Detailed Frontier Timeline – FY60.238 to FY60.267

Here’s the next installment of the timeline. This month sees the Frontier races start to explore a bit outward. Unfortunately for them, they stumble upon a heavily defended sathar starship construction center almost immediately.

I’m also trying out a new layout/design for the table let me know if you like this one or the old one better.

Date (FY)	Event
60.238	Discovery Squadron arrives at Stenmar (Kazak). This is their last stop in known space and the squadron will spend a week here making sure the ships are fully repaired and stocked for their journey.
60.239	Work begins by the Discovery Squadron astrogators to plot the first new jump route of their trip. Their destination is the star system OFS19, five light years away just above the jump route to the Cryxia system.
60.240	Resupplied, the HSS History’s Hope leaves Histran Station (Scree Fron) to return to the OFS224 system and then begin charting the next new jump in its journey.
60.241	Sathar starship construction center in the Liberty system completes another destroyer.
60.242	The assault scout for the K’aken-Kar system is completed at the Fromeltar starship construction center. It begins its travel to its home system.
60.243	After six days of waiting, the storm on Mt. Spire clears and the members of the Spire Dragons team begin their descent from the mountain.
60.244	Having made no detections of signals from OFS200, Strike Force Nova departs Hentz (Araks) for the Scree Fron system.
60.245	After over thirty days in the Kizk-Kar system with no further sign of sathar ships, the assault scouts from Kaken-Kar and Fromeltar begin their return trips to their respective systems.
60.246	Discovery squadron begins accelerating toward Void speed on its first jump out the Frontier and Rim region of space.
60.247	Investigations into the source of Ixiol have definitively linked it to Malco Enterprises on Outer Reach (Dramune). Unfortunately, the UPF charter prevents any direct action against the operation without express consent of the planetary government which denies the allegations.
60.248	Based on the findings regarding Ixiol production on Outer Reach (Dramune), Inner Reach (Dramune) implements a strong inspection policy against any ship coming from Outer Reach to search and inspect all cargo from that planet before it can be delivered on Inner Reach.
60.249	HSS History’s Hope arrives safely in the OFS224 system. Work begins to chart a jump to the neutron star in the OFS221 system, a jump of 7 light years.
60.250	Streel starship construction center (Pale, Truane’s Star) reaches 90% original capacity as repairs continue.
60.251	Discovery Squadron successfully jumps to the OFS19 system, a small M1 red dwarf star.
60.252	– After a day of deceleration into the OFS19 system, the Discovery Squadron detect radio signals from the direction of one of the inner planets. They appear to be sathar in origin. Subspace radio messages are dispatched back to the Frontier and Rim. – The squadron immediately changes vector to not be decelerating directly toward the inner system and the astrogators begin working on calculations for a return jump to Kazak.
60.253	After a day of collecting signals in the OFS19 system, at least 10 different sathar ships have been detected by Discovery squadron. Composition is unknown.
60.254	– Strike Force Nova arrives at Histran (Screen Fron). It will spend 11 days in system exercising around both Histran and Hasokar before departing back to the Araks system – Eight sathar ships begin accelerating out toward Discovery squadron. Two new ships have been identified but four have gone silent.
60.255	– The militia assault scouts that had been deployed to the Kaken-Kar system arrive back at their home systems. The crews are given some needed shore leave. – Calculations complete for the return jump to Kazak, and apparently detected by the sathar vessels, Discovery Squadron begins a hard acceleration to stop and reverse direction for a jump out of the system.
60.256	Discovery Squadron completes the stopping maneuver and begins acceleration out of the system. The sathar vessels are nearly half-way to their position and have a sizable speed advantage. It is questionable if the squadron can reach jump speed before the sathar ships catch them.
60.257	With a known path, the Spire Dragons team make it back to their camp at the base of the mountain after only fourteen days of hiking. All that is left to complete their expedition is to make it back to the coast.
60.258	– After two days of grueling high-g acceleration, Discovery Squadron manages to enter the Void for the jump back to Kazak just hours before the sathar vessels overtake them. Unfortunately, due to the haste of their departure, the Discovery Squadron, misjumps into a binary star system rather than Kazak. – Prior to their jump, the Discovery Squadron identify the sathar vessels as 1 heavy cruiser, 1 assault carrier, 1 light cruiser, 2 destroyers, 1 frigate, and 2 ships of a new design approximately the size of the Streel corvettes.
60.259	The HSS History’s Hope jumps into the OFS221 system. While they arrive much further out in the system than planned, the jump is considered a success. They will spend a week in the system studying the neutron star before returning to OFS224.
60.260	After two days of rest from the grueling jump and observations by the astrogators, the Discovery Squadron determines that it is in FS50 system between Kazak and Osak, having overshot their target. Work begins on calculating a jump back to the Kazak system just 4 light years away.
60.261	With preliminary jump calculations done and the crew mostly recovered from their days of high-g acceleration, Discovery Squadron begins accelerating toward jump speed for their return to Kazak.
60.262	– While they don’t know if the UPF ships detected the starship construction center in OFS19, the sathar high command decide to shift some of the assets there to increase the defenses. – Four destroyers from the Liberty system are dispatched to OFS19. Even with a high-speed traversal of the jump routes, this will take approximately 80 days. – A frigate, light cruiser, assault carrier, and eight fighters are dispatched from the sathar SCC#4 (OFS111) to reinforce OFS19 as well. Much closer, it is only a 20-day trip.
60.263	The new assault scout arrives in the K’aken Kar system. After a brief checkout, it takes up regular patrol duties.
60.264	The third saurian Ark ship is completed and begins its shakedown cruise.
60.265	– Strike Force Nova departs Hasokar (Screen Fron) to return to Araks. No signals from OFS200 were detected while in the system. – Discovery Squadron successfully jumps back to the Kazak system. They immediately begin broadcasting the details of their findings in the OFS19 system to both Rim and UPF contacts.
60.266	With receipt of the information about the sathar forces in OFS19, both Spacefleet and the Flight begin discussions on how best to deal with the sathar presence. While discussions are occurring, the Flight dispatches several ships to both Cryxia and Kazak.
60.267	HSS History’s Hope begins accelerating to return to OFS224 and chart the return leg of the jump connection the OFS221 and OFS224 systems.

And here’s the full timeline file:

DetailedFrontierTimeline-1 Download

Detailed Frontier Timeline FY60.207 to FY60.237

Running a little bit late today getting this up due to the long weekend and being completely swamped. This month sees the launch of the exploration project by the Yazira Heritage Foundation in an attempt to plot a route to the start suspected to be Yazira, the yazirian home world. We also see the sathar probing the Frontier, and the Spire Dragons finally reach the summit of Mt. Spire.

