is a collection of interweaving short stories rather than one big story.

So anyway, let me tell you of my character: Päivi is a young mother living in the Village Lost in the Mist, a sort of Shangri-La hidden village paradise built in the middle of an encompassing swamp that might or might not be magically impenetrable. The Village is a great place to live, except of course there’s a “but” there: the Village headman and Sage, Goldenlore has established a strict population limit for the Village: a new child may only be born (or acknowledged; these are iron age Finns, practicing after-birth abortion where necessary) when an old villager dies.

So you can guess where this is going: a Swedish adventurer named Hallad found his way into the Village, impressed the Sage, and decided to stay. The Villagers were obligated to sacrifice one of their own to the swamp to make room for Hallad, and of course they chose the youngest, the most recently born baby. Mine. It was a tough spot, but so interesting that I chose to adopt Päivi as a player character so we could see a bit of how she’d live with the consequences of having her child taken away like that.

This plays directly into the game’s actual game-mechanical subject matter, as Päivi didn’t have any Passion to begin with; as is the case with most people in the world, she was a conformist, more of a victim of the circumstances than an active participant. The first arc of her story was all about her struggling with this, seeking Passion to seize; if only she could become a real player character, have at least one point, she could finally make some drastic and anti-social choices like say murdering the Sage and leaving this stupid village.

The game system drove Päivi’s story well, and it’s doing that for other characters too, so I couldn’t be happier with the game’s progress. Just 500 hours more playtesting and it’s basically finished!

My adventures in second-hand sales

I’ve been selling off old geek cruft over the last month at a local flea market. The comics, DVDs, CDs move surprisingly swiftly; apparently the reason why I’m not seeing much of this stuff in the flea market compared to old clothes isn’t necessarily that people don’t bring it — rather, it might be that people buy these items so eagerly that they don’t last long.

We went over the old video game collection (mainly late ’90s and early ’00s stuff there), picked out the ones that might have collectible value (that is, a higher price point) and I’ve been selling the rest now. Mainly PS1 and PS2 games at 5 € a pop, and I don’t know why, but apparently somebody really wants these; when I carry a boxful to the market, half are usually gone the next day. Quite gratifying, but also a bit surprising; apparently somebody in Iisalmi likes old video games.

With the video games moving that well, I’m thinking that I’ll need to try out English language genre novels as well. I don’t see any sane reason for them to sell in a small town in inner Finland (where English is not a native language, no matter what you might have heard), but if Finnish-language comics and English-language video games sell, then clearly there’s more of a demand here than I’d have expected.

Gentlemen on the Agora

All right, let’s see what the gents have on their minds in the ol’ cultural saloon:

  • Did you know that Gary Gygax chose to name a fictional mineral in a straight, serious AD&D adventure module “Tumkeoite”? Apparently it turns into “Lacofcite” when exposed to sunlight. If those names sound funny to you, that’s probably because they’re just slightly warped names of the man’s friends. Truly, this is the high aesthetic of fantasy literature right here. The observation did lead to a general discussion about Gary Gygax’s merits as a literary author. Much fun ensued.
  • If nostalgia culture occurs ~30 years after the fact (when ex-teenagers reach middle-age), and the Old School Renaissance has been going for a decade, isn’t it time for traditional mainstream rpgs to have their own nostalgia wave right about now? The answer is apparently affirmative, as games like Cyberpunk 2020 and Twilight 2000 and whatnot are getting reprints and new editions and doing well in crowdfunding. The ’80s and ’90s kids are now old enough to be nostalgic for the games of their youth!
  • How does psychotherapy work? Can you just bring your failing mind to a doctor, who’ll then fix it up? A contributor graciously shared some of their general experiences with the institutions of sanity with us. The news aren’t the most encouraging: apparently psychiatric care takes a lot of time and effort mainly because it’s so hit-and-miss in practical application. You try various things to find out what works, and maybe you patch up something resembling a functional citizen.
  • One of the gentlemen linked an informative advertisement their gaming club in Helsinki made for Adeptus Titanicus, the GW equivalent of Battletech. The video’s in Finnish, but for those fluent in the language it might prove interesting for its quality: I thought that whoever wrote the script actually does a pretty solid job on driving straight at the interesting and relevant features of the game.
  • A gentleman plays in a Legend of Five Rings campaign where the group has decided to stop calling the outcast caste of society (the people doing the dirtiest jobs in the hierarchical caste society of the game’s fantasy-Japan) “eta” on account of the word being a real-world slur towards the Burakumin caste in Japan. Good for them, even if I found it amusing that this is where the group draws the line with a game that’s basically 100% cultural appropriation.
  • We talked a bit about Tuhkimus, the Finnish fairy tale character (the English Wikipedia article on the topic is written by a moron who seems to think that the character only exists in Norway) — I got inspired to discuss him because he’s such an example for all melancholic, useless people everywhere. (I suppose I was feeling down last week or something.) That’s probably the most fantastic part of the fairy tale world: useless younger sons somehow prove useful and important despite being lazy and lacking ambition.

State of the Productive Facilities

Ha ha. I’ll figure this out, but apparently not quite yet.

1 thought on “New on Desk #36 — Useless Graphic Design”

  1. A 2nd-level thief gets his own portrait? I thought that’s when a character gets named… 🙂 🙂 🙂

    We have a player who gives his characters elaborate backstories despite the high lethality. He is the target of some friendly ribbing as when all players spontaneously chanted “One line of background only!” but soldiers on.

    Another player is naming her characters in one part of the campaign Prima, Secunda, Tertia etc. (and Una etc. in another part), which shows that high lethality can significantly reduce character identification, at least initially. However, those who survive for a while – like Tertia – do grow on her (and us) and that’s how it should be, in my opinion: What is developed in play is what matters.

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