The Blue Room Blog: RPGs, Fantasy Cartography, Cooking, Fonts, Stuff.
Feeling the Heartbeat of the Cumberland Style While I’ve been groping around for the tools and language for HTT (the High-Trust Traditional style of play Cumberland is devoted to) for as long as I’ve been a gamer, I’ve only blathered about it openly since the days of Google Plus, that platform Google hit-and-quit back in the day. And my methods of trying to convey what it is have changed over the…
Over on the Dice Camp , groovy questioneer luxet asked a question both compound and substantial, so I'll treat it as a mailbag entry here on ye merrye blogge. The context is Hammondal: Light of the Candle Islands , that fantasy city guide I've been working on these last couple of years , and The Hammondal Campaign, a related book I've been working on these last few weeks. I'd recently yammered a…
A few days ago I did two unusual things, simultaneously. One, I ran a deliberate horror RPG, and two, I did it on one of those "Actual Play" video podcasts, where everyone can see just how much I've let my beard explode into crazy-drifter-man mode. My beard looks like I'm preparing to product-test the Column B item in a Stephen Colbert "Meanwhile" intro. But the beard, while distressing, isn't…
Well, it wouldn't do to let the whole of 2024 pass without a blog post on record, so I'll take this opportunity to look back over this year. It's been a rough one in many ways, but, as always, there are some nice things to note, too. Loss The loss of my Mom casts the longest shadow over the year, partly because she was awesome (dedicated her adult life to being a nurse and a respiratory therapist,…
We're almost out of 2023! This year has been the 30th Anniversary of Risus: The Anything RPG , the 20th Anniversary of The Risus Companion , and the 10th Anniversary of Risus 2nd Edition . As I write this, we're at the end of December, and I feel like I should raise a glass to Risus before the year is done. I've kept quiet so far because I think it would be unseemly , nowadays, for me to parade…
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - We've come to the final entry in the Lexicon series. If you're new, hi! - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Back in our very first entry, we met the goofy metaphor of the “Invisible Rulebooks,” the rules which can't be found in the "rules" part of the Book of Rules ... but they're still rules, because in an RPG, any fact with tactical relevance is the equal of a…
It’s time for another dip into the RPG Lexicon , where I explore the terms I use (for the concepts I need) to design RPG stuff. If you’re new to this peculiar series, you can check the tags for the whole caboodle , hit the Glossary page, or start with the Invisible Rulebooks . Today’s term gets us deeper into the heart of design: presumptive . In order to design a scenario for the kinds of RPGs I…
Hammondal is pure game-design (with bursts of writing) at this stage, so it's harder to blog about in some ways since there's less to look at, and a lot more abstraction, and lists, and abstractions of lists and lists of abstractions (really; I do that). The high-end supernatural stuff has taken a decidedly Slavic bent, as I always kind of assumed it might, but I wasn't really sure until it…
Sometimes, Cumberland Games & Diversions makes games. Sometimes, it's more about the diversions. I take it as a good sign that my silly moods are returning now and then. 😅 100 Names for an Albino Owl Familiar Formerly Named Oscar Who Needs Another Name Because the Party’s New Halfling Is Called Oscar and the GM Asked You to Change Your Owl as if It’s Your Fault Somehow the New Halfling Couldn’t…
I'm clearly confused by how Blogger works. I tried restoring another stack of articles I'd taken down, and Blogger posted them as all-new articles, which wasn't the intention. This is where I would love to add "no biggie I'll figure it out" but I'm not entirely sure I will 😅 Ah well. As long as I'm in here: I did finally have that surgery on my eyes the other day, and apparently it went very…
Correspondent Diederik Van Arkel made a request for more nitty-gritty posts on how I produce graphics, in response to my post about 1-bit images . I expect I'll do a lot of that over time, but I'll begin by describing what my Life Cycle of a Simple Risus Map only hints at: the way I construct a Risus map-graphic by working back-and-forth (and back, and forth, and back, and forth) between rasters…
Today I want to ramble about two closely-related decisions in RPG design, both relating to Hammondal. A couple of months ago, I realized that a significant portion of the city, especially among the Boranese mercantile cultures, are living puppet-people called the Mantoche, the "cloth-hearted," and other assorted slurs (some Imperials still call them Dudmen , an old name for scarecrows). These…
This evening I've been so saddened by the state of the world (and our own failing country in particular) that I worked on fonts. I have a kind of hierarchy based on available energy. When I'm feeling very much myself (enthused, excited by possibilities, bubbling over with energy and affection) that's when I'm most likely to dive headfirst into writing. RPG Writing is the most "Me" thing I can do,…
If you are (so-called) "pro-life," you're a piece of shit.