Date (FY)	Events
60.207	After weeks of debate, an initial charter for the Frontier Expeditionary Force is approved. A young Spacefleet commander, Space Commodore Karl “Rough” Rider (SFKH3), is given command of the operation and assigned the task of building the project.
60.208	Three days out from Hargut (Gruna Garu), the UPFS Nexus, Strike Force Nova’s communications ship, detects signals from the direction of the vast expanse that match the profile previously reported. Strike Force Nova aborts the jump to Araks and begins return to Hargut while monitoring the signals.
60.209	Discovery Squadron arrives at Faire in the Capella system. It will spend a week here meeting with Rim Coalition representatives to attempt to recruit a few members of The Flight to make the mission a joint UPF-Rim operation.
60.210	Assault scouts from the Fromeltar and K’aken-Kar system arrive at Zit-Kit (Kizk-Kar) and begin sweeping the system.
60.211	– The CDCSS Nightwind arrives in the Kizk-Kar system with an assault scout escort delivering a shipment of security robots to CDC operations on Zit-Kit. – The CDCSS Nightwind is set upon by the sathar ships and a running battle ensues as the freighter tries to escape and its escort uses its superior maneuverability to fend off the attackers. A distress call goes out and the two militia ships happen to be less than an hour away. – The CDC assault scout, having damaged the sathar destroyer considerably, is destroyed by the sathar vessels just as the militia assault scouts arrive. The militia assault scouts join the battle fresh and defeat both damaged sathar vessels.
60.212	Shakedown cruise of the second saurian Ark ship is complete. Refugees begin shuttling up to the ship.
60.213	Construction of the first of the TransTravel escort vessels, a Streel Red Thunder class Corvette, begins in the shipyards in Prenglar.
60.214	Strike Force Nova arrives back at Hargut (Gruna Garu). Collection and analysis of the signals continue. They seem to be coming from OFS200, and the signal is often masked by emissions from the pulsar at OFS203 making observation difficult.
60.215	Construction of a pair of TransTravel Assault Scouts begin at the Triad shipyards
60.216	Sathar starship construction center near Fromeltar (SCC#4) completes a light cruiser.
60.217	HSS History’s Hope departs Histran (Scree Fron) on the first leg of what will most likely be a multi-year endeavor to attempt to chart a series of jumps to the star that he Yaziria Heritage Foundations now believes to be original yazirian home system. The first step will be an 8 ly jump to the OFS 224 system.
60.218	After just over a week of discussion, Discovery Squadron continues on its mission leaving the Capella system and headed toward Osak. While the Rim generally supports the mission, they are hesitant to officially contribute ships for fear of increasing sathar ire if problems arise.
60.219	Landing Day celebration held on Hentz (Athor) celebrating the anniversary of the Yazirian Exodus arriving in the Frontier region.
60.220	Having identified and isolated the transmissions, Strike Force Nova departs Hargut (Gruna Garu) to head to the Araks system, continuing its tour and looking to attempt to identify the signals in other systems.
60.221	With the ending of the winter season on Alcazzar, a CDC freighter, the CDCSS Trucker XIV, departs Triad (Cassidine) with crew and equipment to establish mining compound on Alcazzar (Rhianna) (SF4)
60.222	A new cutter is completed at the sathar starship construction center near Zebulon.
60.223	Loading complete, the second saurian ark ship departs into interstellar space.
60.224	Construction of another corvette for TransTravel begins at the Fromeltar shipyard.
60.225	The HSS History’s Hope arrives in the OFS 224 system, successfully plotting the outward segment of the jump. The crew will spend a few days observing the system while the astrogation team calculates the return jump.
60.226	A new destroyer is completed at the sathar starship construction center in the Liberty system.
60.227	Discovery Squadron arrives is the Osak system, where they will spend a two-day layover before continuing on to Kazak.
60.228	Spire Dragons begin their final ascent of Mt. Spire. Over 20 beings, with representatives from all seven major Frontier and Rim species, take part in this final ascent which is expected to take four days to reach the summit.
60.229	As Discovery Squadron is about to depart the Osak system, they are joined by two Humma-crewed vessels from Hum (Fockhrik). One is the equivalent of an assault scout, while the other is a small exploration vessel. Having heard of the mission, the humma are more than willing to take the fight to the sathar.
60.230	Strike Force Nova arrives at Hentz (Araks). No signals from OFS200 were detected on the inbound leg of the trip. The Strike Force will remain in the system for 14 days searching for signals from the system and conducting drills.
60.231	– Repairs at the CDC starship construction center bring capacity up to 75%. – A sudden and serious storm swirls around the summit of Mt. Spire requiring the Spire Dragons expedition to hunker down less than 1000m from the summit to wait out the storm. They dig in but are very exposed near the mountain’s peak
60.232	With repairs of the CDC starship construction center well underway and progressing, work on the CDCSS Mystic resumes
60.233	– After two days, the storm atop Mt. Spire finally clears. Four expedition members were lost during the storm, their shelters having blown away, presumably carrying them with it. The remaining team makes the final ascent reaching the summit about two hours after noon. – The team reaching the summit consisted of members of all seven Frontier and Rim races, although there was only one Osakar as the other two Osakar that were part of the summit team were lost in the storm. With another storm rapidly approaching, they take pictures and quickly begin their descent.
60.234	Construction of an assault scout for Trans Travel begins in the Minotaur (Theseus) shipyards
60.235	The CSCSS Trucker XIV arrives at Alcazzar (Rhianna) and begins shuttling crew and equipment to the surface. Cold conditions slow the initial construction while crews wait for slightly warmer weather.
60.236	The HSS History’s Hope successfully completes the return jump to the Scree Fron system fully charting the route to that system. They dock at Histran station to resupply and report the jump to the UPF. The proceeds from the jump registration will be used to help fund the mission.
60.237	The Spire Dragon summit team makes it safely back to their high-altitude base camp just hours before the new storm hits.

Here’s the full PDF:

DetailedFrontierTimeline Download

Printed Copies of the Expanded Frontier Map

There was enough interest in getting printed physical copies of the map that I’ve set up an ordering page for them. You can follow the link to get there or hit the “Order a Map” tab at the top of the page.

You can get the Player version, Referee version, or both. Price is $20 a map (including shipping) in the US and $40 international, with a discount if you order one of each. All the details are on the ordering page.

I’ll be taking pre-orders through the end of August 2019 at which point I’ll actually get the posters printed. Any posters ordered in this first round will be signed and numbered. If you want a copy, jump on over and get your order in.

Extended Frontier Map – final update – Referee’s Map

Okay, I had planned to do a different post this week as part of this month’s RPG blog carnival but that will have to wait. I decided instead to just push through and finish the Expanded Frontier Map instead.

