The Stone Bone Mound

Here is my entry to this year's One Page Dungeon Contest. With a working title of "negative space dungeon", it's a solution to a thought experiment which came to me, as do all of the best ideas, while walking on the moors: what if I were to use all of the dungeon map, and not just the white bits. As part of the process of making it, I learnt how to draw a labyrinth, which turns out to be super simple and is also super rewarding: I sometimes draw them just for relaxation now.

Here it is: The Stone Bone Mound

Naming Things

The Ship of Yoharneth-Lahai by Sidney Sime

After a lecture at Cornell in which Lord Dunsany had mentioned his longtime collaborator, the artist Sidney Sime, somebody said what a perfect name Sime was for him. “I don’t know,” said Dunsany; “I think Rhibelungzanedroom would suit him better.”

I have recently been reading Lord Dunsany and Clark Ashton Smith's short stories. They're full of names like Yoh-Vombis, Ubbo-Sathla, Thlūnrāna and Karna-Vootra (alongside plenty of purple prose). Exotic, huh? Hmm.

Weird and wonderful (presumably) made-up names like these proliferate in fantasy RPG-land. Usually packed full of Zs, Ks, Qs, hyphens, and dïạćrîtĩcŝ, this Khazad-dûmbing-down of names does very little for me. These names have no resonance, and tell me nothing except "you tried to make this name sound weird". As a result they all end up sounding much of a muchness, interchangeable letter-mush. And are almost never memorable.

"The names used in the adventure are a complete bricolage signifying no particular human culture. In fact they are all the names of caves." - Patrick Stuart, Deep Carbon Observatory

I've found that using pre-existing words, perhaps with the odd letter changed here and there, makes for far more satisfying and memorable names. Electric Bastionland does a very good job of this, suggesting names for each of its failed careers which, although not entirely familiar, are suggestive and simple to remember. There are many potential sources for names, from Patrick's cave names via place names, technical and domain-specific terms, body parts... not to mention the zillions of lists of baby names out there. The names of climbing routes have an exotic but resonant charm of their own and (perhaps unsurprisingly) remind me of the spaceship names of M John Harrison and Iain M Banks. And I'm reminded of a story of a South American country where the naming of babies after components of car engines became so popular that it had to be banned (I may name my next character Carburettor O'Sump).

Despite this, it's not long since I advocated using the names SsShrp, SvyrySshp, and FssSuSshs. So please take everything that I say with a pinch of salt.

Update: here is another great blog post about naming places in RPGs.

Old Maps & Ordnance Survey

 

I love real-world maps. There's just so much you can do with them.

In the mid-80s, I was part of a very short-lived play-by-mail game set in a a post-apocalyptic future. Each player controlled a tribe in a future Britain. On joining the game, you were sent a tiny square of 1:25,000 OS map. Mine was on a moor somewhere in the north of England, crossed by a line of electricity pylons.

The idea that everywhere on the Ordnance Survey map had a parallel in this game world blew my mind. It had that feeling of endlessness that was part of so many of my childhood fantasies. And anyone could get hold of the maps, but until you'd explored them in the game world you could only imagine what part of that future territory they represented.

When I started writing my Peakrill campaign last year, I stole this idea. My campaign is set in a fictional Peak District, and so the OS maps of the Peak District form part of my source material. I'm redrawing the maps, partly to simplify them, partly for the pure pleasure of drawing maps. But I could just as well have used the originals. Old maps are even nicer than the modern ones, and there are some great out-of-copyright OS maps available on Open Street Map. 

Maps can also be a great source of inspiration for naming things. One of my favourite writers, M John Harrison, does this often, especially in his Viriconium books (I have written before about how much the naming of things in Viriconium has affected me). I only recently realised that Canna Moidart, some time Queen of the city, is a place in Scotland.

Almost all of my D&D characters have been named after places in the Peak District - notably Bleaklow and more recently Bolsterstone. Harrison himself had a character called The Youlgrave in, I think, Viriconium Nights - named for the Derbyshire Peak town.  

The map may not be the territory, but nor is it merely a single-function object. What other uses do you put real-world maps to in your RPGs?