New on Desk #121 — Ornamental Art

All right, time to do some real work for a change. An experiment in joining the currents, so to speak, making some practical use of this newsletter writing time.

Useful feature articles

My typical newsletter feature article is a raw, unpolished stream of consciousness grappling with some idea or other. Sometimes it’s fairly interesting, like I’m relatively happy with last issue’s funny framing of D&D adventure module style. Other times less so, but the common thread is that it’s spontaneous.

So as you might have noticed if you’ve read the newsletter at all this spring, I’m running embarrassingly late with doing the last brush-up for Muster, my practically-finished D&D primer book. I basically finished the book in December and then just stopped working on it for several months. In fact, stopped on writing anything… I guess you could call it some kind of burnout? I’ve now been mainly struggling to keep this newsletter going, on the questionably-sane premise that it’s better for me to spend my limited writing time on doing the regular and easy thing, and only move on to finishing Muster when I get my writing foundations back into order.

It’s taken several months, but I feel like I’m getting back into the groove here. Therefore, an experiment: I’ll take a day or two to work on the Muster manuscript, write one of the missing chapters for it, and I’ll just post that chapter here as my feature article for the newsletter as well. Plug two holes with one set of writing, as it were.

(For reference, here’s the roadmap for what’s still to be done with Muster.)

You’re going to get the raw first draft here, just what I put down off the top of my head. Same deal as always with the newsletter. Just this time the text is hopefully going to also help round out Muster.

Ready? Let’s see what comes out:

Ornamental art in book design

So what I thought I was gonna do first was writing that “Muster manifesto”, the 4-page printable “distribute to your players as a flyer” thing that I’ve got in the roadmap. My process strayed to doing image editing instead, so I guess we’re talking about that now.

So here’s a sample layout draft page from Muster; I’ve been writing the manuscript directly into the layout lately (bad habit, but for some reason that’s what works for me), so the core page design (page geometry, typography) has been making the rounds, but here we have a quick addition to illustrate the topic: an “ornament”.

Ornaments are a specific type of graphic historically used in books. You’re probably aware of how book design has changed drastically since the invention of the printing press, what with books turning from hand-made artisan crafts into machine-assembled production line items. (Still art objects for their own sake, but industrially produced instead of hand-made.) The amount and nature of ornamentation has been on a downward turn in book design over the last ~500 years, with the modern baseline being extremely minimal.

(In case you’re wondering about the difference between an illustration and an ornament: illustrations are intended to carry significant information, being essential accompaniments to the text. Illustrations in books are usually full-page or half page, and are presented in a stable, non-whimsical manner.)

Modern book design most uses ornamental art in what I like to call the field of “magazine design”, namely the design of illustrated magazines, portfolios and other light and miscellaneous reading combining an intense visual nature with casual or reference reads. (Newspaper design would be a specialized subcategory of the overarching field of magazine design.) Serious books are usually not ornamented, presumably because the value of the individual book has gone down so much that it’s no longer viable to ornament everyday texts (unless the ornamentation is the point, like it is in magazine design).

The decline of ornamentation in book design is kinda a shame, because ornaments serve a variety of functions. I’m well aware of the economic concerns, and do agree that industrial design (including book design) ultimately must align with the balance sheet. Still, it’d be nice if we could have more book ornamentation: it improves text flow, helps learning, makes reference easier and makes the book more fun to look at. I mean, just this grab-bag of minor virtues to it.

Doesn’t need to be gaudy, and of course part of the issue is indeed that good ornamentation is thoroughly individualized for the book on hand, which has no doubt contributed to the slow decline. Like say illuminated initials (charmingly called “anfangs” in Finnish, as per German) have tried to hang on in the printing press era, but ultimately the initial has to become fairly barren if you’re planning to reuse it from publication to publication. So you minimalize and generalize to make a given set of initial art affordable, and ultimately just end up at a point where there’s no real point to the visual device any more because you might as well just blow up an initial glyph from the title font, skipping the artistry altogether.

About that rpg book, Eero…

So anyway, rpg books historically fall into the general category of “magazine design” as the kind of object they are; not a text book so much as illustrated light reading. The core tradition of rpg book design uses small illustrations in a way similar to how magazines use photographs, to break up page space and provide atmosphere to the text. Most corporate rpg books are ornamented, even if I doubt that the designers necessarily think of what they’re doing as that. (Check out the example page from C2020 on the side: that’s an ornamental as opposed to illustrative piece of art.)

Muster specifically has some interesting design particulars to it, such as an entirely nominal budget and an eremitic book designer with peculiar tastes. What I basically ended up with was that I had Sipi, the artist for the book, draw me some rough dungeon fantasy sketches that I could use for ornamentation. Small stuff that I’d use to prune up text flow and such, as discussed earlier. Here’s another example of these:

So that’s what I just spent a few hours doing, cleaning up the rough scans for these little bit ornaments. I’ll be using them later when finalizing the layout to get rid of some empty page syndrome and such. A reader versed in layout knows what I’m talking about.

