TRPG General Chat

BESW

12:00

I generally get an idea for the kind of land that's in an area, and that gives me a feeling for how many and what size of town you'll find there, but more than that waits until I see the whites of the plot.

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

I've been considering using Fractal Mapper to generate landmass, and then map in villages as they discover them. Let the players be from a small town where they don't know much about the world around them.

BESW

I know a decent amount about how geography and geology impact habitation patterns, and I run from there.

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

Fractal Mapper has a player display option which shows the map without the GM hints.

On a seperate screen. Since we play in my living room, I could show in on my TV.

BESW

That's cool.

I like having a piece of paper the party hands around and points at and scribbles on.

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

@BESW Like if there's no water source around, villages are very scarce if present at all?

BESW

12:02

It goes in one of the cover pockets on the PC Binder.

@William'MindWorX'Mariager Right, and if the water is navigable you'll not only get more towns, they'll be richer and more diverse.

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

@BESW I love that as well.

BESW

Where types of travel meet--river and sea, mountain path and river, etc--you HAVE to have a large settlement or a good reason not to have one.

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

Maybe I could work out a compromise. Make a general overland map in fractal mapper with terrain features like mountain ranges and POIs. Then print it. I have access to an A1/A2 plotter, then add details using pencil and let the players do the same.

And then continue to map out towns and such using the software for GM use. But let the players map out their own details how they see them.

BESW

I... really like not having an exact scale to my maps.

That Caesar III map where cities are all the same icon? That's kinda perfect for my taste. It leaves things to fill in, room to fudge as the story needs and room to add things that the players think of which I want to pretend I did.

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

That's sorta conflicting for me. I like how versatile a map that's not to scale is. But I'm very OCD about distances traveled and such.

BESW

12:05

Understood. We tend to travel at the speed of plot.

Suggestion: two very different maps.

Your map, which is precise and exact but you can fiddle with as you like because you're the only one who sees it; and the player map, which you drew in pencil by sight (not by tracing) from your map.

Maps the players get shouldn't be accurate. Not only is it contrary to the setting, it's also contrary to fun: the purpose of a map is to show places to go and explore, not to show places that have been explored.

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

That sounds like a good idea.

So I can OCD all I want with the actual to-scale map on my laptop.

BESW

Knowing your map isn't totally accurate is like having "Heer May Bee Dragyns" scrawled all over it.

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

And the map is just so-so but shows the general information about the world.

BESW

Yes.

Heck, throw in a couple obvious flaws in the map you give them.

Not malicious flaws, but flaws that have a reason to exist.

Get them wondering why that mountain is on the map when it's not there IRL.

A good map is also a plot hook, an expository tool, and a trap.

Simon Gill

Or not exactly wondering why a city in the middle of a dangerous swampland they've been forced to travel to is there - but what is going to happen now that they've found it.

BESW

12:12

You see that little "(mermaids)" label on my older map?

I had no idea what I was going to do with that, but I knew that its very existence --even if we never went looking for mermaids-- would change the way the world breathed in my players' minds.

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

Yeah.

BESW

For starters, why's it in parentheses?

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

I was planning different areas too. Like a blighted region or magic wasteland. Areas marked with no current purpose beside to pique the players.

Zachiel

because all populations on the map are

BESW

Also, make your names mean things: the Slurpy Marshes are obviously named by the orcs that live there.

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

12:14

The "Slurpies"? :P

BESW

No, that's just the kind of descriptive, evocative, yet rather dumb name orcs would give a swamp.

(Has anyone figured out my city naming scheme on that map?)

On the other map, Knave Port was originally Nave Port: the middle, or hub, or bellybutton, of a set of ports on a long oceanic trading route.

But after it declared independence and a lot of political refugees came to live there, the name's meaning changed.

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

@BESW You took names ending in "tion" and removed that part?

Bastion, Tesellation, Inseption, Ossification?

BESW

@William'MindWorX'Mariager My players spent six months failing to figure that out.

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

And Devotion? :P

I noticed a pattern right away. Took me a bit to figure out what it was.

BESW

heck, I didn't make it hard. Devotion was a religious center, Bastion was a fortress city, Ossification was surrounded by walls of stone and had centuries of unchanging tradition...

Inception is where the campaign started, of course.

Zachiel

12:20

Bas was harder for me. All the others are processes, Bastion is a thing.

BESW

Devotion is a quality.

But yes, I had to use different types of speech or it'd have been extremely obvious.