Corrections

If you downloaded the color player’s map from last week’s post, go back and do it again. As I was working on the final map, I found a bunch of mistakes that I completely missed while working on last week’s map. Most of them are minor, like names overlapping jump lines, but a few of them are pretty bad like names overlapping each other or running over jump distances. In any case, I’ve fixed those and uploaded new maps to the links in that article.

Adding the Sathar

The only difference between this map and the previous one is that I’ve added in all the jump routes known by the sathar as well as some labels on the map that give the location of the sathar homeworld, their ten starship construction centers, and the location of their Tetrarch ruins complex similar to the one on Laco (If you are following the timeline posts, this is where the signal went out to and was returned from). I haven’t defined which of these systems are actually inhabited by sathar, I’m leaving that up to the individual referee to decide.

Let’s start by showing the black and white version of the map and then I’ll talk about how I filled it in.

Jump Routes

As you can see, most of the sathar systems are up and to the right of the Frontier. This is the their main population center. The tendrils that surround the Frontier tend to be more outposts and travel lanes than population centers.

In addition to the jump routes marked in red, it is assumed that the sathar know all the UPF routes marked in black as well.

The routes don’t extend to the left side of the map as the sathar stopped their expansion in that direction after encountering the Rim. They were also stopped by that big nebula in the upper left. I have plans for some of the star systems up in that area on the far side of the nebula.

I consider the jump routes along the bottom of the map, from Saurian space, past Liberty, into S’esseu space, and then up to Prenglar to be newly explored routes. In fact, in the current version of my background material, the starship construction center just south of PanGal, labeled SCC#1, is still under construction and hasn’t even started producing ships yet in my timeline project.

When I first made this map back in the 80’s, I didn’t have Zeb’s Guide and obviously none of the fan material existed so this region of space looked a little different on my original map (I should probably scan that in and post it for reference). But the idea was that these routes were established to give the sathar the jump route right into Prenglar in the Second Sathar War game in the Knight Hawks Campaign book allowing them to strike at the heart of the Frontier. In creating this map, I modified my original concept to work through these modified regions of space. It also provides an opportunity for interdiction as the UPF could potentially cut off some of the Sathar routes.

Starship Construction Centers

The numbering on the starship construction centers may seem a little odd and requires a little bit of explanation. I originally built this map for two purposes. The first was to give me a more strategic level view to write a Second Sathar War timeline, taking into account sathar ship production as well as the UPF ship production. I wanted to see how the balance of forces would work if you stuck to the rules on ship construction. This is now being realized in my timeline project.

The other was to provide a larger Frontier region for a big exploration campaign inspired by the Beyond the Frontier series of adventures (SFKH 2-4) where the PCs would explore out from Truane’s Star upward on the map. I have had the beginnings of that campaign in a notebook for literally decades. Maybe it’s time to dust it off and use it for material here on the blog.

It’s the former purpose that resulted in the numbering of the starship construction centers. I originally had the ones labeled 1-5 dedicated to the Second Sathar War effort. They were strictly producing military vessels with which the sathar would be attacking the Frontier. And I just started at the one connected to the Prenglar jump route and numbered them counter-clockwise.

SCCs number 6-9 were added in to provide “civilian” ship construction for the sathar population and exploration away from the Frontier. They are not labeled on my original map but were added in as part of this project. The final SCC, #10, was added as part of my timeline project to provide the production capacity for the Sathar offensive against the Saurians. I’ll probably do another post about the production capabilities of all these construction centers at some point in the future.

The Sathar Homeworld

The sathar homeworld is labeld on my original map. I had always envisioned it as a slightly cooler star than the sun with their home planet close relatively close in and warm and muggy. As such, I’ve given it a K4 spectral type on the map. Someday I might actually design and write up the system.

The Final Color Map

Now that we have the background information covered and everything else in place, it was time to make the final color version of the map.

This was done in two steps. First, I made a separate data file that had all the star systems again but instead of the jump routes known to the UPF, it contained the jump routes known only to the sathar. Using this, I generated a new map.

Since the map is generated with the jump routes on different layers, the second step was to just open the new map, and copy everything off the jumps route layer, open the Player’s map, create a new layer for the sathar jumps, and paste them in. I then had to adjust the position of all the features after pasting them in but that was just a matter of looking up the position in the original image and entering that in to the final image.

Of course, it really wasn’t that simple. The last step in adding the jumps was to adjust the color. The program makes all jumps in white. I simply changed the color to red in the final map. But that does give me an idea for an enhancement in the program, namely allowing the user to specify the link color.

The next step was to add the sathar specific labels. To do this I created a second names layer that I could add in the labels for the sathar homeworld, the starship construction centers, and the Tetrarch complex. Since the sathar jumps and labels are on separate layers, I can turn them on and off as need to make a player or referee version of the map as needed.

The final step was simply clean up. I went through the entire map and moved star labels and jump route distance labels in order to have the map as clean and clear as possible and fix and small issues the program has in drawing the labels. This is where I discovered the errors in the original version of the Player’s map and fixed them. And since the sathar names and jumps were on separate levels in the image, it was easy to re-export that map.

And that was it. The map is now done. (Unless I find some more typos as I start using it.) Here it is in all it’s glory.

The sathar jump routes don’t quite show up at the resolution of this preview. Click for the full sized version (~4.5 MB). There is also a very high resolution version (~20 MB) available.

The Code

Again, if you want to play with the code and make your own maps, it is written in Python and you can grab it from my GitHub repository. I’m going to continue to work on this code. This will be to add in the remaining features it’s lacking to make it more user friendly such as command-line options, the jump route colors, and creation of nebula, but those will fall under a different article title going forward. If I get really ambitious, I might even add in a GUI to make it a windowed program instead of a command line one. We’ll see. I’m curious how much interest there would be in that project.

Final Thoughts

This has been a fun project. I’ve really enjoyed doing it. As you can probably tell by the number of posts I’ve made. And I love the look of the final map. If you see any errors, feel free to let me know and I can update the map to correct them.

I think if I was doing this again, I would make the map dimensions a little different. This map was original made by taping together six sheets of graph paper (landscape orientation). while that ended up with a nearly square work area, it wasn’t quite. The map is 90 ly wide by 100 ly tall. If I were to do it again, I’d make it either perfectly square, or conform to a more standard aspect ratio.