One more thing about rpg art while I’m at it… I find myself extraordinarily pleased with this art-design nexus we’ve arrived at with Sipi here. A clear commitment to functional, authentic illustration over the eye-candy approach usually advocated by rpg publishing. I mean, I imagine it’s kinda obvious that aside from the modest art budget (I’m striving to pay what the work is worth, but this sort of sketching is fairly cheap), the choice to fill the book with rough hobbyist fan work instead of commercial illustration is an aesthetic one. It’s really working for me, I love the look that the book is getting here. It’s the same look our gaming has.

The argument for what books should even look like is wonderfully obscure for the layman, but for whomever cares, I’d argue that our ornamental strategy here in Muster is looking pretty snazzy in comparison to the mainstream of rpg layout.

And… I guess that concludes our feature article for this newsletter? I was planning to just write something for Muster and then post that chapter as my newsletter, too, but the graphic design stuff I was doing today didn’t produce text. I’ll chalk this up as a success, though, as I’m apparently not having any particular problems getting back to working with Muster after the several months of not doing it. Maybe I’ll have some writing to show for the next newsletter.

AP report pile: Coup in Sunndi #55

So we’re in the middle of our Death Frost Doom experience here: last session one of the PCs did a total economic backstab on the team, getting away with the entire treasure haul and leaving the others with nothing. The rest of the party regrouped back in the nearest civilized location, which proves to be the coastal city of Naerie in the kingdom of Idee.

Understandably Sipi wouldn’t be playing Scar the conniving barbarian with these particular adventuring companions a second time, and the other players had their own character issues, so we got some PCs swapped here and there around Aku the Akuma, the expedition leader. Aku was still keen after that chapter book of darkness, Koraktor, the Bible Black, the Hell-Bound Tome, the Embossed Charter, Naturom Demonto, etc. So we’d go back to the mountain as soon as the party prepared for the new journey.

Who were the new characters… I think Triple-Witch (who the player judged too frail for an adventure so deep in the wilderness, I think?) was replaced by a Naerian wizard; the player memorably dropped the chance to have a sane character in favour of being a total nutjob demon cultist. (For some reason they haven’t figured out the disadvantages of such yet.) Husu the combat engineer was thoroughly cursed by the last excursion, so he got replaced by old pal Huru, of similar persuasion. (This one I’m all for; fuck character uniqueness, we’re playing a numbers game here at the bottom of 1st level. Far as I’m concerned, a character might deserve a name around when they survive to 2nd level.) Sipi’s new character was some commoner (read: shitty stat line) of little distinction. But at least these fine adventurers were willing to follow a wizard of questionable character into the wilderness!

The rest of the session was amusingly spent in hex crawling back to the mountain. I could imagine a world where this wouldn’t necessarily have taken so long, but the adventurers were kinda intent on outsmarting themselves: gotta avoid the hill clans because the mountain is taboo to them and it’d be borrowing trouble if they knew we’re here. And while we’re at it, why should we circle all around to the eastern flank of the mountain when we can just approach from the north, where we are now…

The DFD cursed mountain doesn’t have a fully written up wilderness (a decision I’m in favour of myself), but it does have like a paragraph of GM guidelines for it, and those clearly say that the mountain is a total bitch and a half to climb from any direction and route except the ancient path the party used on their first expedition. So steep cliffs, hostile animal life, weather issues, as nature itself twists and bends to bar the way up the mountain. My personal pet theory (just in Coup setting context here) was that the local animal life is haunted by demons of the orders of Demogorgon and Chernobog, as a sort of “associate evil” of the utterly nihilistic and non-demonic ground zero that is the actual cult site.

Also, the absolutely brilliant cherry on top here was that a typical player brain-fart had the party collectively strive to reach the top of the mountain. They never were at the peak before, the cult site is not at the peak, so it was just one of those pattern-matching things that the human brain does. Maybe only one player paid attention to the geography the last time we were through, and now a different guy is guiding the expedition… maybe the adventure location is so dramatic that it gotta be “the peak” of the mountain so to say… maybe the player brain reacts to somebody pointing out the mountain peak on the map by assuming that the visible landmark must be where we’re going… whatever the reason, the players were far too long convinced about the need to climb up and reach the top. I tried to give the PCs some WIS checks (this is the exact sort of thing where the character should know, even if the player doesn’t, that their destination is not at the peak of the mountain), but what can you do.

So we spent the session climbing up the mountain the hard way, is what I’m saying. As if to off-set their hexcrawling skill issues (the above is, ultimately, all on them; who decides to trailblaze a new mountain route when you could use an existing, known path…), the party had a fair amount of luck in their forestry skills and random encounter and weather checks… this could all have ended up being much worse than it ultimately was.