At the time I thought Ossifica and Tesella together, if not separately, would tip my hand.

After that, though, I stopped using that kind of word game and moved on to bigger and better things.

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

... like Slurpy Marshes? :P

BESW

I mean after that map.

Often just straight-up cribbing from bits of history I know my players are unfamiliar with, or taking them and changing them up a bit.

Barataria, the home of one of the most successful pirates in the Caribbean (because he turned to business), featured in one of my campaigns.

Zachiel

I've noticed how just taking names of small villages from the FR maps (not the big map) works too

Simon Gill

@Zachiel That's because they've already done the work of evoking D&D style flavour for you :P

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

12:25

I've actually, with great success, used plots, names and characters from Duck Tales comics. :P

Since my players haven't read all the comics I have, they never suspect a thing.

BESW

You'll notice "Bluebird's Rest" toward the top of the Scale map. I deliberately made a female pirate named Bluebird, to evoke Bluebeard.

Avner Shahar-Kashtan

As a Hebrew speaker, sometimes I get to see "behind the curtains", when names that are supposed to sound exotic to native English speakers are too familiar.

Like in Dune.

BESW

@William'MindWorX'Mariager I've done similar.

@AvnerShahar-Kashtan One moment, I have a link for that.

rinkworks.com/bookaminute/b/herbert.dune.shtml

rinkworks.com/bookaminute/b/herbert.children.shtml

Avner Shahar-Kashtan

Ahh, Rinkworks' book-a-minute. I'm glad that site it still up. Spent hours quoting these mini-summaries at people. :)

rinkworks.com/bookaminute/b/weishickman.chronicles.shtml

BESW

There's some great stuff in there. Nothing's ever going to top Huckleberry Finn.

> Goes rafting. Goes home.

Zachiel

12:30

hahahahahaha

BESW

But yes, I frequently 'borrow' from literary sources, providing I know my players won't recognize them.

Zachiel

I once had the bad idea of naming a saladin-like paladin "Kammas"

"don't tell me his surname is 'uthra'" jokes ensued

BESW

[blink]

Zachiel

saladin-like in visuals only

Zachiel

12:57

g2g now (sort of), bye

BESW

13:16

Ouch. I feel like St. Lawrence.

Simon Gill

@BESW Why's that?

BESW

Sat out in the sun, got a bit well-done on just one side.

St. Lawrence was martyred on a griddle; partway through the ordeal he supposedly announced "This side's done, turn me over."

Simon Gill

That's... morbidly amusing.

BESW

The best part is that this, of course, means he is the patron saint of chefs and roasters.

Rather like the patron saint of bricklayers was a woman who got bricked up.

(St. Lawrence of Rome also managed to get comedians in his portfolio.)

There's nothing quite like saint logic.

Simon Gill

Not sure if the catholics had a sense of humour.

Or if they really thought that was logic.

BESW

13:25

Yeah, they had a sense of humor.

Although not in the areas you'd always expect.

The whole "horned Moses" thing seems to have been in earnest.

Simon Gill

@BESW Not come across that one before.

BESW

At a certain point, the translation of the Bible into the Latin Vulgate suffered a curious style choice: only Christ, it was decided, could be described as having beams of light emanating from Himself.

Avner Shahar-Kashtan

@BESW ...and also brings us back to the topic of Hebrew words getting lost in translation.

BESW

And so all mention of beams of light coming from other heads had to get... fixed.

Which wound up with Moses having goat horns, because of a loophole in which both rays of light and goat horns used the same word to come out of someone's head.

Moses (Michelangelo)

The Moses (c. 1513–1515) is a sculpture by the Italian High Renaissance artist Michelangelo Buonarroti, housed in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome. Commissioned in 1505 by Pope Julius II for his tomb, it depicts the Biblical figure Moses with horns on his head, based on a description in the Vulgate, the Latin translation of the Bible used at that time. Commissioning and design history Pope Julius II commissioned Michelangelo to build his tomb in 1505 and it was finally completed in 1545; Julius II died in 1513 The initial design by Michelangelo was massive and called for...

Actually, the story of St. Lawrence being fried comes from a typological curiosity too.

Simon Gill

Well now, that is peculiar.

BESW

13:30

If you lose one letter, the Latin for "he suffered" becomes "he roasted."

Simon Gill

Haha, lazy copywriters have always been a problem.

BESW

And since "he suffered" was a traditional formal expression to indicate martyrdom of any kind, it's much more likely that he had the traditional beheading and later got typoed onto the griddle.