I’m also curious if anyone would be interested in a printed, poster sized version of the map. 24×27 inches. This is actually what prompted my thoughts on the dimensions. As a purely digital product, the aspect ratio doesn’t matter. But when you try to print it, you start to run into problems. I’ve been looking at possible printing options, and while most of them want you to use a standard aspect ratio (16×24, 24×36, 12×18, or square), I have found a few that would let me print it to exact size. Final costs would be in the $15-$25 dollar range for the 24×27 inch one. If that is something that would interest you, let me know in the comments. I might do this as a small Kickstarter for those that are interested.

And that wraps up the the Extended Frontier Map project. Let me know your thoughts, ideas, and any remaining questions you have about the project and let me know if you’d like to see more things like this in the future.

Expanded Frontier Map – update 5 – The Player Map

Woo-hoo, we’re approaching the end of this particular project. In this update we present the final* “Player” version of the Expanded Frontier Map, both the color and black and white versions. This version just contains the systems and jump routes known by the UPF as presented in the rules, modules, and some fan content.

(* Final assuming I don’t find any typos and such)

Changes

First up, as I was generating the data for the color version of the map, I realized that there were just way too many neutron stars on the map. There’s one on the original AD map, five on the Zeb’s Guide map, and I had added in a couple dozen or so more.

One is too many for this volume of space. You might find one (anything is possible) but beyond that is really stretching it. However, since the five are in the original materials, I left them in. I also left in two of the ones I added in the lower left of the map. This puts all the neutron stars in the Frontier region and towards the Vast Expanse. Maybe there’s an explanation for that.

For all the other neutron stars, I replaced them with multiple star systems. That changed two dozen stars systems from neutron stars to multiple star systems, some with as many as five stars.

In comments on the previous update, it was pointed out that I forgot to label Mechan, the world in Zeb’s Guide where the Mechanons fled to when they left Volturnus in the Zeb’s Guide timeline. I don’t typically include that event in my games which is why I probably forgot to include it. Mechan is just up and to the right of Scree Fron on the map. That just required changing the label.

In fixing the labeling on Mechan, I also noticed that the Zeb’s Guide map adds another star 3 light years above Mechan near Capella. So I added a star in there as well.

As far as I can tell, that fixes everything.

The Black and White Version

So that gives us the new and updated black and white version of the map.

The Color Version

Creating the color version was mostly a matter a generating a large number of random systems and then positioning them on the map. Since I had to manually update all the positions, that took a couple hours of work to get all the data into the file and the coordinates updated.

After that, I could generate the rough map with my mapping software. The next step was to go through by hand and tweak the position all the labels that needed to be moved. There actually weren’t that many, I just had to move a few names and a few of the jump distances so that they were not overlapping any of the jump route lines. That cleaned up in just a few minutes.

The other major portion of the map was creating all the nebula. Since I had the outlines of them on the black and white map. I just copied (and scaled) those outlines to the color map. In a few places where the B&W map has little wisps of nebula next to the big ones, I connected them as the process I use to create the nebula would make those wisp-like areas.

This actually took less time than I was expecting. Since I was working zoomed out on the map, the rendering went fairly quickly. Whenever I zoomed in, however, it would take some time to redraw the screen due to all the detail in the nebula. From the earlier sample map, which was zoomed in, I had experienced a bunch of slow down and was expecting the same here. I thought I was going to have to do the nebula on a series of layers so that I could turn them off and on. That wasn’t actually necessary and this process only took a couple of hours instead of the several hours I was expecting.

The hardest part for me was picking colors. The truth is that there probably wouldn’t be any nebula in this part of space but since they look cool and were included in the original material, they are part of the map. I tried to pick colors for them based on the stars that were around as most of the nebula would be reflection nebula since none of the stars in the area put out that much ionizing radiation to cause the gas to glow on its own. I’m not completely happy with it but I like it. This is something that might get revisited at some future date.

The next step was adding in a legend. This also might get redone in the future to include each of the different stellar colors but it is good enough for now.

Finally, I decided I didn’t like the flat black background but wanted there to be a bunch of faint “distant” stars speckling the background of the image. To get that effect was pretty simple. I just applied the Textures->Cracked Glass filter to the black background layer. I’ll admit that I got lucky here and it applied the exactl level of background noise that I wanted. There are other filter combinations that would work as well but that was good for now.

With that done, I signed it and exported the final image.

This is a scaled down image. Clicking on the image above downloads the medium resolution one which is the same scale as the black and white map (4 MB) There is also a full, super high-res version (18 MB).

Up Next

The next step is to do the Sathar worlds and jump routes. Since all the stars are there, all I need to do is add in the links and update some labels. That will be the topic of the next and final (at least for a while) update.

Share you questions, comments, and impressions in the comment are below.

Expanded Frontier Map – update 4

Okay. I’ll admit that this project has taken over my brain. It’s been fun for me to work on it and dust off some of my programming skills. This will be another small update as I haven’t had a lot of free time this past week but enough to get some work done. If you haven’t read them yet, the early posts are here: original post, update 1, update 2, & update 3

The good news is that I think there will just be two more updates and we’ll have the completed map. There might be a few more after that for upgrades to the software but those will probably be a bit more spaced out. Here’s what’s left to do:

Random generation of spectral types (this post)
Complete “Alpha Dawn” map (this post)
Complete “Player’s Version” of the Extended Frontier map (update 5) – This is the full color version of the B&W map I’ve been posting
Complete “Referee’s Version” of the Extended Frontier map (update 6) – This will be a version of the map with all the Sathar system labels and jump routes included.

I’ve decided that to get to the completed map, I’ll just do the nebulae by hand. I already have the shapes drawn on the B&W version of the map so it’s easy enough to transfer them and do the render. Getting the software to do the nebulae will be a future project.

If there is interest, I could also do a remake of the Zebulon’s Guide to Frontier Space version of the Frontier map in this style. While I’ve modified my map to match most of the named systems on the Zeb’s Guide map, they are not exactly the same (for reasons discussed in earlier posts) and the unexplored stars do no match between the two maps. If there is a large clambering for it, I’ll do that as a future project.

Let’s get on with this week’s update:

Random Stellar Types

After I had the program interpolating the colors between the base spectral types, the next step was to sit down and code up the random generation of those spectral sub-types. I needed this to randomly fill in all the “unexplored” systems with a proper mix of spectral types. The explored systems are way too heavily weighted toward the F & G stars and there are a few too many (i.e more than about 3) for the number of stars in the region but that’s okay.

In any case, I wanted the relative numbers to be approximately correct based on real stellar distributions so I busted out data on the stellar mass functions and after a bit of math came up with a d100 table for the various main sequence spectral types (A, B, G, etc.) to determine the relative ratio of their sub-types (A0, A2, A4, etc). Once I had the numbers it was a simple matter to code up a few subroutines to generate the values. There are some refinements I could make in the future but this is good enough for now.