The most amusing part of the ascend by far was that the party encountered a pack of demonically charged monkeys, and went to some effort in killing most of them pre-emptively before they could get up to no good (which they no doubt would have, so good call there). Then they decided that because we’re hardy wilderness survival mountain men, we can’t possibly pass on eating what we kill, even if it is satanic monkey meat and we have plenty of supplies. (I think this was another one of those vague pattern-matching things that players do a lot in this game; not so much that they have a firm opinion about the tactics of mountaineering, but that they gotta declare characteristic roleplaying actions. Not doing it would be boring, while doing it proves that you know what’s what in wilderness survival. Even if what you “know” is mainly informed by movies rather than sound judgment.)

So some party members eat satan-monkey while others are apparently less “survival mode” about this inhospitable mountain. The real star of the event was combat engineer Huru (alternatively, Husu II), who caught a kinda physical-spiritual Demogorgonian ailment from the tainted meat. The main symptom to begin with was nightmares that he didn’t take too well… Huru had a particularly lively dream about a Duvan’Ku high priest “cutting something off”. Since then, the next day, the poor man started doubting his own humanity. As in, it felt a bit shaky in there, like his humanity was a bit loose.

(Such a strength of the rpg medium, the subjective experiencing of obscure occult conditions. What Huru was suffering was a psychological reorganization into a non-conscious being, basically the thing where were-creatures forget their humanity and start behaving like beasts. But of course I wouldn’t describe it in such clinical terms. Artistry!)

The night after eating the monkey flesh, slowly traversing the labyrinthine mountainside, the party camped out and Huru had a most amazing night: he shook awake and realized that he’d “dropped something”. Starting to furiously look for it in the dark camp, the night watchman was quickly alerted. Huru had lost the power of speech, though, perhaps because whatever had happened to him. (I hadn’t said it explicitly yet that this thing that was cut in his dream, and that felt “loose” and rattled inside him, and had now dropped off, was his humanity. I imagine the more language-gaming players had figured it out, of course.)

The endgame here totally was for Huru to turn into a satanic monkey himself, but I gotta admit that Esa, the player, has solid skills in the game of D&D; I could see many other players not being able to pull back from this brink, their character would end up succumbing to the affliction and going feral. Esa hasn’t been playing with us recently (issues with geography and scheduling and this not being his primary hobby), but he’s had showings in the past, so I wasn’t terribly surprised when he actually listened to the clues and started declaring maneuvers that were actually relevant to what was going on. Occult puzzles with unknown rules are almost unique to wargamey rpgs (literally, most games have medium issues with this kind of challenge), and some players are really, really supremely bad at them, but if you actually pay attention and understand what it is that you’re trying to do (understand the big picture from the imperfect information the GM is giving you), there is a change to maneuver through.

Also, have some dicing luck, that’s necessary in this sort of situation. Huru’s harrowing experience ended up being the weirdest we’ve had in a long while, as his futile search for his lost humanity kept going into the morning hours. My conceit was that Huru would soon defecate his lost humanity (it’d dropped into his digestive track, you see; a magical theme of the spiritual becoming corporeal in this particular ailment), and wonderfully Esa picked up on that from vague clues and actually had Huru examine his own droppings (total monkey moment insofar as the other adventurers were concerned). Humiliating, but he found it! He found his humanity! And somebody else might have tried a different thing to “fix” it, but Huru here promptly swallowed the precious thing (it was never described in physical terms), successfully reintegrating his rapidly deteriorating personality. Huru would forevermore be known as the adventurer who ate his own scat, but at least he preserved his sanity.

So that’s the story of Huru and his scatological adventure. Beyond that the ascend was fairly uneventful. When they reached the snow line of the mountain, with several miles of ever more perilous ascent still to go to reach the top, the characters even got another WIS check and finally realized that hey, I think we’re not actually even trying to get to the top, you know? Wasn’t the cult site we’re trying to reach in a shallow hollow just under the snow line? On the eastern side of the mountain? If so, and we’re now at the snow line, the destination would be to the right or left from where we are? Kinda started a basic double-checking of how the players were even orienteering here. (Core hexcrawl content, by the way.) Fortunately they weren’t quite lost and clueless enough to decide that the best way to get to the eastern flank of the mountain would be to go counter-clockwise from the northern flank. That’d have been funny.

So anyway, after a bunch more pointless maneuvering we finally found our way back to the thoroughly cursed, nameless cult site, where the party promptly set up to camp. A suitable place to end the session again. Perhaps the next time we’d finally achieve Koraktor. Big session ahead!

State of the Productive Facilities

I guess I’m being productive now? This is the third newsletter I’m writing this week, so I’m now just two behind. And of course I’m again working actively on Muster instead of just talking about doing it. If I had two weeks uninterrupted by some damn tomfoolery now, who knows we might be able to set this entire situation behind us.