Re: Moses, it's important to remember that the depiction of the devil as traditionally goat-horned was, if contemporary at all, not common at the time. So it didn't provide quite the same cognitive dissonance it does now.

Avner Shahar-Kashtan

I don't have a copy handy, but Gaiman and Pratchett have an excellent bit about that in Good Omens

BESW

I'm sure they do.

Another really interesting thing to me about Catholic mythology is that in an era of illiteracy, everyone had the Bible memorized, in stories if not word for word, and there was clearly established iconography for every story and most characters in the Bible that any adult in Europe was expected to be able to readily identify.

A woman in blue, a man seated on a pile of cannonballs, and a gated garden all had specific, explicit meanings that were considered common knowledge.

Simon Gill

Is that really surprising, considering that most of human history has/had an oral tradition where much the same was expected.

BESW

13:39

Not surprising, but interesting.

It makes me very curious what kind of parallels a world like D&D might have.

Simon Gill

mmmm, that is an interesting question.

BESW

Are you familiar with the TNG episode Darmok?

Avner Shahar-Kashtan

It's really hard to avoid introducing anachronisms into pseudo-medieval fantasy settings.

There were so many basic changes in how people think since medieval times, we don't even know how different we thingk.

Simon Gill

Vaugely.

More familiar with the Gith of Planescape - who communicate in much the same way.

BESW

To someone outside of Catholic culture, it must have felt a lot like that. So I have no real hope of being able to recreate with any degree of verisimilitude the experience in a D&D context without alienating my players utterly.

But using broad strokes to give the vague idea of it... I've experimented with that for years, to varying success.

Simon Gill

13:42

Unless you can build a shared mythology between yourselves.

wax eagle

@BESW don't blink

BESW

@waxeagle Don't quote Ten at me.

wax eagle

@BESW sorry, watching through 9-11 with the wife right now. Need to go back and watch the old ones

BESW

@SimonGill Yes, that's a thing. Unfortunately D&D cosmology and mythology is so... awkward.

@waxeagle Say hi to Nine from me.

Nine Prime was my second Doctor.

wax eagle

@BESW dead and gone at this point...I really liked him though. Wife likes ten better for some silly reason.

BESW

13:46

@waxeagle Ten is the most human of the Doctors. It made him accessible to a wider audience by meeting them on their side instead of on his, but in the process it stripped him of that essentially alien quality that made every Doctor so Doctory. He replaced alien with quirky.

Simon Gill

@BESW Being built up by multiple competing interests with no real central dogma to fall back on will do that to a myth-complex.

BESW

...also Tennant cannot be relied upon to act decently for any sustainable period at all.

@SimonGill Yes. I also blame the fact that the gods are all some combination of boring, useless, and flat.

Simon Gill

@BESW Certainly in 3.5 era - those tiny capsule descriptions were never vvery good at explaining who these beings really were.

And earlier - they do sorta come across as excuses for wish fulfillment a lot of the time.

BESW

In a world whose raison d'être is PC agency, gods kinda have to take a narrative back seat that, historically speaking, they have never been content to occupy.

I suspect this is one reason Dark Sun enjoys its popularity: the gods are dead, and their replacements are, to a desiccated husk of a man, begging to get stabbed in the face.

It's a much more PC-centric environment.

Simon Gill

@BESW And then, there are "cannibal" halflings.

Although, it's not really cannibalism if you eat sentient beings of other races.

There must be a better word out there.

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

13:55

Is it called Racism if a human doesn't like a orcs?

wax eagle

@SimonGill carniverous is perfectly appropriate there

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

Or is that... "Specism"?

wax eagle

@William'MindWorX'Mariager xenophobia

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

Phobias aren't really as hateful as racism though is it?

Simon Gill

@William'MindWorX'Mariager That's where the use of "Race" int the 70s comes back and adds to the confusion.

BESW

13:56

I think the use of the word "race" in D&D indicates an interesting undercurrent of thought that all sentient beings consider themselves in some ways akin to one another on a fundamental level.

It's a very poor connection, but it's a kinship the word "species" would obscure.

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

To my understanding, race would be different kinds of the same species. So like black and white humans are the same species but different races.

BESW

That's about it, yes.

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

"black and white" humans? What an odd way to phrase it.

Anyways. I'm off. waves

BESW

Well, any discussion of physical differentiation in the human species is fraught with poor word choices in any language.

Ta!