Complete “Alpha Dawn” Map

Once the program was generating random spectral types in the correct distribution, it was time to finish the smaller map corresponding to the Frontier provided in the original printing of the game and the later “Alpha Dawn” reprint (named to distinguish the core rules from the Knight Hawks supplement).

I did this by running a random map and then taking the spectral types generated and applied them to the remaining systems in the original map. Next I took the resulting file and edited it to tweak the positioning of some of the labels so that they weren’t overlapping any of the jump lines or other text. Finally, I took the nebulae I had created for the earlier version and imported them into this map. This gave me my final version of the smaller map.

The full version of this image is 2250×1750 px (1.8 MB). You can grab an even higher resolution version (6750×5250, 9MB) if you want.

I might revisit this in the future and do the nebula with different colors but for all intents and purposes, this one is done.

In making this I realized that the stars in system FS18 are really bright. It’s an M0 Giant and A0 main sequence star in a binary system. Combined, they are ~39x brighter than the sun and only 2 ly from Athor. That means they would appear to be at -5.27 magnitude star in the night sky. For reference, the brightest star in our sky, Sirius, is only -1.46 (small, more negative numbers are brighter). Venus, at its brightest, is a -4.2 magnitude object. That means that this star appears 2.5 times brighter than Venus at it’s brightest and about 30 times brighter than Sirius.

The Full Map

Now that the AD map is done, it’s time to start working on the full Extended Frontier map. I knew I was going to need a lot of random star systems so I generated a big random map with the program to get a good number of star systems with the correct spectral type distribution. I’ll use this whenever I need a random system value.

That done, the first step was to get the data for all the various labeled systems on the map. I already had the ones from the AD map I just needed to add the others. The data for these systems came from a variety of places. For the systems included on the Zeb’s Guide map, I used the spectral types listed in Zeb’s Guide after verifying that they made sense when mentioned in the modules (which usually just gave a color). I didn’t find any real issues so I just used the Zeb’s Guide values.

For the Saurian systems (east of the Frontier), the spectral types were taken from the article “The Sauria Sector” published in the Frontier Explorer, issue 4.

The data for the S’sessu systems (south of the Frontier), the spectral types were taken from the article “Phri’sk Anyone? Detailing the S’sessu Homeworlds” in issue 16 of the Frontier Explorer (p 23 – I haven’t gotten around to putting the individual articles of that issue on-line yet). However, that article only listed spectral types for two of the systems. For the other three, I selected random spectral types in the G & K spectral types from the list of random systems.

With all the star systems in place, I added in all the jump routes connecting those systems. I discovered I had a limit in my code that would not print a jump if it was over 14 light years in length. This was preventing the jump between Gruna Garu and Lynchpin from being drawn so I had to fix that bug. I still don’t let the random process create jumps that long but if you’re entering the data for a map and want a longer connection, the software won’t stop you anymore.

This also required me to change a couple of things. If you’re familiar with Zeb’s Guide, you may notice that the connection between Zebulon and Capella is now a straight line at 9 ly instead of a broken line at 10 ly. The broken line never made any sense given the Knight Hawks rules so I’ve done away with it. The other change was the connection between the S’sessu worlds of Kashra’sk and Minan. The map in the Frontier Explorer lists the distance as 12 ly but it is actually only 11. That is fixed on this map.

The next step is to now add in all the other systems on the map. To do this, I simply pull a system entry from the big random list for each star system on the map and remove the system from the big list so I don’t reuse it. I started in on that process, filling in the systems to the southwest of the Frontier but haven’t finished entering everything else yet. That will be the subject of the next update. However, here’s the big map as it currently stands.

Click for the full resolution version. This map is 4550×5050 px and ~1MB in size

This is just the raw, software generated map, with no tweaking or extra annotations on it. Over the next week or two, I’ll start adding in the rest of the stars and the nebulae. This map covers an area 90 ly wide and 100 ly high which should give your players plenty of area to explore if they need to get out of the Frontier and into the wilds.

That’s it for now

That’s where the project currently stands. If you have any thoughts, questions, or suggestions, let me know in the comments below.

Expanded Frontier Map – update 3

It’s been a fairly busy couple of weeks between family vacation and recovering from said vacation. I’ve been working on the map project but a lot of it has been behind the scenes and not anything that is easily displayable although some progress has been made. Additionally, I took the first steps toward getting the Murder at Rosegard adventure actually written up into a coherent document but again, nothing to display. So on to the map work.

Working on the Nebulae

This first bit definitely falls into the non-visible bit. I began implementing code that will allow me to draw the nebula. Over the past couple of weeks I figured out an good algorithm to use to trace the grid boxes containing the nebula and dived a bit into the code for SVG graphics to understand how to draw curvy lines.

There is nothing to see here yet but the next steps that I’ll be working on are:

Write the code that draws the curvy boundaries for a predefined nebula region
Write code to read in nebula regions from the data file
Write code to randomly generated nebula regions from some to-be-specified parameters.

That will probably be the content of the next update.

Stellar colors

The other major bit I worked on was adding in code to interpolate the colors of the stars based on their actual spectral type. Originally, the code could just handle a few spectral types: B0, A0, F0, G0, K0, & M0 plus a few special types like brown & white dwarfs, black holes, and neutron stars. That is what you’ve been seeing in the maps to date.

The colors for those stars were picked partially to be visually accurate and partially to aesthetically pleasing. Basically I had to exaggerate the color variations between the stars as almost all of them would appear white to the human eye. The interpolated colors will smoothly shift between these predefined colors.

What I wanted was to be able to handle any spectral type, i.e. G2, F3, K7, M5, etc. To do this I needed to interpolate the colors down the spectral sequences. It took a bit of reworking the code to do the interpolation and that’s were I spent most of the time I had this week.

Once that was done, I went back through and put in the actual spectral types for all of the named Frontier sector stars. These were derived from a variety of places. In the original rules, the stars were just given colors which correspond roughly to spectral types. Then there were a few more details in the published modules. Zebulon’s Guide to Frontier Space provided actual spectral type designations for all the stars in the Frontier. However, some of those spectral types in Zeb’s Guide didn’t agree with the previously published material.

This isn’t the first time I’ve tried to do this and luckily, the last time I did it, I recorded all the information. That was done on my Star Frontiers Network Wiki in the Frontier Travel Guide section. So for most of the stars, all I had to do was go through the pages on the wiki and grab the spectral types I had already figured out for each star.

With those code updates, and the updated spectral type values, you get the following map of the Frontier.

Frontier map with the stars of the named systems having the correct colors

There are a couple of things missing from this map. First, I didn’t put the nebula back on as this was a test of the spectral colors. Plus I didn’t do anything for Padda or the star systems labeled with the FSnn designations. Those are still at the “0” spectral types. I will get to those but there is another bit of the code I want to update first (more below).