I've built my life around love, food, and roleplaying games. Love is still the greatest. 🥰 Food ... really isn't, due to health and dietary limitations (and being back in Colorado, where the food is often mediocre, middle-class-bland-pretentious, or both). 😟 But, silver-lining-ish: the current state of RPGs is helping me give Colorado food a second chance. 😆
I have Strong Opinions on matters of fantasy cartography. No shock, I know! One of those opinions is that you should never draw to fit the paper. The way I fight that tendency (because it can be really hard not to) is I do a lot of preliminary work on a much, much larger canvas than the target output. One of the other towns on the same island as Hammondal is called Choragus, and it's not nearly a…
This isn't normally a m using-about-Star-Trek sort of blog, but I've been enjoying the heck out of Star Trek lately, and last week's episode of Strange New Worlds was a new version of an old favorite, so that's got me musing. Spoilers ahead. When I say "an" old favorite, I don't just mean a single episode of Star Trek . I mean several episodes of Star Trek and a few of Doctor Who , and more…
The whole point of this blog-post is to mark that I've finally got all of Hammondal's street-names in place on the master map. There are, at final count, 195 named streets (there are even more named alleyways and closes and other storied passages, but finishing all that labeling is still a big deal to me) 😄 This is what the process looked like. It's very unthrilling: BUT ... you can't (or at…
I wake up each morning excited about Hammondal. I'm working on it constantly (or as constantly as asthma permits, lately) and it gives me that noisy popcorn brain where the elements are enjoying their teeny little explosions, bouncing and colliding and combining ... And then I'd go burble happily about it on Twitter, and have that enthusiasm bled out of me by that whole "burbling happily into the…
Cumberland Games is participating in the TTRPGs for Reproductive Rights bundle on itch, and it's a very, very, very large bundle (nearly 300 items) for five bucks (or more, if you've got more to give). It's got some adventures, some settings, some resources, a lot of creative oddities, some journaling and other solitaire games. It's a lot, and it's for a vital cause.…
The early, heady, research-heavy phase of an RPG project is, to me, the beginning of a rollercoaster ride. During that phase, I cram my eyeballs full of historical research, classic RPG works, genre research, fiddly real-world stuff like evaporation and waste from cisterns, the nature of long-term road maintenance, the precise conditions for fog, the chemistry of a peat bog, the many uses of wax,…
The main "poster" map of Hammondal is complete. It'll still evolve as the book progresses, of course, but it's nice to see it all together ... or even pointedly dissected. I've begun work on some building interior maps and accompanying exterior building elevations, and I've never drawn elevations before, so I'm at the kind-of-thrilling, kind-of-depressing "I am very very bad at this" phase with…
The Hammondal poster townmap is nearly done. What's preventing it from being declared a "complete draft" is boats. I've done multiple passes at "populating" the city's harbor and other waterlines with ships and boats, and each one has fallen short of my standards in one way or another. I'll keep poking at it between fontwork and other stuff. I hope to begin some of the building interior maps over…
It's easy to preview maps in progress, and writing in progress, but the actual design in progress is such a ghost of a thing ... But I'll try: This evening we were hanging out at a local pizzeria, tapping at our devices, and I was doing some historical research for Hammondal, which is fantasy, of course, but I love plundering history for strange little details, and I ended up focused on the matter…
The short version of the story is that there was no surgery after all, because they wouldn't let Sandra enter the building with me, so I said no thanks. We'll hopefully find another place that will be more flexible about that stuff. 😳 Hope this finds you well.