Simon Gill

@waxeagle I'm not sure carnivorous has quite the level of distinction I'm looking for though.

BESW

14:01

There's a word, but I can't track it down.

Simon Gill

Sapiophagy? Or is that just eating wisdom?

wax eagle

@SimonGill do they only eat sentients?

BESW

Most, if not all, words used to describe a diet are non-exclusive unless otherwise made explicit.

Otherwise placentophagy would be a lot weirder.

Simon Gill

@BESW Ah - not "just" as in "the only thing it eats" but "just" as in "the only thing it refers to"

BESW

I've seen sapiophagy used in this context before.

Simon Gill

14:05

@waxeagle Don't think so - but I'm looking for a word that can carry the horror of somebody tracking you down because they want to fill their salting barrels.

BESW

Man-eater

Man-eater is a colloquial term for an animal that preys upon humans. This does not include scavenging. Although human beings can be attacked by many kinds of animals, man-eaters are those that have incorporated human flesh into their usual diet. Most reported cases of man-eaters have involved tigers, leopards, lions and crocodilians. However, they are by no means the only predators that will attack humans if given the chance; a wide variety of species have also been known to take humans as prey, including bears, Komodo dragons, hyenas, cougars, sharks, and even other humans. Big cats Ti...

Simon Gill

That works then :)

wax eagle

@SimonGill smells of the most dangerous game

BESW

What's the Latin construction for "us" as opposed to "them"?

Simon Gill

@waxeagle Those halflings are playing it for keeps.

wax eagle

14:08

@BESW my knowledge of spanish suggests nos

BESW

Nosphagy?

Nosiophagy?

wax eagle

nobis is us

says google translate

nobisphagy?

BESW

Try "we"

wax eagle

we is nos

@SimonGill if you haven't read it fiction.eserver.org/short/the_most_dangerous_game.html

BESW

Nobisiophagy: Eaters of Us.

Simon Gill

14:11

@waxeagle Actually no, I only know of it through cultural osmosis.

Thanks for the link.

BESW

And then there'd be eosiophagy: Eaters of Them.

wax eagle

@SimonGill read it in highschool, I need to read it again, but the concepts stick with you

BESW

►

Sorry, I always go straight from The Most Dangerous Game to Island of Doctor Moreau for some reason.

Anyway, bed for me.

G'night!

Don't let the nobisophages bite.

Simon Gill

Goodnight :)

Simon Gill

19:40

Good question @Ernir. I'm curious to see what other options for simulation there are out there.

DForck42

19:56

anyone around?

wax eagle

@DForck42 I'm here, what's up

Simon Gill

Same

DForck42

@waxeagle me brain's fried from work

wax eagle

@DForck42 fun :(

DForck42

@waxeagle :-D

Simon Gill

19:57

@DForck42 Hehe, mine's still frying.

DForck42

my weekly report is about 1 1-2 pages long at the moment

i've taking a hacksaw to the security on my second oldest sql server

it was basically the sql server toilet for the company for about 3 years. and for the previous "dba"

Simon Gill

The SQL Server toilet? Where data goes to grow nasty stuff?

DForck42

@SimonGill yes

Simon Gill

Lovely.

wax eagle

20:11

@DForck42 ick, I'm just playing with javascript to do up a custom form...

Simon Gill

20:25

urrgg, Javascript. I feel your pain.

wax eagle

@SimonGill it's not too bad. Mostly it's working within the confines of our custom prebuilt tools. I'm having to mod some of them to suit my purposes (and hopefully be useful to us in the future). Things like text boxes that only show up when certain conditions are met.

it's nothing too complex tbh, but it's fun nonetheless

Simon Gill

Heh, you probably feel a twinge of my pain then :P Trying to do a relatively simple hiding of a flash video player behind a titlecard.

You'd think it was simple....

wax eagle

@SimonGill display:none; :P

DForck42

@waxeagle fun

Simon Gill

@waxeagle Well, that'll hide it alright :P

wax eagle

20:31

@SimonGill and I'm lucky enough to have an OnChange even to respond to :)

Simon Gill

Always helps!

DForck42

so i accidentally deleted a user's database because their ticket was confusing

but it was on a server that i've been trying to get them to migrate their crap off of (it was just to test something, but they're using it as production)

well it's not being backed up currently, so i can't restore what i accidentally deleted. to be honest i have no sympanthy though since i've tried to get them to migrate twice so far

wax eagle

@DForck42 lol

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