Quick notes

Three quick notes, neither of much serious consequence. So I'll throw this cool although randomly non sequitur image in too, just so the post isn't totally useless. Neal Adams' famous cover art for the version of Tarzan of the Apes that I own. Neal Adams and Boris Vallejo illustrated the entire series if I remember correctly, mostly alternating between titles. Vallejo is OK, and he did some good art for some other series here and there, but I always greatly preferred Adams for Tarzan. Curiously, Frazetta did covers for most other Burroughs works, but his Tarzan stuff was only sketchy stuff that he did that never graced any cover, was mostly line art, and he was always personally disappointed in it. 

Anyway, the three notes: I've decided to do an unusual thing with my mapmaking future for Dark Heritage. I'm not going to redraw the entire map after all (flip-flop again, I know.) Rather, I'm going to draw smaller area maps of portions of the map, that would be appropriate for a single campaign rather than showing the whole shebang. I'm also as I do this, and this is the part that will probably sound strange and unusual to most, not going to worry overmuch about getting the details exactly the same. In fact, I'll deliberately distort some elements. Thinking about the epilogue or reboot, if you will, of CULT OF UNDEATH that I'm currently working on, I can see that drawing a map for that campaign specifically would be one that is abnormally long and thin. Not like a piece of paper turned landscape, but two or three pages turned landscape and laid end to end. A 5x1 ratio map, or something else ridiculously long and low. So rather than maintain the same proportions as the original map, I'll distort it so that it fits landscape on a smaller yet normally ratioed piece of paper. Rather than worry overly much about which is "right", I'll say that whatever the version I'm using for my campaign is right for that campaign, but the original map (or original maps; I have three that aren't even the same as each other, fer cryin' out loud) will always be the ones that I turn to for reference when creating a campaign specific map. And any changes that need to be made to accommodate that campaign will be in a kind of quantum, Schrödinger's canon interpretation, where what is and isn't in the "canonical" DH5 setting isn't defined, and doesn't ever need to be defined. The changes for any given campaign vs the original map could be just as canonical as the original, but I have no interest in addressing the paradox or clarifying which is more "canonical" than the other. 

This is in strict contrast to how Tolkien did it. He messed around with all kinds of details with his setting, up to his death, even, but once something was committed to print, he felt bound to honor it as "correct." An interesting example of this is his origin of orcs. Now, granted, the Silmarillion wasn't actually published until after his death, but the Silmarillion had a very specific and definite origin of the orcs spelled out in it. However, Christopher Tolkien himself was later unhappy with having defined that (among many other details). We can see from The Peoples of Middle-earth that Tolkien had actually changed his mind and did not necessarily favor the interpretation that he had written in his notes for The Silmarillion after all. Although he passed away before completing the change, so the Silmarillion was published with the older origin story included. Had that happened while Tolkien was still alive, he'd have felt stuck with it, even though he no longer actually favored that approach.

Meanwhile, I'm deliberately suggesting that I reject hard and fast canon for my own setting, and whatever I feel is correct in that moment is correct... in that moment. But it may not be in another moment in the future.

Second note: I'm going to do one more campaign brief. In fact, I already know most of what it will have, so maybe I should have taken the time to just write it up rather than post about how I'm going to, but I'll have that ready soon. Why three campaign briefs? I actually kind of like the idea that if I were on the verge of running soon, which I'm not so it's an academic, theoretical discussion for now, then I'd like to have three different campaign proposals ready to pitch, and the group could pick together which concept sounds most interesting to them. Now, granted—they're all still in the same setting, and will have mostly the same tone and themes—albeit with subtle variations and tweaks. This third one will, if anything, be the least dark and potentially more gonzo and absurd of the bunch, as I'm getting the main theme of the campaign itself by riffing off the main theme of the movie The Hangover and proposing that the characters are missing a week of their lives, and they don't know what happened, but it's clear that they did a whole bunch of really crazy and out of character stuff that they now need to reconcile to. This will be challenging, because they have no idea what it was until someone confronts them about something that happened while their memory was gone, so they'll be bouncing back and forth from one bizarre surprise after another. UPDATE: Here it is: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gj81zwHv6lqvi9Ym2eNpwKrODS7UHUv4/view?usp=sharing

If I'm calling my reworking of CULT OF UNDEATH by it's original name; just reworked for a new vision of how it should have been done all along anyway, then I probably need labels for these other two campaign précis too, and I'll go through the same exercise with them eventually. The original campaign brief should be called CHAOS IN WAYCHESTER and this third one can be MIND-WIZARDS OF THE DAEMON WASTELAND. Those actually make Cult of Undeath sound kind of tame in comparison. Well, whatever. I can always rename it if I ever actually run it and want a more gratuitously exciting pulpy title.

Third note: I've spent the last few days, after blogging about the three main influences and best descriptions of my GMing style, re-reading the Ray Winninger run of the Dungeoncraft column. And reading it again now, I realize that while he had some great ideas that resonated with me because I did those things too, and liked having them specifically articulated rather than intuitively felt, that there's much more that I don't like about how he describes his running style too. I still think that it's a good run, with some good advice, but I guess I'd filtered it more than I remembered; I found it somewhat less compelling to re-read again after not having done so for quite a few years. Fer the heckuvit, I'm going to re-read the Chris Perkins column too. It's not nearly so prescriptive or organized; it just talks about a whole bunch of random ideas. I never considered myself a follower of his "discipline" because I have no idea exactly what it is, but I sure like an awful lot of his specific ideas. Let's see if after a number of years I still agree.