Oh yea, @Fiddleback on Twitter mentioned he couldn’t see his house and I promised him a zoom box.

The Full Map

The other thing I worked on was getting everything set up for the big map of the full extended Frontier region. This mainly involved just translating the systems in this map to the larger canvas.

There’s no difference between this one and the one above, it is just situated on the canvas is the correct position to correspond to the big black and white map. Over the next little while I’ll be adding in all the other systems as I extract their coordinates from the big map into the data file that generates this map. Watch for updates in the future.

What’s Next?

I’ve already mentioned the work on the nebulae that I have on deck. On the spectral type front there are a few things I want to add there as far as functionality goes.

First, (this is the bit I hinted at above) I want to add code to the random system generation to properly generate the 0-9 subtypes. The relative ratios of major types (A, G, M, etc.) are accounted for but I need to get the relative numbers withing the major types correct. I have the data (or can get it) to do that, I just need to crunch the numbers and write the code. Once that’s done, I’ll add real spectral types to the systems labeled with the FSnn designation and really be ready to generate the full map.

With the spectral types the other things I need to do include:

Add code for drawing non-main sequence stars. Right now it handles all the main sequence stars (luminosity class V) and some giants and super-giants (luminosity classes III and I) but it may need to handle more when I get the full random generator done.
Add some interpolation of stellar sizes for main sequence K stars. Right now they are set to a fixed size but I’d like the later K stars to be a bit smaller than the G and early K stars and approach the size of the M stars. Again, the data is there in the program, I just need to code the interpolation.
Fix the color interpolation for M stars. It’s not obvious in the map that there is a problem since I don’t have any M stars that aren’t M0 but as you progress down the spectral sequence I’m interpolating to the colors of the Brown Dwarfs which are a pinkish color (In real life they’d be a really dull red which doesn’t stand out on the map). I want to make the interpolation go to a deeper red instead of pink. This should be a really quick fix. I know what needs to be done, I just need to code it up and test it.

Since I can do the nebula by hand for the Extended Frontier map, this work on the spectral types is where I’ll be focusing my efforts for the next little while. Once those updates are done, I’ll have everything I need to make the full-color Extended Frontier map.

The Code

Again, If you want to play with the code as I’m working on it, you can grab the current version from my StarMapGen repository on GitHub. This is still not the most user-friendly program to run as it it requires coding in all the parameters by hand before running but that’s on my todo list as well.

Expanded Frontier Map – update 2

Okay, this project has obviously grabbed my interest as I’ve spent way too much time on it recently. I’m actually writing this before last week’s post goes live and I had to force myself to write the campaign post rather than this one. If you haven’t read the first two parts of this series, they are here: part 1, part 2. So what’s new?

Names

First up is names. I had mentioned that I needed to do some tweaking on the black and white version of the map before I was ready to release it with all the stars labeled with their designations. I sat down and did that one day while my daughter was at soccer practice. That gives us the updated big map.

All of the systems (and a few just on the edge) of the original Frontier map (from the Alpha Dawn rules) received an “FS” designation for “Frontier Sector” The few beyond were either afterthoughts that I missed the first time around or ones give that designation in the Beyond the Frontier series of modules. There are 56 of those systems.

All the other systems on the map received an “OFS” designation for “Outer Frontier System”. There ended up being 227 systems with that designation for a total of 283 star systems on the map. The OFS designation dates from when I first made this map way back in the 80’s.

After reading the Beyond the Frontier series of modules, I had the idea for a campaign where the PCs ran an operated a series of exploration missions into the region that Zeb’s Guide declared to be the Rim. I created this map and designated the stars beyond the original Frontier with OFS numbers. The numbers on this map do not correspond to those original numbers (especially since I had to move some systems around to match the Zeb’s Guide map) but that’s where the concept came from.

This is the map of the Expanding Frontier. If I ever place adventures or locations in one of these systems, I’ll use these designations so you can find them.

In addition to adding designations to the larger map, I added the capability into my map generation program to print out the names of the star systems. Currently it randomly generates a name based on the systems coordinates in the random generation portion but reading in data from the file for the Frontier I was able to give the actual names of the systems, either their name or the FS designation. Running the program with that capability results in the following map.

I’m using the Copperplate Gothic Bold font for the text. I just really like the look of that font with its small caps and serifs. It’s the same font I used on the black and white version of the map.

Again, I’ve done nothing to tweak the positions of any of the labeling on this map. That will be a final step that will have to be done by hand. Another behind-the-scenes change I made to the code was to have the output created on different layers. Thus the black background is one layer, the grid is another, the stars a third, the jumps a fourth, and the names on a fifth. That way you can turn each layer on or off as desired when generating the final PNG or JPG file from the SVG file.

Star Scaling

You may also notice that the neutron star jets are larger compared to the one in the previous post. I figured out how to properly scale the symbol for the neutron star to match the others. There were some other internal tweaks to the way I did the scaling in the program that make it more robust and will allow me to do things in a more controlled manner in the future.

Nebulae

With the scaling and the names done, it was time to tackle the nebula.

In the interest of seeing if I could just do the final map if the program drew the stars, names, and jumps (since I have nebula shapes on the black and white map), I decided to sit down and play with Inkscape to see if I could come up with a way to get a nebula effect using the filters built into the program.

I had looked around on-line and there were some examples of how to do a full image, or do make a random nebula and cut it out to paste into your image, but nothing that would take an already determined shape and make something that looked like a nebula out of it. So I was on my own.

This is where I spent way too much time on the project in the past week but I was having too much fun to stop. In the end I did come up with a way to make nebulae that I think I can reproduce within the program itself. It will be specific to rendering the file in Inkscape, but since that’s a free, open-source program, I don’t feel bad about making that a requirement.

Here’s a sample nebula created by this process (which I’ll describe in a minute).

Once I figured out the filter combination to use, I was excited and tried it on the full color map using the nebula shapes from the black and white one. And it failed miserably.

It turns out that the patterns generated depend on the scale of the map and my maps generated by the program were using pixels as the scale while all the test nebula I had been doing were using millimeters, which were off by a factor of almost 4. So I was getting way too much variation across the shapes.

So I had a couple of choices. I could either take the shapes, put them in a document with the correct (mm) scale, generate the nebula patterns, and copy them back into the final document. Or I could figure out a way to make it work in the computer generated document.

I spend a lot of time playing with the filters and making changes to the filter settings trying to come up with something that would work in the programmatically generated maps but in the end I couldn’t find anything that was easy to apply that I really liked. (Or even something that was hard to apply that I liked). In the end I changed my program to output the files, still using pixels, but using millimeters as the scale parameter and things work out just fine.

Using the shapes from the black and white map, and playing with different color schemes to test them out, gave me the following map.

This is first attempt, the final map will have different colors and shapes in the end but I wanted to see what it potentially would look like and play with the color combinations to see what I liked.

The nebulae really bog down the rendering when they are all done so I’ll probably put each of them on their own layer that I can turn on and off as needed to speed things up.

How to make a nebula

So how exactly did I make these? Once I figured it out, it’s actually fairly quick. First, draw a rough shape of the nebula.

Next, apply two Texture filters. The first is the “Crumpled Plastic filter” (Filters->Textures->Crumpled Plastic). Which gives us something like this:

This isn’t the most intuitive filter to apply but bear with me. The various ridges and color variations provide the structure of the nebula when we get to the next step. Next apply the “Watercolor” texture (Filters->Textures->Watercolor). And now we have a nebula.

You’ll notice that it shifts the shape somewhat. That’s fine by me because I’m going for the effect more than the exact shape. If the shape is more important, there’s another filter you can use which I’ll talk about below. It also expands the nebula a bit and can make it go outside the original area.

Next we need to add the color tones. This takes several steps. First duplicate the nebula and change the color of the second one. In this case, I’m changing it to purple (#ff00ff).

Next shrink the “interior nebula” with the new color. I did this using the Path->Inset command ( ctrl-‘(‘ ), applying it 2-5 times. Then select the “outer nebula”, i.e. the original one, and make it a little larger using the Path->Outset command ( ctrl-‘)’ ), again applying 2-5 times. If that makes everything too big, you can leave the outer nebula size alone and just shrink the inner one. You might also play with the opacity of the “inner” nebula and maybe change the fill from solid to a radial gradient. Just play with it to get something you like.

In this particular case, I expand the outer nebula 4 times, shrunk the inner nebula 5 and gave the inner nebula a radial gradient on it’s fill instead of it being solid.

Add in the black background and your done.

One thing I discovered is that if you move the shape around on the image, it changes the shape of the nebula. If you want to move it around without changing the shape, you have to first copy it and then re-paste it back into the image. That locks it’s parameters and you can no longer change it.

Also, another filter that you can use for a slightly different effect, either in place of the crumpled plastic filter or the watercolor one, is the Inkblot filter (Filter->Textures->Inkblot…). This one has some knobs you can tweak so you’ll have to play with it a bit more. If you want to keep the shape of the final nebula closer to the original shape drawn, you might want to use this filter instead of Watercolor with low horizontal and vertical inlay parameters. I just like the combination above a little bit better.

The great thing about these filters is that you can store them directly into the SVG file. So I should be able to make the nebula directly in the files although they will now only work with Inkscape instead of any generic SVG rendering program. To me that’s a small price to pay.

Up Next

The next step on this journey is to get program to read and write the nebula shapes from a file. Eventually, I’ll also want it to randomly generate nebula on the map in places where there aren’t any stars or jump routes. I have ideas on how best to do that, I just need to play around with the code to make it happen.

How do you like the nebula on the color map? Which color combinations do you like best? Are there others that you think I should try? Let me know in the comments below.

Expanded Frontier Map – update 1

I had planned to to have the next part of the module campaign write-up as the post this week, but that’s taking me a bit longer than I had planned and I spent more time than I should have on updates to the Expanded Frontier Map so I’m writing about that instead.

As I said in my last State of the Frontier post, one of the things I want to work on this year is a full color version of the Expanded Frontier map. So while I was on vacation, I fired up my laptop and started on that. This post will detail some of the things I’m working on and what to look for in the future.

Corrections

The first thing I had to do was fix some errors I noticed in my original expanded map. Mainly, I had left off some labels on a few of the star systems. I haven’t posted a version of the map with those labels yet but will in the future. So I added those in.

The other omission I had to correct was one I noticed in creating entries for the Detailed Frontier Timeline. I was missing a necessary jump route for the sathar. So I added that in as well. Again, I haven’t posted that version of the map so the correction just appears on my “Referee’s Copy” at the moment.

Next, I decided to shift the system I was labeling as Belnafaer (from the SFAD5: Bugs in the the System module) to the same one that the TSR folks did in the Frontier map in Zeb’s Guide. The choice was arbitrary and both my selection and theirs matched the description given in the module. I figured it was better to disagree as little as possible with the “canon” material. (I’m still not moving Starmist or Rhianna though).

Finally, I discovered that the labeled distance from Madderly’s Star to White Light was wrong. The map labels it as 6 but it is actually 8. (The map in Zeb’s Guide has it correct but the one in the Dramune Run is wrong as well.) This was actually discovered in making the color map as described below. So I fixed that. It’s funny, but I’ve been playing Star Frontiers for 35 years now and never noticed that typo.

Those were the corrections I made. While you can’t see two of them, this is the resulting map:

The inner blue box is the original Frontier map area from Alpha Dawn while the larger blue box is the area covered by the map in Zebulon’s Guide to Frontier Space

I also fixed up some internal errors, mostly labels on the wrong layers, but that has no impact on the map itself. I had planned to post the version with all the star designations, but in looking at them, I realized they need some cleaning up on their positioning so it wasn’t quite ready to go for this post. I need to spend about an hour tweaking things.

Moving on to Color

Star symbols from the map generation program

As I mentioned before, I had written a program to randomly generate sector maps. The stars were represented using the symbols in the chart to the right. The second column showing how multiple star systems are represented.

As written, the program only generated random systems and wrote basic map data out to a file. What I needed was the ability to read in that output file and build the map from the data instead of randomly.

So that’s where I started. I had an output format, I just needed code to read that and convert it back into data that could be used for drawing the map. Along the way, I realized that I needed to change some things about the way the data was represented and stored in the program and output file as we well as needing to add storage for things like the name of the system.

Another thing I had to change was the printing of the Z-coordinate. The random map generation process creates star systems in 3 dimensions and labels each system with its Z-coordinate above or below the plane of the map. Since for the Frontier Map (at least initially) everything is on the same plane, there was no need to print little zeros by each star system. So I added a flag to turn off printing that coordinate on the map.

Generating the Data for the Frontier Map

With the code now ready to read data from a file and draw the map. I needed to generate the data for the Frontier map. As I’m building and testing the software, I figured I’d work with a smaller map so I’m just using the original Frontier Map from the Alpha Dawn rules.

There are 51 systems on that map. I determined the coordinates on the map (as the software sees them, currently measured from the upper right corner – that may change), and wrote those into a data file. That was the easy part.

The next step was to get spectral classifications for each of the systems. The inhabited systems were relatively easy. In the listing for each of the systems in the rule book, it gives a color for the star. At this point the program isn’t refined enough to break down the spectral types so a G0 star is represented the same as a G2 or G8 star. So I only had to approximate. Yellow stars got a G0 designation, orange stars got a K0 designation, white stars got an F0 designation, and red stars got a M0 designation. I used those since those are the spectral types that the program currently understands.

Next I went through and added in the spectral types for the stars that host the various planets of the modules and added in designations for them. Then, I had to go in and add in the designations for star systems in the Rim that were labeled in Zebulon’s Guide. Zeb’s Guide give full spectral types (F7, G3, K2, etc.) but for now, I just used the spectral type letter and not the number since the program can’t process those yet. (Note: if you compare the spectral types from Zeb’s Guide for the original Frontier worlds to the colors given in the Alpha Dawn rules, they don’t always agree. That’s something I’ll have to resolve later. For now, AD takes precedence.)

That covers all the “explored” systems. Note that I didn’t use the Zeb’s Guide data for the megacorp systems. I can always go back and add that but I don’t use those systems in my game. Finally for all the other systems, I had to randomly generate spectral types. To do that, I just generated a map with random values and copied the appropriate values over for the binary and single systems, only selecting single systems that were M stars or brown dwarfs. There are already way too many F, G, & K type stars in the region so I wanted a sprinkling of the other types. I also added the neutron star designation by hand for that system on the map.

Then it was time to actually run the program and make the map. It worked fine but looking at it I noticed a few problems with the jump distances. Several were too small by one and one was too large. Looking closer, I realized that while I was calculating the distances correctly, it was rounding wrong on display so I fixed that which corrected the distances displaying too small. That just left me with the one jump distance that was too large, now by two instead of one. This is where I discovered the typo on the original map for the distance between White Light and Madderly’s Star. The program was giving the correct distance but the original map was wrong.

I also decided that the symbols were a bit too small. The size I was using worked fine in the random map when there was the possibility of two systems in the same grid box with different Z-coordinates but for this map, where that couldn’t happen, I wanted the symbols larger. So I built in a scaling parameter in to the program allowing me to control the scale.

With those changes, we have the following initial color map of the Frontier.

The grid is there, you just can’t see it at this size. Click for the full size image.

You’ll notice a few things right away. First, there are no names on the map. Second, there are no nebulae. Right now the program doesn’t do those things.

Names will be relatively easy. I have the data, I just need to have the program add them to the image file. I need to research how to set fonts but otherwise, it’s straightforward.

Nebula are a whole different story. And may have to be added in by hand after the fact. Either way, that is going to be a complicated process and require some learning and work (and artistic ability) on my part.

If you look closer, you’ll notice that the positioning of the numbers along the jump routes are not optimal. It works for most of the jumps but for connections that are at an approximately 45 degree angle running from upper left to lower right, the number comes out too close (and sometimes overlapping) the line. I’ll need to fix that. That cleanup will probably be done by hand.

The program generates SVG files where each item is an object that can be manipulated allowing me to tweak things by hand. That was done intentionally as I knew the program wouldn’t be able to get everything perfect. That will be even more apparent once the names are added. I suspect that many of them will have to be moved to not overlap the jump routes.

The other minor thing is that the scaling factor I added wasn’t able to affect the size of the jets coming out of the neutron star. I need to either figure that out or, more likely, reduce the size back down for that spectral type and ignore the scaling. We’ll see how that goes.

Next Steps

The easy next steps are adding in the names of the systems and fixing the scaling on the neutron star.

After that, what I want to do is add in a way to handle all the various spectral types. The colors I picked don’t exactly represent the colors of the stars. They are close, but were chose for aesthetics rather than complete accuracy. Almost everything would be white with just some color tinting if we went for accuracy. I did that originally but didn’t like the result. I want to add code that will extrapolate between the given colors for the various spectral types’ number values to give various shades to the stars.

After that, I plan on tackling the nebula. I want to see if I can programmatically come up with something passable to start and then refine it.

The Code

If you want to play with the code, you can find it on my GitHub repository. It’s written in Python and right now isn’t the most user friendly. I need to add some in-line documentation as well as add features that will make it more usable directly from a command line instead of having to modify parameters in the code itself before running. That is another future project. But if you want to dive in and play with it as is, feel free.

Resources for Campaign Design

This post originally appeared on the now-defunct Arcane Game Lore blog.

Today’s post was inspired by yesterday’s Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #577. I thought I’d share a couple of the great resources I’ve found recently.

Roleplaying Tips

The Roleplaying Tips Newsletter is put out by Johnn Four. You get 2-3 emails a week with various ideas and links to resources primarily aimed at GMs and designers. I’ve only been subscribed for a few months but the wealth of information received in that time has been amazing. If you run or design games and you’re not already subscribed to his newsletter, stop reading this, jump over to the Roleplaying Tips website and subscribe. There is also a blog you can follow.

Go. I’ll wait.

Seriously, get over there and sign up.

All done? Okay, let’s continue. The topic of the specific newsletter that prompted this post was written by Perry W. Rogers and deals with building adventures by using the villain’s perspective. I’m not going to rehash the entire article here, but the main points were:

Create the villain and flesh him/her/it out in great detail
Create the Master Plan
Put the plan in motion
Have the situation come to light
Escalate and up the ante
The pursuit of the villain by the characters
The last gambit by the villain to try to get the Master Plan to work
The villain’s escape plan (if any exists)

I think the style of campaign design was best summed up by the writers own words: “I design the villain, and his plan. Then I stick the players in the middle, and see how it plays out.”

This style of game design resonated with with me quite strongly. I think it is how, on a subconscious level, I’ve always approached the game design that I’ve done. I typically set up a villain and what they are doing and write various contingencies (i.e. the master plan) for how things will play out based on possible player actions. This article was great in that it provided a codified way to approach my style of game design.

Campaign Mastery

The Campaign Mastery we b site is another great resource for GM’s and game designers. This site is actually where I learned about the Roleplaying Tips newsletter as Johnn Four is one of the authors there. The entries here are often very long, many over 10000 words. That said, the content is amazing in both it breadth and depth and I look forward to every entry. The authors cover just about any topic related to designing campaigns and adventures and bringing your world to life.

One of the great things I like about this site is that you see the creation process “live” as it is going on in the authors’ campaigns. They discuss things that they are currently working on and dive into their thought processes as they do the design. Like the Roleplaying Tips newsletter, the amount of great material I’ve read just in the few short months I’ve been following the site is simply amazing. And I haven’t even had a chance to dive into the archives of either site (which stretch back to 2008 and beyond).